YATES CENTER — Yates Center High School will celebrate the trailblazers who brought girls sports to life 50 years ago.
Kathe Hamman, a former YCHS student and coach, has invited players and coaches from the early Wildcat girls teams to attend Friday evening’s basketball games at Norris Gymnasium.
The attendees will be introduced during a ceremony between the girls and boys games against Jayhawk-Linn.
Hamman, who also works as a photographer and writes up sports stories, penned an article about the history of the Lady Wildcats in the Dec. 7 edition of the Yates Center News.
What few people realized was that girls basketball was a part of Yates Center High School more than 100 years ago — 1912, to be exact, Hamman wrote.
A group of young ladies formed what became known as the EOW Club Team. The “EOW’’ name came about as a form of protest against a school superintendent who declined their request to form a team. He had been heard remarking he’d heard “Enough Of Women” wanting to play.
“It is not recorded who their competition was during that year, but they most certainly paved the way for the Lady Wildcats of today,” Hamman wrote.
The first “official” YCHS ladies team was allowed in 1915, Hamman noted, under slightly different rules than ones set up for the boys.
Teams were composed of six-player lineups — three on offense, and three on defense — and were prohibited from crossing the half-court line. And rather than playing teams from other schools, Yates Center’s squad played against other classes from the school.
The Lady Wildcats played for several years in a remodeled barn, on maple floorboards, until the high school built a new gymnasium in 1949 — it became the school’s “old gymnasium” nearly 50 years later when Norris Gymnasium opened its doors in 1997.
Hamman said the six-player format existed for 48 years before dissolving.
But girls didn’t stay on the sidelines for long.
GIRLS athletics were revolutionized with the passage of Title IX in 1973, giving females equal footing in the high school athletics realm.
Yates Center High School’s current Wildcats program started that same year, and tasted success almost immediately.
In year 2, Yates Center’s 1974-75 squad — which included Hamman as a team manager — became the first Lady Wildcats squad to earn a state tournament bid, under head coach Robert Balerio.
“They were so coachable,” Balerio told Hamman. “Not having any prior experience other than what they picked up in PE, all they wanted was to learn and improve. They did everything I asked of them, and when it came to wanting to win, there was no one better.
