Last surviving member of Edmonton Grads dies at 96
TORONTO — Kay MacBeth, the last surviving member of the famous Edmonton Grads basketball team, has died at the age of 96.
MacBeth (nee MacRitchie) joined the Grads in 1939 when she was just 17 and played in the team’s final two seasons.
Ranging in age from 17 to 40, the Grads are known as Canada’s most successful team in history, losing about 20 of their more than 400 games between the late 1920s and ’40.
They won 17 world titles in a row as well as national and North American championships, and captured their final Canadian title in 1940 before folding due to demands of the war and low attendance.
The five-foot-four MacBeth played what was then called a left light point guard, and in an interview last year with The Canadian Press described herself as “fast and a good playmaker and not a ball hog.
“Any time the ball was in our hands, I pretty much started it.”
The Grads went into the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame in 2017, and the highlight of the induction news conference was when MacBeth asked former Calgary Flames legend and fellow inductee Lanny McDonald for a kiss. He obliged.
“How about that?” McDonald grinned through his bushy moustache.
The Grads were also featured in a Heritage Minute last year.
MacBeth, who grew up in Saskatchewan and didn’t start playing basketball until Grade 10, said she and her teammates remained close after the Grads disbanded.
“It was a crying session at our last dinner anyway, everybody was upset to some degree,” she said last year. “We decided we’d meet every three years somewhere in Canada, which we did until everybody had become either ill or too far away
“The last reunion was sometime in the 80s.”