Kay Macbeth was last surviving member of Edmonton Grads

They were basketball’s version of “A League of Their Own,” only better, a group of trailblazing women who utterly dominated their sport for a quarter of a century.

And on Saturday, Kay MacBeth, the last surviving member of the famous Edmonton Graduates basketball team, died at the age of 96.

“It’s really an end of an era,” said her granddaughter, Christin Carmichael Greb. “It was like the movie, it was the same sort of thing for basketball, there were these women who were amazing athletes that we don’t always hear about.”

Macbeth (nee Macritchie) joined the Grads — whom Dr. James Naismith, the Canadian inventor of basketball, once referred to as “the finest basketball team that ever stepped out on a floor” — in 1939 when she was just 17, and played in the team’s final two seasons. Known as Canada’s most successful team in history, they won 17 world titles and went 502-20 from their founding in 1915 to 1940, when they folded due to demands of the war and falling attendance.

Coached by J. Percy Page, who would go on to become lieutenant governor of Alberta, the Grads collected four straight exhibition Olympic titles (before women were permitted to compete in the Games), winning all 27 matches.

They played nine games against men’s teams. They won seven of them.

Macbeth talked fondly about her days running the Grads’ offence as the team’s five-footfour point guard. She described herself in an interview last year with The Canadian Press as “fast and a good playmaker and not a ball hog. Any time the ball was in our hands, I pretty much started it.”

But Macbeth never revelled in her celebrity.

Carmichael Greb, a Toronto city councillor, said the family had Macbeth’s Grads jersey framed. But when her mom, Kerry, went looking for it in Macbeth’s house, she found it gathering dust in a box.

“She had kept it, but she wasn’t overt about it,” Carmichael Greb said. “(Basketball) wasn’t something that she necessarily saw herself as a role model for, it was more that it was part of her life. She loved sports. She just did it because she loved it.”

Macbeth played softball and dodge ball growing up in Saskatchewan, but didn’t take up basketball until Grade 10. She lived most of her adult life in Comox, B.C., before settling in Toronto six years ago.

Carmichael Greb remembered family trips to Comox to visit her grandma and vice versa.