The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Hamden fan has unique tie to Bobcats
HAMDEN >> Barbara Lupino Mecca beamed with pride on Monday night as she watched the Quinnpiac women’s basketball team’s stunning victory over Miami.
“I couldn’t get over it,” Mecca said. “I was so excited about it. I never thought Quinnipiac would reach that level.”
Mecca, 83, is a longtime UConn women’s basketball fan who has jumped on the Bobcats’ bandwagon during their miracle run to the NCAA tournament’s Sweet 16. But she has another very good reason to be proud of the team that plays its home games right down the road from her Braeside Drive home.
More than 60 years ago, Mecca was a member of the very first women’s basketball team at Quinnipiac.
It’s not chronicled in the school’s archives. According to Quinnipiac’s media guide, the school didn’t field its first women’s basketball team until 1975. But the press clippings at the time don’t lie: In 1952, the school started its first “girls’ basketball team” (or “gals’ team,” as it was sometimes referenced in the papers). And Mecca, a 5-foot-4 center (!) and “possessor of a hook shot which would put many of the male performers of the College to shame,” according to one article at the time, was one of the star players.
Of course, it was a very different time for women’s basketball, and women’s sports in general. The team didn’t even have uniforms. Games were played with six players on the floor for each team, but only three on each side of the court. Three of the women would play defense and pass the ball over halfcourt to the three women on offense, who could dribble the ball no more than three times.
Why such rules? As Mary Benevento, a physical education teacher and assistant coach, once told Mecca: “Women will never be able to play fullcourt. They don’t have the stamina.”
A very different time, indeed.
“It’s wonderful to see change,” Mecca said on Friday afternoon, in the kitchen of the home where she’s lived for more than 45 years.
Mecca (nee Barbara Lupino) and her older sister, Jeanette, grew up in New Haven and were anomalies at the time: daughters of Italian immigrants who were encouraged to play sports from an early age. When Barbara was 11, her sister (who was 14) asked her father to put up a basketball hoop in their yard.
“In those days, girls didn’t even think about playing basketball,” Mecca recalled. “But we did. We loved sports, especially basketball. (Our parents) were happy about it. They thought we were tomboys, but they were happy for us.”
Mecca played for a team at Troup Junior High, then played intramural ball at Hillhouse High, where she also was captain of the softball team and found time to play golf, tennis and field hockey, as well.
She graduated Hillhouse in 1951 and attended Quinnipiac to take a two-year secretarial course. There was no women’s team at the time, but the following year, the school merged with Larson College and moved to a campus on Whitney Avenue that featured a basketball gym. Mecca was in the gym shooting around one day when Sal “Red” Verderame, the school’s men’s basketball coach, approached her.
“We’ve got a girl that plays basketball, and if you can play, we want to put a team together,” Verderame said.
“And that’s how it started,” Mecca recalled, adding that the team had to scrounge to find four other players to fill out its roster.
The other “girl” Verderame was referring to was Beverly Beard, who became the team’s top scorer and “one of the best girl basketball players in the East,” the coach told a local paper at the time. Mecca (and her hook shot) was next at 15 points per game for the team, which played against schools like Arnold College (a physical education school in Milford) and State Teachers College (now Southern Connecticut State).
Alas, it only lasted one season. After Mecca got her degree, interest waned. But Mecca continued to play for the TelBelles, a popular industrial-league team sponsored by Southern New England Telephone. She played for a couple of years, but one day got a call from her boyfriend after coming home from practice.
“It’s time for you to stop playing basketball,” he said, “and act like a lady.”
“So,” Mecca “I quit.”
That pretty much ended her playing career. She would shoot around every now and then with her son, Bill, Jr., but her interest in the sport wasn’t truly rekindled until she got a phone call from her sister in 1995.
“Barbara, have you been watching the UConn women?,” Jeanette asked.
“They have a team?,” Barbara responded.
“Yes, you should see them. They’re on TV now, put the channel on.”
Reluctantly, Barbara did just that. She couldn’t believe what she saw.
“‘Gee these girls are good,’” she thought. “It was an awakening for me. I didn’t know that basketball was so popular with women.”
Mecca has been an avid fan of the Huskies ever since. Now, she’s found another team to root for. She’ll be glued to the screen on Saturday at 4 p.m., when Quinipiac takes on powerful South Carolina in the Sweet 16. She knows it won’t be easy.
“They’ve gone this far,” Barbara Lupino Mecca noted. “This, in itself, is incredible.”
The times sure have changed in women’s basketball.
“It’s unbelievable,” she added. “Especially since we were told we’d never be able to play fullcourt. It’s been a revelation.” recalled,