A century before Clark, 6-on-6 reigned
Imagine Iowa star Caitlin Clark playing a basketball game where the rules allowed her just two dribbles before she had to pass or shoot and it was illegal for her to cross the half-court line.
For most of the 20th century, this was girls basketball in Clark’s native state of Iowa. The game was 6-on-6, with three girls on one side of the court playing defense and three on the other side playing offense.
The rules might seem archaic now, if not blatantly sexist, but it was popular. Girls high school games filled gyms to capacity in many towns and state tournament tickets were resold at a premium, with the finals televised in nine Midwestern states.
“Sometimes it was so loud in our little gym that we couldn’t even hear the coach when we were in a huddle,” said Nancy Schmitz, who starred at Elk Horn-Kimballton in the 1960s . “It was really dynamic. A lot of screaming and hollering. And we all loved to play. I should have studied more, but I loved to play. Every game the gym was full.”
Iowa Coach Lisa Bluder, associate head coach Jan Jensen and assistant Jenni Fitzgerald grew up playing 6-on-6 and Clark regularly gives a nod to her forebears in the sport.
“When I hear from a lot of people that played basketball, whether it was 6-on-6 however many years ago, I think they’re blown away at where women’s basketball is now and the platform we get to play on,” Clark said. “That doesn’t come if it’s not for the people who came before us.”
With her long-range shooting and nifty passing, Clark has become the face of women’s basketball and is among the most popular athletes in the country. She has averaged 31.9 points per game this season and passed Pete Maravich as the NCAA Division I all-time leading scorer, male or female.
Jensen, one of the state’s all-time high school greats, said Clark would have been just as formidable in the sixgirl game. Those shots from the perimeter and threadthe-needle passes would have been part of her game, her snaking drives to the basket not so much because of the two-dribble limit.
“She would have probably rewritten all the scoring records,” Jensen said. “Just scoring and focusing on the shooting aspect, that would have been right up her alley.”
Iowa high schools could choose to play 5-on-5 beginning in 1984, but many small schools kept playing 6-on-6 until 1993, only 23 years before Clark’s freshman year at Dowling Catholic High School in West Des Moines.
Chuck Offenburger, a retired Des Moines Register columnist and now an author, said immigrants from northern Europe who settled in the state in the 19th century believed strongly in physical fitness for both sexes.
Boys and girls worked alongside each other in the fields, and basketball was seen as a suitable competitive outlet. The caveat was that the sport was considered too strenuous for girls of that era, so special rules were made.
Even at that, a federal study on physical education in the 1920s put the kibosh on girls basketball in some areas of the state.
“The conclusion was that girls should not be involved in interscholastic and competitive athletics because it could affect their birthing capacity in later life,” Offenburger said. “The larger schools in the larger towns and cities just bought that lock, stock and barrel, and they ended their programs.”
In 6-on-6, players on the defensive side did not inbound the ball and bring it up after the opponent made a basket. Instead, the referee would throw the ball to half-court, where his partner would give it to a forward to initiate the next sequence of play.
Games could be fast-paced and high-scoring. Jensen averaged just under 66 points per game as a senior in 1987 at Elk Horn-Kimballton, and she went on to become a national scoring leader and All-American at Drake. Jensen’s grandmother, Dorcas Anderson, was MVP of the 1921 state tournament for Audubon and nicknamed “Lotty” because she scored a lot of points.
In 1926, Irene Silka of Maynard became the first girl to score 100 points in a game. Denise Long of Union-Whitten was so dominant that she was drafted by the San Francisco Warriors in 1969 as a publicity stunt. Lynne Lorenzen of Ventura set the still-standing national career scoring record in 1987 (6,736 points).