By Ken Lass
I’m sitting in my living room watching the girls class 7A state championship basketball game. The Hewitt Trussville Huskies are playing perennial power Hoover. The Hewitt girls have been trailing the entire game, but now in the fourth quarter they are staging a terrific comeback. I’m shouting and pumping my fist for the Trussville girls, as though they can hear me through the TV screen. In the end they come up two points short. I slump back into my recliner and reflect on how amazing this was.
No, it’s not amazing the Hewitt girls were in the finals. They’ve been good for some time now. What I found amazing was that a girls high school basketball game was on statewide television. I am old enough to remember when that would have been impossible.
Somewhere in a deep, dark corner of my bedroom closet lie my high school yearbooks, spanning the school years from 1966 through 1969. In them you will find many pictures of girls participating in activities such as band, chorus, Spanish club, Future Teachers of America, yearbook staff, booster club, science club and drama club. What you will not find are any pictures of girls’ sports teams.
Because there weren’t any.
There was absolutely nothing wrong with being in those other activities. But the most popular and prestigious extracurriculars at my school were the sports teams, and the boys who played on them. Particularly football and basketball. The ticket to recognition and popularity for girls was cheerleading. I vividly recall on game days, usually Fridays, the cheerleaders would wear their flashy outfits to school all day. Those brightly colored sweaters and skirts would stand out in a classroom or in the hallways like a beacon of light from a lighthouse across a calm lake. All the other girls admired them, and all the boys wanted to date them.
But there was still a tacit understanding that their function was of a supporting role. They would come out on the gym floor during the pep rallies and do a few cheers, but only after the football players had been called out to center court to be acknowledged. Their function was to get the student body fired up to encourage the real stars, the players. I remember thinking how unfair that seemed to be. Those cheerleaders were really skilled. How many football players could do backflips and handsprings? Or the splits? Especially the splits!
Sadly, it was typical of the social order of the era. Boys were the stars. Girls were the support. When my mother was in high school, girls were expected to focus on learning skills such as typing, cooking and cosmetology. Very few went to college. My grandmother used to tell me that, in her day, many girls didn’t go to school at all, or just went through a few grades in order to learn to read and write.
As our culture has evolved over the last century, some of the trends are concerning and disturbing. But one thing we have gotten right is the emergence of sports opportunities for girls. Now they get to be the stars. They get to be on statewide television. Hewitt Trussville girls are grabbing headlines and video clips for their excellence, not only in basketball, but softball (three state titles in the last five years), track and field, flag football and other sports. Even cheerleading has become a competitive sport, as it always should have been.
My eight-year-old granddaughter has taken dance and fine arts. But she has also done soccer and gymnastics. It makes me smile to know that, if she wants to play basketball or softball or flag football, the opportunities will be there. Opportunities that did not exist for my female classmates over fifty years ago. Boys have always had sports heroes to look up to. I idolized Bart Starr, Jerry West and Henry Aaron. Today there is Lebron James, Patrick Mahomes and Lionel Messi. But now the girls have Caitlin Clark, Serena Williams, Simone Biles and Alex Morgan.
Whether it’s marching in the band (which has a competition of its own), putting forth convincing points for the debate team, acting out a role in the school play, or dominating on the chess team, options have never been better for our young ladies. And when the Hewitt girls are on television, it’s must-see TV for our community.
These days schools have to add several more pages to those high school yearbooks. It was long overdue.