Women’s basketball pioneer Elizabeth McQuitter is on a mission

It’s been 46 years, yet Elizabeth McQuitter vividly remembers one of the most pivotal moments of her life: the 1978 launch of the Women’s Professional Basketball League — the nation’s first women’s pro basketball league — which debuted in Milwaukee.

National news outlets, including CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, previewed and covered the game.

Milwaukee’s mayor issued a proclamation, noting the historical significance of the moment.

And a healthy crowd attended, curious about what they were about to witness.

“About 8,000 people there watching us, couldn’t believe that,” said McQuitter, known then as Elizabeth Galloway, who played in that game with the visiting Chicago Hustle. “The crowd was electric. The game was competitive. We were off and running.

“Of course, we won.”

The WBL, which featured such talented players as Nancy Lieberman and “Machine Gun” Molly Bolin, who was the first to sign a contract with the league in 1978, lasted three seasons before disbanding following the 1980-81 season.

McQuitter is on a mission to change that through the organization that she leads, Legends of the Ball, Inc., which aims to bridge the gap between today’s elevated status of the WNBA and its players, and the pioneers from the WBL and the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, whose accomplishments have been largely overlooked.

“One of my favorite quotes from Maya Angelou is ‘there’s no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you,’ ” McQuitter said. “In the men’s game you look at the complete history and the eras, but on the women’s side focus seems to be on the new history, or the history being made.

“You have to look at all the history. That means you have to look at every era of our game.”

In March, McQuitter will be taking her message to Athletes Unlimited, which launches its third basketball season on Thursday in Dallas. McQuitter will be honored on March 7 by Athletes Unlimited, a league launched with the intent of giving pro basketball players, including WNBA players, a chance to play professionally in the United States.

“Our board has had great collaborations with groups like Athletes Unlimited, the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame and the Smithsonian,” McQuitter said. “We’re only 5 years old, but we’ve accomplished a lot in that time.”

Among those accomplishments has been the unveiling of McQuitter’s personal, fascinating journey. She played basketball in the early 1970s at Rockdale High School (Texas), where the teams played 6-on-6 basketball. (Each team had three players playing offense and three on defense, with none of those players allowed to cross half court.)

“We were just playing basketball,” McQuitter said. “We didn’t know anything about what was going on in the legal system.”

What was going on in the courts was the 1972 passage of Title IX, the gender equity law that called for equal opportunities for women and girls in sports. 

While McQuitter didn’t feel the immediate impact of Title IX when she graduated from high school, she did after her first year playing basketball at Temple Junior College, which won the first National Junior College Athletic Association national championship.

“My coach at Temple started to educate us about Title IX, and the opportunities that were available for women,” McQuitter said. “That’s how a few of us ended up at UNLV the first year they offered full scholarships for women.”

As her career at UNLV ended, McQuitter assumed her basketball playing days were over. 

That changed with the formation of the WBL.

“It seemed there was a love affair with the game, and we got to continue our careers,” McQuitter said. “We had some skepticism. I ended up in Chicago, where we had real support from ownership and diehard fans.”

That team, the Chicago Hustle, was treated just like the other pro sports teams in town, McQuitter said. The Hustle were covered by beat writers from the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune, its games were aired on WGN and the team played in front of decent-sized crowds at DePaul University.

“We scrimmaged against Walter Payton and the Bears, and we were in the midst of it all,” McQuitter said. “We had great marketing as a team, and were doing well in Chicago. But the league went from eight to 14 teams, coast-to-coast, and that was probably a bit too fast.”

After the league folded in 1981, many of the players remained connected to the sport. McQuitter spent the better part of the next two decades as a coach (Mundelein College, Lamar and Northern Illinois) and an assistant coach (DePaul and Texas A&M).

“We continued to have an impact as coaches and as broadcasters and our handprints are all over today’s game,” McQuitter said. “What we did was make the women’s game socially acceptable. It was the 1970s, and people began to look at women in sports differently.”

Yet that initial group of women’s pro basketball players who helped make the women’s game socially acceptable have, sadly, been largely forgotten.

“We don’t talk about it or because we don’t know about it,” said Sheryl Swoopes, the former WNBA legend and the first player signed by the league before it was launched in 1997. “I know Liz personally and I know she’s a trailblazer and just an incredible woman.

“I love what her mission is. I love what she’s trying to do. When we talk about this game, and when we educate people about this game, it’s important that we include everybody.”

The undeniable connection between the WBL, the WNBA and women’s basketball at all levels: the circumference of the ball (28.5 inches), which is one inch shorter than the men’s ball. The ball was the idea of Karen Logan who, before she took on the role to recruit players into the WBL, was best known for beating Los Angeles Lakers guard Jerry West in a televised game of HORSE.

“Some of the great coaches were against it, because they thought it would cheapen the game,” McQuitter said. “But Karen’s rationale was that if other sports like golf [shorter tees] and volleyball [lower nets] made adjustments, why not basketball.”

After the WBL adopted the ball in 1978, the NCAA followed in 1984. Today, the ball is the uniform size for all of women’s basketball.

The ball’s size is the inspiration behind the group McQuitter leads, and is one of the many examples she uses in her travels as she educates fans of the game.

“We’re everywhere: at the Final Four, meeting with AAU groups because we want to tell our story,” McQuitter said. “The reaction we get is like when I saw Hidden Figures, and I got mad and asked myself why didn’t I know this. We hear all the time why don’t I know about you guys.”

Those encounters often leave McQuitter both frustrated and invigorated.

“We can’t fight for our history when people don’t know that we exist,” McQuitter said. “We have to establish we were there, confirm our impact and demonstrate our relevance.

“We’re in the hall of fames, we’re everywhere,” McQuitter added. “We’re here to educate you that we exist.”