From ‘Chicks’ to champions: How South Carolina women’s basketball got its start

Last April, in Dallas, Texas, South Carolina’s women’s basketball team did something it had never done before: win a national championship.

Tens of thousands of fans watched with bated breath as the Gamecocks battled Mississippi State. Media outlets from across the country wrote thousands of words about Dawn Staley and her team. And at the end of the day, Staley and her players hoisted the trophy, cut down the nets and came home to a parade in their honor.

Forty-six years ago, in Council Bluffs, Iowa, another South Carolina women’s basketball team did something no other one had done before.

In 1971, women’s collegiate athletics were not recognized or organized by the NCAA. Even the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW), the organization that filled the role of the NCAA for women college athletes, would not be fully established for another year.

Instead, women’s college athletics were a disorganized affair, with many large co-ed schools not sponsoring women’s teams under the athletics department. South Carolina was one such school.

But the university did have a women’s basketball team, albeit unofficially. A group of 13 young women gathered together in 1970 with a volunteer coach and raised their own funds, got their own uniforms and warmups with the Gamecock logo and dubbed themselves the Carolina Chicks.

It wasn’t the first time teams comprised of South Carolina female students had taken to the court — as early as 1922, the “Pullets” played other local colleges. But that 1970 team marked a new era for women’s college basketball for USC. For one, these women played full-court, five-on-five basketball, not the earlier version of the women’s game where each team had six players and only three could pass half-court. For another, this team was good enough to make it onto the national stage, even if things came together in an unorthodox way.

“The way I saw things coming together is, those girls, we had some girls that would be on the team today if they were here. And with that many good people in PE programs or whatever they were in that could play basketball, it was kind of just like ... ‘Let’s start playing, let’s find a way to play.’” Linda Webb, one of the original members of the team said. “It was, ‘Hey, we got good people here. We need to be playing somebody.’”

The team’s players came mostly from a group of talented local high school athletes whose passion for the sport kept them going, even after they aged past the organized competition available.

“You just can’t give up basketball,” Barbara Wilkes, another member of the team, said. By 1970, Wilkes had been named a high school All-American, gone to college, left, moved with her husband and had four children. She and her sister, Peggy, had formed a rec team called the Shooting Stars that organized their own games before they went to USC and joined the newly formed club team.

At that time, the team was under the Physical Education department, had a severe lack of funds and essentially organized everything themselves, Wilkes said.

“We needed uniforms, and I was the one with the uniforms,” she joked about how she made the team. “My sister ... basically did the groundwork and all that and got it together. She got the cars and called ahead for us.”

Webb and Wilkes said their schedule was mostly comprised of games against local nursing colleges, Winthrop University, then still an all-women’s college, and Oglethorpe University, near Atlanta. The Columbia Record reported that they won nine of 11 games, an impressive mark considering the team had to practice late at night in whatever gym they could find space in.

The school and athletics department’s administration “didn’t tell us we couldn’t do this. They allowed us to practice wherever we could,” Wilkes said.

However, they drew the line when coach Violet Meade asked if the team could practice or play in the Carolina Coliseum, then the home arena of the men’s team.

“We were told no, absolutely not. So I felt shunned,” Webb said.

To Wilkes, who would go on to become a coach and athletics director in the South Carolina Athletic Coaches Association Hall of Fame, the denial of their request to play at the Coliseum was primarily because the athletics department didn’t want to support or fund the team.

“I’ve been in administrations and I see a different side of it, where you open it up and people say, ‘Well they’re not a team, really, so if they can play there, we can play there too,’ ” Wilkes said. “And so that’s where I could see why Carolina would not allow us to do that, and if they did that, then they’d have to fund it, and that was a big deal (for them), not doing that.”

Without playing time at the Coliseum, the team’s profile remained extremely low on campus.

“I don’t think anybody really cared as long as we didn’t bother them in the Coliseum or in the USC sports department,” Webb said.

Or, as a 1971 article from The Daily Gamecock put it, “they have given USC and this state something it has never had before — whether it cares or not.”

In March 1971, the team was selected to be part of the AAU Women’s National Championship, then the highest level of competition available in the country to women’s college teams. Led by star center Mary Tope, who averaged 15 points and 14 rebound per game, the Chicks were deemed one of the best teams in their region. There was just one catch — a trip to Council Bluffs, Iowa, wasn’t in their limited PE budget.

Instead, the team raised money on their own with fundraisers and even contributed their own money, sporting their Gamecock warmups and representing the university, even if the university didn’t recognize them.

“It wasn’t school … but it was school, because we were representing USC,” Webb explained.

“I felt like I was a Carolina Chick, even though we weren’t incorporated into the school, I was a Carolina Chick. And that’s why we got (those) warmups with the Gamecock,” Wilkes said.

Once in Iowa, the tournament itself didn’t go particularly well for the team, Wilkes said. They played several games, but according to Wilkes, a lack of time and resources in practice prevented the squad from excelling.

“We had the size, we had the ability, we had the intensity, we just didn’t mesh, and I think time had a lot to do with that,” Wilkes said. “But if we had some great coaching, or more time practicing …”

After the team returned from Iowa, it dissolved, at least partially, as Webb graduated, Wilkes got a job and others went their separate ways. But after that first season, things began to change: In 1973, another club team of women representing USC were allowed to play in the Coliseum as preliminaries to men’s games. That team later went on to the newly formed AIAW national tournament.

And in 1974, the South Carolina athletics department formally sponsored a varsity women’s team for the first time. The team name remained the Carolina Chicks.

That being said, neither Wilkes or Webb necessarily considers themselves trailblazers.

Playing basketball in college “was just a continuation of what we’d always done,” Webb said.

“It was exciting, but it was also just something we did,” Wilkes said. “We played, we came home.”

Now, nearly half a century later, South Carolina has become one of the most storied women’s programs in NCAA history. But ask Wilkes and Webb, and they think their original 1971 squad could hold up against the likes of A’ja Wilson and Dawn Staley.

“The way the girls are so tall now, my personal opinion is that we made up for it with speed where they have height,” Webb said.

“And we could really jump,” Wilkes added.

The two women remain passionate about Gamecocks basketball and were some of the tens of thousands who followed the team’s national championship run this past March and April.

“When you’re watching on television, you get on the edge of your seat and you’re yelling in your own house,” Webb said of her feelings watching the team play now.

“I’m getting goosebumps right now,” Wilkes added.

“And it’s exciting and then you think, ‘Calm down,’ because we’re older and you wonder how the heart’s holding up,” Webb joked.

This story was originally published December 9, 2017 at 5:14 PM with the headline "From ‘Chicks’ to champions: How South Carolina women’s basketball got its start."