#grace wright

omg no, random ocs asks are always welcome!! ☺️

to be honest it would probably be gracie, she can be very excitable when things go her way or she gets good news 😂

Airball – that’s pretty much what basketball was like at the University of Cincinnati at the dawn of the Twentieth Century. Basketball – or “basket ball” as it was known then – was relatively new and very much inferior to football and baseball. The first basketball game at the University of Cincinnati was played on 7 January 1896, by a loosely organized pair of intramural teams known as the Dew Drops and the Pig Toes. The school janitor was drafted to fill out one squad. The result was a 1-1 tie.

It took a while for hoops to gain attention. Among other reasons, there were few schools to play against. Basketball proved very popular with women, however, and each year UC’s women organized teams by class and competed round-robin style among the freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors.

During the 1900-01 academic year, UC’s male students couldn’t get it together to organize a varsity team and the women were appalled. They decided to form an all-female varsity squad to uphold the school’s honor and scheduled a game with a Chillicothe team. The Cincinnati Post [24 April 1901] gave them kudos:

“The University girls’ basket ball team has enacted a brilliant coup at Burnet Woods, and, like their male predecessors in the athletic world, are going to make an athletic tour.”

When UC’s administration heard about this trip, however, they immediately vetoed it. The Chillicothe women’s team was not associated with any college, so UC’s administrators prohibited the UC women from representing the university in such a competition – despite men playing non-college teams for decades. According to the Post, the young women agreed to comply with the letter of the administration’s edict while still fulfilling the Chillicothe agreement:

“Another meeting was called, and it was decided not to send ‘the University team,’ but all of its members, leaving to Chillicothe the responsibility of taking down their advertisements for the U.C. team or not.”

In other words, the administration might prohibit a UC team from playing, but had no right to keep individual students from playing a game anywhere. The women traveled to Chillicothe as individuals and played as the “Cincinnati” team, not the “University of Cincinnati” team.

The women who made the Chillicothe trip comprised something like an all-star team. Among them were Elizabeth Andrews of Hamilton, who would captain her class team as a junior; Grace Wright of Walnut Hills, freshman guard; Alice Richardson of Glendale, who seems not to have been enrolled that year; Marguerite Craig a ringer from Glendale, who may never have been a UC student; and Alice Thornton, a freshman who would captain her sophomore team.

Coaching this miscellaneous squad was Mabel Halliday, who had enrolled in the class of 1899, but almost immediately dropped out to become UC’s instructor in gymnastics. Halliday’s younger sister, Vernon, had captained the 1898 UC women’s basketball team.

The Chillicothe team featured two sets of sisters – Anne and Marion Nichols and Lillie and Sallie Snyder – along with their captain, a center named Grace Brown. The Scioto Gazette remarked that this team had won “many a victory,” unlike the UC women for whom this was their first competition as a team.

The UC women, decked out in black bloomers, white shirtwaists and red cravats, led at halftime, 4-2. Basketball was so new that rules differed between Cincinnati and Chillicothe. The Gazette [26 April 1901] reported:

“A little discussion arose during the first half, which caused a few minutes delay, over a technicality of the game regarding the manner in which the ball should be hit as it leaves the hands of the referee, the custom of the two teams differing somewhat. The entire game was remarkably free from dispute however, which added to its enjoyment.”

Chillicothe, clad in blue and white, came back strong in the second half, with three baskets from their captain leading to a final score of 8-10 in the home team’s favor.

After the game, the two teams adjourned to The Masonic Opera House where all enjoyed a performance of a play titled “The Bells” starring Creston Clarke and Adelaide Prince. They then convened at the Hotel Carson, where the out-of-towners were registered, for a reception that ran late into the evening. In addition to the team and coach, seven young ladies made the trip from Cincinnati.

No mention of this game appears in the UC yearbook for 1901. UC’s men took the hint and organized a varsity team that autumn. UC women would not gain varsity status for their basketball team until 1915, the year Beecher Hall opened with a women’s gym.