An ode to six-on-six

Once again, high-school gyms across America resound with the thump-thump of balls dribbled on hardwood floors, the clang of three-point bricks bouncing off steel rims and the rubber-soled roar of twenty sneaker-clad feet running up and down the court. Yes, basketball is back — and I curse the imagination-deprived standardizers who succeeded thirty years ago in banishing four additional feet from roundball courts in the Hawkeye State.

Iowa, the historic hotbed of girls’ basketball, is hailed today for producing the superb Caitlin Clark, but for most of the twentieth century its hundreds of small-town bandbox gymnasiums were alive with the wonderfully idiosyncratic sporting variant known as six-on-six basketball.

Like the culture of small-town Iowa — and, I might add, like such great Iowans as historian William Appleman Williams, painter Grant Wood and Senator Harold Hughes — six-on-six was “simultaneously conservative and progressive,” as Midwestern historian Max McElwain wrote in The Only Dance in Iowa.

Six-player basketball, which became popular nationwide in the 1930s but survived only in Iowa and Oklahoma by the fin de siècle, posted three girls in the frontcourt — the forwards, who shot the ball — and three guards in the backcourt, where ball-handling and defense were prized. Players could not cross the center line and were limited to two dribbles at a time.

A distinctive game grew around these rules, emphasizing crisp passing and deadeye shooting. It achieved extraordinary popularity in rural Iowa, where six-on-six teams became a source of town identity and community pride.

The earliest apostles of women’s athletics in America emphasized participation (“a game for every girl and a girl for every game”) over competition, but six-on-six provided both. In 1950, an incredible 70 percent of Iowa’s high-school girls played basketball. The five-day state tournament at the massive Veterans Memorial Auditorium in Des Moines attracted sellout crowds, dwarfing attendance for the boys’ games.

In 1970-71, one of every five American girls playing a high-school sport was an Iowan. Sports Illustrated called Iowa a “utopia for girls’ athletics.” But professional-class feminists and their men’s auxiliary of academics and lawyers would deep-six six-on-six, over the protests of farmwives, romantics, the people in the stands and the girls themselves.

Some folks desire a world with no variety, no diversity, no color, just a do not bend, fold, spindle or mutilate nightmare of dull sameness. And they can’t stand to see the hicks get their way.

First they lodged Title IX challenges in the several states in which six-on-six survived into the 1970s. Their gravamen was that by limiting shot-taking to three players per team, six-on-six lessened the chance of an Iowa girl receiving a college basketball scholarship. This was simply untrue; Max McElwain notes that both research and surveys of coaches revealed “no significant difference in postsecondary opportunities for basketball scholarships.”

In a flash of bureaucratic common sense, Jimmy Carter’s HEW secretary, Joseph Califano, denied that Title IX was relevant to the case, saying, “Whether a school has six-player, half-court basketball is entirely up to it.”

Then came a 1983 federal lawsuit on behalf of three Iowa girls, arguing that six- on-six violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The suit was conceived by men and funded by middle- and upper-middle-class feminists.

Understanding which way the legal winds were blowing, the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union (IGHSAU) bought time with a local-option compromise: schools could choose to field either six- or five-player girls’ teams. Five years into the compromise, 367 of the 449 Iowa high schools fielding girls’ basketball teams chose six-on-six.

Des Moines Register polls in the 1980s and Nineties consistently found Iowans favoring six-on-six by wide margins. The strongest support for Iowa’s signature game was found among women and people who lived in small towns; the only demographic groups favoring five-on-five were men and those who lived in cities with populations over 50,000.

But men in big cities usually get their way, don’t they? “How long can we fight off the federal government?” asked IGHSAU’s executive director. Sensing impending defeat, the organization killed off six-on-six beginning with the 1993-94 season. All that was left were the memories.

Iowa native and agrarian sage Allan Carlson recalls, “As a teenage boy, my favorite team was the Everly Cattlefeeders, who won the tournament in 1966. Hailing from a town of 668 in northwest Iowa, the very name evoked images of muscular farm girls lifting fifty-pound bags of alfalfa pellets before heading off to practice.” (Allan notes that he “eventually married an Illinois cattlefeeder.”)

Participation in Iowa girls’ sports has declined from its peak in the heyday of six-on-six. Allan tells me that the once spirited and sold-out girls’ state tournament has been superseded in popularity by boys’ wrestling. But hey, “gender equality” won. Rah rah.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 2024 World edition.