The Way Back: Hoop Dreams

By Keana Saberi in Nov | Dec 2024, The Way Back, TXEX on October 31, 2024 at 4:02 pm | No Comments

Earlier this year, the Texas Women’s Basketball team advanced to the NCAA Elite Eight for the third time in four seasons, adding another accolade to their impressive record. More than a hundred years prior, however, pioneering female basketball players were carving out some history of their own.

Thanks to Pearl Norvell, a physical training instructor hired especially for female students, basketball first came to the Forty Acres in 1899. Beginning in physical education classes and then developing into organized team sport, the women played their first games in a library-turned-gymnasium in the former Main Building. No men were allowed as spectators, reports UT History Corner blogger Jim Nicar, BA ’17, Life Member. 

The first on-campus game took place in January 1900—more of a scrimmage, really, between two smaller teams of the UT players. After the construction of the Women’s Building in 1903, the women were organized into a single team for the University and, in 1904, played their first game against another athletic program, Belton High School. 

The women’s team ended intercollegiate play in the late 1910s, with some intramural competition continuing later into the century. The sport found new popularity in the late 1960s, until it was formally incorporated into University athletics in 1974 in the wake of Title IX. 

Despite societal prejudice against female athletes at the time and a consensus that they were unfit for sport, the Texas Men’s Basketball team didn’t form until 1906, years after the women’s first on-campus game. 

Their once fledgling audience has grown to a record 10,763 fans in attendance at the Moody Center for the Dec. 3, 2023, game against the University of Connecticut. And with the emergence of global stars bringing new viewers to the NCAA and WNBA, UT’s history of women’s basketball has surely just begun.