50 years later, Iowa champion discusses changes in women’s basketball

Heather Heddens of Coralville stands with memorabilia from her days enjoying basketball for the 1973 state champion Mediapolis Bullettes, when the ladies’ sport was 6-on-6 and performed on half-courts. Heddens was planning to be in Dallas to see the Iowa ladies play Friday within the NCAA Ultimate 4 Match. (Jim Slosiarek/The Gazette)

At the same time as a baby in 1961, Heather Heddens was aiming to play basketball for the Mediapolis Bullettes, a crew she led to a state championship in 1973. (Jim Slosiarek/The Gazette)

A snap-on title patch is seen with images and press clippings of Heather Heddens’ basketball days with the Mediapolis Bullettes. (Jim Slosiarek/The Gazette)

A commemorative towel that includes a crew photograph of the 1973 state champion Mediapolis women’ basketball crew hangs within the house bar of Heather Heddens of Coralville. (Jim Slosiarek/The Gazette)

CORALVILLE — In high-tops and white socks, with a basketball underneath one arm and a home made pennant within the different, a Sixties-era, black-and-white photograph of a younger Heather Heddens epitomizes the dream scrawled on her hand-drawn flag.

“Future Bullette 1969-73 We Hope!”

A Bullette was the feminine model of her future Mediapolis Excessive College’s bulldog mascot, and the “hope” captured her ambition to play 6-on-6 basketball, the sport Iowa highschool women performed from the Nineteen Twenties via 1993.

“I believe it’s much more finesse. It counts much more on passing and reducing, and display and roll, and shifting with out the ball,” stated Heddens, 68, of Coralville, who led her Bullettes to a state championship in 1973. “It was a distinct sport.”

What stays the identical from Heddens’ highschool heroics and the 5-on-5, full-court system the Iowa Women Excessive College Athletic Union adopted in 1993 is the keenness the game stirs amongst followers statewide — just like the hundreds who parked in entrance of their TVs Friday, or drove to Dallas, to observe the College of Iowa ladies battle South Carolina within the NCAA Ultimate 4.

Even 50 years in the past, when far fewer athletic alternatives existed for women and girls, throngs of neighborhood members would end up to observe and have a good time the woman ballers, Heddens stated.

“Once we went to the state match … the city would do a giant send-off,” Heddens stated. “We would get within the bus, and so they’d have individuals waving at us as we left to go to Des Moines.

“All of the (Mediapolis) companies and the faculties shut, and folks went to Des Moines or else they had been house listening to it on the radio.”

When the Bullettes fully dominated the sector in 1973 and introduced house the state match trophy in Heddens’ senior 12 months, the crew performed earlier than a crowd in Veterans Memorial Auditorium that one reporter described as “a roaring throng.” The crew bus had a caravan escorting it house that grew to become a victory tour.

“We did slightly detour via Wapello, Iowa — they gave us a key to the town — after which the fireplace vans met us from Wapello and escorted us all the way down to Des Moines County, the place our hearth vans took over,” Heddens stated. “We went into city, and there have been indicators throughout and a giant reception on the health club.”

The ladies basketball state match was the oldest sanctioned women sport in Iowa, having began in 1920 “even when many individuals believed they (women) mustn’t play,” in line with the highschool athletics web site.

Within the 6-on-6 sport, three guards would play on one-half of the basketball court docket and three forwards would play on the opposite half. If a guard stole a ball, she would go the ball to certainly one of her crew’s forwards. The forwards then would attempt to rating of their half-court whereas guarded by three gamers from the opposite crew. And vice-versa.

The video games “actually united the neighborhood,” Heddens stated.

And the identical might be stated immediately for the Hawkeye ladies who — whereas enjoying a quicker, completely different fashion of ball — grew to become solely the second ladies’s UI basketball crew to make the NCAA semifinals.

“Iowa ladies’s basketball has undoubtedly been on the uptick,” Heddens stated, pointing to the present group of ladies who’ve been enjoying collectively for years. “I believe individuals have actually embraced them.”

Though Iowa males’s basketball nonetheless introduced in additional income than the ladies’s sport final season, Heddens stated she’s seeing extra followers becoming a member of her and her husband as season ticket holders.

“I believe you are going to see an enormous uptick in season tickets subsequent 12 months,” she stated.

Throughline

For Heddens, basketball has served as a throughline for her life, beginning with the pickup ball she performed as a child — a far cry from the organized leagues provided to immediately’s youth, together with these not but in kindergarten.

“For us, it was simply scrimmage in opposition to the neighborhood boys and work arduous and observe and get your pictures tuned,” she stated. “You had been sort of by yourself to get good.”

Though Heddens’ older sisters performed organized ball in junior excessive, the earliest it was provided, they didn’t keep it up — partially as a result of their dad was a coach. So when Heddens was sufficiently old to hitch a crew, the older women urged to their dad, “Don’t trouble her. We wish her to play.”

And she or he did. In her senior season, Heddens’ Bullettes received all 31 video games, together with the championship. And after commencement, Heddens headed to the UI, which launched a lady’s basketball program underneath coach Lark Birdsong in 1974.

Heddens wasn’t on the crew, however she was an everyday within the Discipline Home — enjoying pickup with the blokes and finally organizing an intramural crew with women in her sorority.

“We had been actually good,” she stated.

As a self-proclaimed “Discipline Home rat,” Heddens stated she spied on the ladies’s practices and finally obtained up the nerve to supply her intramural squad for a scrimmage.

“I stated we would be comfortable to do no matter you want us to do,” she stated. “And so we did scrimmage them as soon as, and it was actually enjoyable, and I actually appreciated that.”

Magical

Heddens went on to get her physician of dental surgical procedure diploma from the UI within the Eighties and finally arrange a dental observe in Columbus Junction. However she by no means left behind the sport that stole her coronary heart as a teen, becoming a member of that neighborhood’s highschool as an assistant women basketball coach in 1988.

As a result of she’s additionally been an adjunct medical professor with the UI Faculty of Dentistry since 1987, Heddens early on joined a UI committee to advertise ladies’s basketball and “get extra individuals to return to the video games.”

“We had what was referred to as a gold card that you would buy, and it obtained you into all of the video games.”

Though she’s been in Carver-Hawkeye Area for many years cheering on the ladies, Heddens — a day earlier than departing along with her husband to Dallas for the Ultimate 4 this week — urged this season has been particular.

“It’s been magical,” she stated.

Vanessa Miller covers increased schooling for The Gazette.

Feedback: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com