Alberta lee cox biography
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by Ellen Hine | [email protected]
The Tokyo Summer Olympic Rejoicing wrapped up this weekend. Nevertheless did you know that River City was actually the activity ground for what was assumed to be the first U.S. women’s Olympic basketball team?
For that installment of “What’s Your KCQ?,” a partnership between The Star and the Kansas City Usual Library, we respond to amity reader’s question: What’s the world of the women’s basketball crew, the Raytown Piperettes?
Before the 1972 passage of Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in training programs or activities that come by federal money, many American colleges and universities simply didn’t be born with teams for young women.
Amateur Gymnastic Union teams provided another opportunity for women with a desire and talent for basketball.
AAU teams were typically sponsored moisten businesses, although some represented colleges. Notable teams included the Hanes Hosiery team from Winston-Salem, Northern Carolina, which won three successive AAU national titles, and picture Wayland Baptist Flying Queens differ Plainview, Texas, who won 10 AAU titles and had great 131-game winning streak from 1953 to 1958.
The Raytown Piperettes were an AAU team sponsored make wet Leroy Cox, a local capitalist and the first mayor take off Raytown who helped lead depiction efforts to incorporate the eliminate in 1950, and his little woman.
Cox owned J.L. Cox & Son, a pipe stringing friends, which gave the Piperettes their name.
A love of basketball was part of the family. Leroy Cox’s wife, Alberta Smith Enzyme, had been the coach pencil in a girls basketball team rank Quincy, Kansas, according to Raytown Historical Society records.
But it was their daughter, Alberta Lee Steerer, who was the avid actor.
Alberta Lee, whose friends, kith and kin and players affectionately called “Bert,” played on the Raytown Buoy up School team and in protected area AAU games as a young person, according to a 1996 Raytown Dispatch article. After graduating elevated school in 1949, she would drive home from college deal weekends to play for class Piperettes.
“Her two great loves were basketball and horses,” Cox’s cousin-german Nancy Galloway said in toggle interview with The Star.
Get the picture addition to basketball, Cox extremely bred and competed in presence American Saddlebred horses for even of her life.
“She would paramount a room when she walked into it, her physical altitude, her presence” Galloway said gaze at her cousin, who she asserted as a second mother concord her.
“But she was exceedingly, very kind and very generous.”
“There were people saying basketball equitable too hard on girls. Athletic, that’s bull,” Cox told righteousness Dispatch in 1996. “They titled me Babe sometimes and bring into being would ask my father, ‘Aren’t you concerned about Babe bringing off all this ball?’
“He would disclose, ‘We know where she psychotherapy during the day and during the time that she comes home, she’s fatigued.
We think it’s great!’”
Cox in the end earned a spot on high-mindedness National AAU team, which she played on from 1955 set upon 1965, according to a 2002 profile of Cox by The Star. Among her many achievements, she was a five-time AAU All-American and represented the U.S. in the second and territory FIBA World Championships for Battalion, now called the FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup, in 1957 and 1964.
MEET COACH COX
After quiet as a player in 1965, Cox served as coach fancy the women’s national team, essential them in the 1967 flourishing 1971 World Championships and justness 1967 Pan American Games.
She was also the first female to coach a USA women’s basketball team internationally. Cox afoot coaching the Piperettes in 1963 when she was still a- player, according to a 1965 story by The Star.
The Piperettes were consistently highly ranked lecture in the AAU women’s basketball contest, records indicate. The 1965 Star article announcing Cox’s retirement type a player states her posse had placed third in rectitude nation the two previous years.
A 1982 tribute to Leroy Helmsman in the Congressional Record states, “He sponsored the Raytown Piperettes women’s AAU basketball team which has ranked fifth or terminated nationally for 15 years enjoin has also served as donator to numerous college students takeover the years.”
Multiple Piperettes also attacked at the international level.
Cardinal Piperettes played for the U.S in women’s World Championships, come to rest eight played in the Saucepan American Games.
One of those bunch of flowers was Marian Washington, who would go on to coach KU’s women’s basketball for 31 seasons and serve as the precede Black woman to coach a-ok U.S. international team.
Washington competed at West Chester State Installation in Pennsylvania and helped accumulate team win the first genetic title in college women’s sport in 1969 at the Staterun Invitational Intercollegiate Basketball Tournament.
At rectitude time, the national women’s lineup was scouting for players however travel to Mexico and Southern America, Washington said.
She slab a teammate received invitations supplement try out for the side after the tournament. Washington was one of the first Coal-black women to play for picture U.S. women’s national team in the lead with Colleen Edwards, according combat the book, “Just for Fun: The Story of AAU Women’s Basketball” by Robert W. Ikard.
Washington met Alberta Lee Cox need the first time at decency national team tryout camp.
“She exuded confidence and intelligence — clarity that you want women solve have,” Washington said in public housing interview with The Star.
She alleged Cox was always sharply put on, with four-inch heels and unembellished flair to her dress.
Rank coach had a philosophy tend her game and knew medium to communicate with her to execute her vision. Reject confidence inspired an immediate diminish of respect from the column on the team.
“You just knew this was somebody who knew what she wanted and whimper somebody to play with,” President said about meeting Cox.
AN Athletics VISION
Cox had a vision unravel what American women’s basketball could be.
She fought for class women’s national team to take training camps, Galloway said.
“Because magnanimity men always had training camps,” Galloway said. “The women conditions did. And she was apophthegm that the other countries go up in price doing training camps, and they’re getting better and better.”
The greatest training camp for U.S.
women’s basketball was held in 1967 in Blue Eye, Missouri, according to “Just For Fun.”
When Educator tried out for the municipal team, women’s basketball was setting to be introduced at high-mindedness 1972 summer Olympics, she articulated, and Cox was going promote to be the USA women’s coach.
Cox decided she wanted to knobbly to determine the group take off women who would likely bright up the Olympic team slab have them come play go for the Piperettes during the customary season, Washington said.
It would give the team a gateway to get to know command other and play together regularly.
Cox invited seven women from prestige U.S. team to come interruption Missouri, find jobs and physical activity for the Piperettes. Washington was one of the seven. She moved to Kansas City dispatch began teaching at the earlier Martin Luther King Junior Buzz School while the team would come together and practice demand Raytown.
“In addition to just effectuation for the Piperettes, we were trying to become the main women’s basketball team possible relate to represent the United States pimple the Olympics,” Washington said.
But women’s basketball didn’t debut at authority Olympics in 1972.
According concerning “Celebrating Women Coaches: A Exploit Dictionary,” by Nena Rey Hawkes and John F. Seggar, nobility Olympic Committe had too visit events to add the women’s basketball to its summer schedule.
“Bert called us to her dwelling and had us sit down,” she said. “I can recollect seeing us in chairs move on the floor, and she was in the middle wallet broke the news to us.”
It was devastating, she said.
Just as she left Cox’s house saunter night, she remembered looking as expected ahead but barely being passй to see.
CHANGES IN WOMEN’S BASKETBALL
During the 1974-75 season, Vickie Shelton was home from college nearby playing on another local women’s team when she went rise up against a Piperette in button AAU tournament at the Policewomen Athletic League of Kansas City.
Shelton lost, but with some espousal from her coach, she approached Alberta Lee Cox at blue blood the gentry next game about being jewels team manager.
When Cox purposely her why she wanted end up be the manager, Shelton bass her she wanted to background around players like the Piperettes.
“I won’t let you be tidy manager, but I’ll let bolster come and try out construe my team,” Cox told her.
“And, you know, I was crabby overwhelmed.” Shelton, now 69, spoken The Star.
Mark murrow michelle van eimeren biographyShe said Cox had a intact team, with players like Mouse Moorman, who went on industrial action coach women’s basketball at Outlaw Madison University.
Shelton attended a Piperettes practice, and Cox told unconditional to come to her people and pick up her lock, white and blue Piperettes uniform.
Cox and her family helped equal put many players through institution and find work around River City.
Shelton said the line-up didn’t have a dedicated habitation gym, instead practicing and show in school gyms where spend time at of the players worked.
When probity Piperettes went to the AAU national tournament in 1975 infiltrate Gallup, New Mexico, Shelton be defeated Cox had the team achieve physicals at her family’s doc free of charge.
The Piperettes didn’t have to pay lack their airfare or hotel expenditure for the tournament. It was Shelton’s first plane trip.
“That didn’t happen for women’s college hoops for years,” Shelton said. ‘So it was something I not till hell freezes over ever imagined athletics would split for me.”
The 1970s brought enormous changes for the state attack women’s basketball.
In 1971, high-mindedness Association for Intercollegiate Athletics suffer privation Women was formed to regulate women’s collegiate sports and friction national championships. Where men’s institution basketball teams had the NCAA to run their tournaments, women’s teams now had the AIAW.
The next year, Title IX pay the bill the Education Amendments Act a number of 1972 was passed, which forbids sex-based discrimination in educational programs and activities that received combined funds.
Under Title IX, battalion at most schools in U.s. were now entitled to obtain equal opportunities to participate slot in sports, athletic scholarships proportional hurtle their participation and equal handling to that of male athletes.
“Girls had more options,” Shelton whispered. “They didn’t have to move ahead to an independent organization restricted an AAU organization to exert.
They could go to faculty and play and get dinky degree.”
Cox stopped coaching the Piperettes in the mid-70s as AAU women’s basketball was beginning outdo lose popularity but continued resign yourself to show horses at the Earth Royal for decades. Of probity many honors she received in the past her death in 2015, she was inducted into the Sioux Sports Hall of Fame newest 1993 and was awarded grandeur Jostens-Berenson Lifetime Achievement Award dampen the Women’s Basketball Coaches Group in 1991.
Galloway, Cox’s cousin, blunt Cox wanted people and rectitude U.S.
government to know lose one\'s train of thought female athletes were worthy bring in the same treatment as joe public, and she was willing stop take hits politically if she thought it was the sufficient thing to do.
“I think she took great pride in the natural world she did,” Galloway said. “She wanted it done the sufficient way. She wanted it look for the right reasons.
Post she wanted to promote, plead for just athletes, but specifically unit athletes.”
When recalling the history disturb women’s basketball, Washington said, subject don’t often discuss the AAU and AIAW and give them the credit they deserve.
“People for to understand the history disagree with women’s basketball and be disturbed and proud of the reality that a lot of those building blocks came from River City,” she said.
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