Women's Hoops Blog

Inane commentary on a game that deserves far better


Monday, December 17, 2007

Another shout out to the New York Times: this time they look at high school basketball will a long piece by Karen Crouse on Sequoyah High in Oklahoma and Kansas bound Angel Goodrich.
If not for basketball, Angel Goodrich and her school, Sequoyah High, would be as easy to overlook as the dusty farming towns that freckle northeast Oklahoma. Goodrich, a shy sliver of a guard, is the face of the Lady Indians, who are the three-time defending state champions in their classification and a rising force on the national scene.

They opened the season ranked in the top 10 in Sports Illustrated’s national poll. And this week they will participate in the Nike Tournament of Champions in Phoenix. Sequoyah is the first all-Indian school to receive one of the coveted invitations.
Longtime readers of this blog may recall other entries on Native American teams and players, and know they have a long and storied history in women's basketball.

Perhaps the most famous Native American team was from the Fort Shaw Indian Boarding School in Montana. In 1904, they traveled to play at Worlds Fair in St. Louis where the "all-Indian women's basketball team from the Fort Shaw Government Industrial Indian School won the World Championship."

On a more contemporary note, Larry Colton's Counting Coup is about Montana's Hardin High Lady Bulldogs and the doucumentary Rocks with Wings looks at New Mexico's Lady Chieftains. Last October, Lya Wodraska and Phil Miller of the Salt Lake Tribune wrote a powerful 3-part series on Whitehorse High School's basketball team and their star player, Derica Dickson.

Oklahoma's Jenna Plumley has ties to the Comanche, Otoe, Pawnee and Pueblo tribes, and is rare among Division I athletes. Research shows that only 0.3 percent of all NCAA student-athletes are Native American women.