Clearing the path for Reese, Caitlin Clark and Mulkey WNBA | Entertainment/Life

The last couple of years have brought much fanfare with Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and women’s basketball in general — especially in Louisiana when, in 2023, the LSU women won the national championship. 

I often wonder what the long-term effects of the attention the sport has garnered will make in years to come, especially with impressionable young girls watching from afar — or even up close. 

When we go to the LSU women’s basketball games and see the young girls watching so intently, I remember how much I loved watching the game when I was their age. The small Mississippi town where I grew up had a wonderful women’s athletics tradition.

Back then, I thought it was normal that the girls’ games were better attended and a lot more fun to watch than the guys’. The games felt like the whole town was there cheering them on.

Basketball was the light of my life. I couldn’t wait to grow up and play.

Which never happened the way I envisioned it — largely because we moved to a different town in the summer of 1980, between my 10th and 11th grade years. The new town did not have a tradition of supporting girls’ athletics.

However, that year, the school hired a new coach, Tesa Townsend Duckworth — and I thought we had a shot. She was fresh out of playing professional basketball. She was very tall and had blond, blond hair. 

She had gone on to play for Mississippi College and then for the Chicago Hustle — a team in the Women’s Professional Basketball League, the first women’s professional sports league in the U.S. It existed from 1978 to 1981.

After playing in Chicago for two years, Duckworth played for a season with the New Orleans Pride, also in the WBL. 

The league folded after the 1980-1981 season, which was the first year that I was playing basketball for Coach Duckworth. When she messaged me a few weeks ago, saying she would love to come to an LSU women’s basketball game with Becky Sinclair Green, another former Mississippi College player, I was excited. 

Coach Kim Mulkey remembers Duckworth and the WBL. Before the game, Mulkey told me that she would love to say hello to Duckworth and Green after the game — which is how it came to be that on Sunday, I cooked lunch for and went to the LSU game with my high school coach. 

She’s a grandmother now, with three grown sons and five grandsons. She and her husband live in the house where they lived when I was in high school.

Sitting there at the game, talking with her about great defense and rebounding felt like the last 40 years didn’t happen. When, at halftime, LSU honored 50 years of women’s athletics, Duckworth and Green watched intently as the women from the 1970s paraded across the court — for players they would have played against.

Back then, Mississippi College was one of the top national programs for women’s basketball. Duckworth’s senior year was the first year they gave scholarships for women to play basketball at the college level. Before 1974, the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women prohibited athletic scholarships for women. 

“We all just played because we loved it,” she said. “Back then, we beat all the LSUs and the Tennessees, the Ole Misses. Little Mississippi College was right there competing with all of them.”

We talked about how much the game has changed — mainly how much more physical it is now and the intricacies of NIL. 

We chatted again Monday morning.

“I’ve been sitting here this morning thinking about it,” she said. “That was a big deal for me to go back and to see it because I feel like, and maybe I shouldn’t, but I feel like I have a connection with the WNBA players because I played. I mean, things have gotten better now — and players are better, stronger and all that, but I feel like I played on that level. I feel a connection. It was a big thing to go back and be in that atmosphere again.”

We talked about the recent reunion the WBL had, with 100 players showing up, and the WBL’s recent induction into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame. 

“At the Hall of Fame event, they said we were trailblazers for the WNBA,” she said.

She referenced recent comments from Caitlin Clark naming a bunch of WNBA players — Lisa Leslie, Dawn Staley, Maya Moore — who “kicked down the door so I can walk inside.”

Duckworth took exception. 

“Nothing against the players she mentioned,” Duckworth said. “They were great players and did indeed help pave a road for her, but she doesn’t go back to acknowledge some who began the process of paving the road — or in her line of thinking, the ones who cleared the path to get to the door.”