There were no TV contracts in 1971, no corporate sponsorships and no Big Dance. Not even a Big Cotillion. And Selection Sunday was a series of invitations sent by mail. Yes, on paper, delivered by the Postal Service.
The NCAA did not sponsor women’s sports at the time; in fact, when it finally did a decade later it was only after a very contentious debate. And the corresponding women’s sports association, the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, was still a year away.
But there was a national invitational tournament sponsored by the Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, just as there had been for the previous two seasons. And after winning four games in four days in Cullowhee, North Carolina, Mississippi State College for Women claimed the de facto national championship.
Now Mississippi University for Women, the school honored that championship team as part of its homecoming festivities, and four players and coach Jill Upton were at Pohl Gym on Friday to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their triumph. (It had been planned for last year, but it was canceled because of the pandemic.)
Getting the right coach
At a time when few women were serious about sports, and few men were serious about women’s sports, Upton brought a basketball background to Columbus.
“I played high school basketball, and I also played AAU basketball,” said Upton, who grew up in Walnut Grove. “There weren’t that many universities that had teams at that time.
My best friend Sue Gunther and I, we would have come to The W. We grew up together.
“We wound up going to Nashville and to Peabody College so we could play AAU basketball with Nashville Business College, which was a good AAU team.”
Sue Gunther would go on to an outstanding college coaching career, racking up 266 wins in 12 years at Stephen F. Austin before spending 22 seasons at LSU, where she took 14 teams to the NCAA Tournament, reaching the Final Four in her final season in 2004 and finishing with a 442-221 record.
“The W, I guess knew of me,” Upton said. “They asked me to come here, and they mainly wanted me for a basketball coach. I was kind of all into physical education, because women’s basketball was not like it is today where you would go only as a basketball coach.”
Back in those days, the women’s basketball schedule consisted mostly of playing tournaments, Upton said.
“Our big tournament every year was in Houston,” she recalled. “We had just gotten back from the Houston Invitational, and a letter came to me in the mail inviting us. I met with my team in the corner of the old gym and said, ‘Do y’all want to go?’”
It was a valid question. The tournament was not major news, and there was the matter of getting to tournament host Western Carolina University.
“At that time, we were just going in cars,” Upton said. “I think I took my own car, and then maybe we had a station wagon from the school.”
“There was no consideration of not going,” said Dot Murphy, a freshman on that team who came to The W after a stellar career at Starkville High School. “We just all loved playing. I took my dad’s car some, there was a school station wagon we always took. A couple of players would sit in the back on the luggage so we could get everybody in the station wagon with the luggage.”
The eagerness to drive to yet another tournament shows how much the Blues, as they were known back then, loved the game, especially taking into account Murphy’s memory of those Houston tournaments.
“Three of the four years I was here, we got up on a Thursday morning, drove all the way to Houston, Texas,” she said. “We’d get in at 9 or 10 o’clock at night, get up, play two ball games on Friday, then get up and play two Saturday.
“One year we had to play three. We had to play Stephen F. Austin, which was coached by Sue Gunther, in the finals that year. You talk about a sorry game. We were worn out. It was our fifth game in less than 48 hours.
“We got back in the car, drove back, and we were in class at 8 o’clock the next morning. You did it because you loved it. And we paid for our own meals. The W may have paid the gas, and they did pay the hotel bills.”
The pieces come together
Murphy was a two-time all-state player for Starkville, averaging 33 points per game and finishing with 2,772. But not everyone brought that kind of resume to The W.
“I had never played basketball before I came to The W,” Pat Smith said. “They didn’t have it in the city of Jackson schools for girls. I played a lot of sandlot ball with guys.”
Somewhere in between all-state and no team was Karen Fuller.
“That’s the only reason I came to The W, because I heard they had a basketball team, and I wanted to play basketball,” said Fuller, who played three-on-three at Potts Camp High School, back when many feared girls couldn’t handle running the length of the court.
Those people never met Upton. All of the former players remember how much they ran. And ran. And ran. Then, when they were done, they ran some more.
“That’s the best shape I’ve ever been in; even in the police academy I didn’t get that good,” said Smith, a 16-year veteran of the Jackson Police Department who, when she decided she had enough of that, went back to school and embarked on a 20-year nursing career.
So, with the Blues preparing to head to Cullowhee, there was a task besides packing and practicing that had to be done.
“We cleaned the balls the night before we went because we couldn’t afford to buy new basketballs,” Smith said. “So we cleaned them and waxed them so we wouldn’t look like a bunch of hicks.”
None of the players worried how they looked when they encountered significant snowfall during the tournament.
“I have trouble remembering things that happened yesterday, but I do remember it was snowing, and we got in trouble for playing in the snow one time instead of resting,” Dixie Everett said.
Smith remembered that as well.
“While we should have been looking at the teams we were going to play, we were out playing in the snow,” she said. “We’d never seen 6 inches of snow.”
Four days, four wins
But there were games to play. As this was the first time MSCW had been invited to the tournament, they knew little about most of the other 15 teams in the field.
“We didn’t know what we were doing, and we didn’t know how good we were,” Upton said. “I had no idea what the quality of play was.”
So the game plan, such as it was, was simple.
“We went out and played like she told us to,” Everett said.
“We had no video, no film,” Murphy said. “She always prepared us to be the best we could be.”
That gave the Blues all the confidence they would need.
“I don’t know that Miss Upton ever walked on the court, and I know Dixie Everett and I didn’t walk on the court, thinking we might get beat,” Murphy said. “We always thought we had a chance.”
The tournament draw didn’t do them any favors, matching them against defending champion Cal State Fullerton in the first round. The Titans were no match for the Blues, who won the Wednesday game 54-37.
The margin of victory was the same in the quarterfinals, a 70-53 win on Thursday over Pennsylvania’s East Stroudsburg State. That brought up North Carolina-Greensboro, the closest thing to a home team the tournament had after host Western Carolina lost to Southern Connecticut State in the first round.
The Blues posted their biggest win of the tournament, rolling to a 66-43 win on Friday to set up a championship game against West Chester State, which had won the first national invitational two years earlier and had played for the title in 1970.
“West Chester had a girl named Sue Minniefield,” Murphy recalled. “Everyone was talking about how good she was, and she was a really good player. We knew we had our work cut out for us.
“Jill played a 1-3-1 zone a lot of the time, and we were definitely in condition. We could run a full-court, man-to-man press up and down the floor pretty good. And we stopped them.”
Indeed they did. In what was by far the most competitive game of the four-day tournament, MSCW posted a 57-55 win.
“I had a dream the night before,” Murphy said. “We stayed in a dorm, because Culliwhee, North Carolina, at that time I don’t even think they had a hotel. I had a dream we won it by two.
“You know what the final score was? 57-55. Isn’t that weird?”
That score was displayed on an auxiliary scoreboard in Pohl Gym during Friday’s event, a fitting commemoration of Mississippi’s first national championship women’s team.
The party wasn’t over
In retrospect, maybe it shouldn’t have been such a surprise.
“This area was a gold mine of good high school girls players, and since there weren’t many universities in the state that even had girls basketball, all of the good players in Mississippi came to The W,” Upton said.
“They made me look like I was a terrific coach. The most complicated thing I did was try to decide who would start.”
Her players would disagree, as would the basketball officials who named Upton the coach of the U.S. team for the 1973 World University Games. The Games in Moscow were the eighth edition but the first to include women’s basketball.
Coaching a team that included future Hall of Famers Pat (Head) Summitt and Theresa (Shank) Grentz — and Murphy, who started and roomed with Summitt in the Soviet Union — Upton led the team to a silver medal.
By then, The W had played in the first AIAW Tournament in 1972. One year after their championship, they were competitive with the nation’s best again.
A 64-47 win over host Illinois State sent them into the quarterfinals against Head’s UT Martin team. Somewhere there is a photo of Murphy’s opening jump against Head, but the game was no contest, with MSCW advancing with a 43-25 win.
That brought on the Final Four and Shank’s Immaculata team, which had defeated South Dakota State and Indiana. Upton will never forget that one.
“Immaculata beat us, and we were 19 points ahead of them,” she said. “I’ll never forget that game. They came back and beat us and won the national championship that year.”
It was the first of three consecutive AIAW titles for the Mighty Macs, and being so close to stopping them meant the Blues were one game away from making history again. Instead, they wound up in the consolation game against their old friends from Cal State-Fullerton. This time, it was the Titans taking the third-place trophy with a 52-42 win.
“We were so deflated after losing, playing for third and fourth, well, we just didn’t have the heart,” Upton said.
After The W, life goes on
Upton coached The W for nine seasons, then pursued exercise physiology in graduate school. Eventually, she went back to college teaching at Dallas Baptist University.
“I felt like I wanted to go into other things,” she said. “My ambition was never to be a coach. Looking back on it, I really should have treasured it more than I did, but at that time, it didn’t have the prestige that coaches have now. But it was a special time.
“I love The W. I still consider The W my professional home.”
Green and Murphy made careers out of sports, and both have been recognized for their contributions.
Green was an enormously successful coach and athletic director at Potts Camp High School. She coached basketball for a few years but really made her mark in track and cross country, sports that were added during her time as athletic director. Green coached teams that won 10 state championships and finished runner-up eight times.
Almost echoing Upton, Green deflected credit for those titles.
“I put them in the right place, and they did their jobs,” she said.
And she kept doing her job, going beyond serving as athletic director at one school and taking on responsibilities at the state level. In January, she was inducted into the Mississippi Athletic Administrators Association Hall of Fame.
Now retired, she said she still watches college basketball and enjoys watching her grandchildren play.
“It makes me wonder how they prepared,” she said. “We prepared well. We were in really good shape. It’s so much faster now, but sometimes I don’t think they know fundamentals.
“I sit and watch my grandchildren play now, and I can point out where’s the fundamentals? Where?”
Murphy went on to average 22 points per game during her career at The W, becoming the school’s first 1,000-point scorer. She coached briefly as an assistant at UT Martin and as head coach at Itawamba Community College, then returned to her alma mater from 1977-1982 as coach, physical education instructor and director of the school’s basketball camp.
Murphy spent a chunk of her career teaching fundamentals, but not on a basketball court. Not letting Starkville declaring “Dot Easterwood Day” complete with a parade in 1973 go to her head, she continued to be a pioneer, becoming the first woman to coach football in National Junior College Athletic Association history in 1984. She was inducted into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame in 1999.
Over more than 30 years at Hinds, Murphy has been an assistant football coach, athletic training coordinator and physical education instructor. She credits The W with her professional success.
“People don’t realize how much rich history The W has in athletics,” she said. “Because I was aware of what these ladies had been a part of, pioneering it, is what gave me the courage to coach football, which is what I ended up coaching.
“And my husband did not hire me.”
Gene Murphy was athletic director at Hinds from July 1997 until his retirement last year and served two stints as head football coach, the first time from 1987 to 2003 and the second time from 2009 to August 2017.
The former players who were honored Friday at Pohl Gym proved that there is much more to life than a national championship, and Smith cited a basic lesson.
“My mom always told me, and it’s just like everything The W taught, you can do anything you want to do if you put your mind to it and work hard,” she said. “You may not be the best, but you probably won’t be the worst.”
In 1971, the Blues were indeed the best.
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 33 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
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Jill Upton, coach of The W's 1971 championship basketball team, speaks during a celebration of that accomplishment on Friday at Pohl Gym. Tom Rysinski/Dispatch Staff
Former basketball players, from left, Dixie Everett, Karen Fuller, Dot Murphy and Pat Smith listen during a celebration of Mississippi State College for Women's 1971 national invitational tournament victory on Friday at Pohl Gym. Tim Rysinski/Dispatch Staff
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