Early Years

CMU Women's Basketball team, 1908 From the CMU Photographic Veritcal File

Athletics at CMU began only ten years after automobiles were invented and has become a rich centuries-long tradition. In 1896, only four years after the founding of the university, Central had its inaugural sporting events. Baseball and football represented CMU's earliest sports, available only to men at the time.

However, it wasn't long before women began to participate in Central sports. In 1899, Central introduced its first track and field team to take part in an inter-school meet. One of the competitors, Myrra Hepburn, was the first woman to compete in a sporting event at CMU, and she took second place in the club swinging event. Soon after, in 1905, CMU's earliest women's basketball team defeated Midland High School 24-13 in their first game.

The era of women's intercollegiate sports wouldn't last long, however. In 1913, Bertha Ronan, a women's physical education instructor, announced the end of intercollegiate women's sports at Central. In particular, she warned against the dangers of organized women's basketball.

In an article published in the March 1913 Central Normal Bulletin, she wrote:

“In order to develop this winning team all laws of hygiene are often completely ignored, and girls are not physically strong enough to endure this strain. They are emotional, and the excitement connected with any intercollegiate game—the travelling, the worry, the thought of the approaching game, the irregular hours for food and rest, and many other things—places them in a position where they expend an enormous amount of energy, and at the close of the game they are exhausted. This condition is not conducive to good health, which cannot be sacrificed for whatever social training may be derived from an intercollegiate game.”

With this effort, intercollegiate women's athletics at Central ended in 1913. It would be another roughly forty years and two world wars before CMU women once again engaged in intercollegiate sports. In the meantime, physical education courses and intramural competitions were the only options available.

Central women playing field hockey, circa 1950s

After World War II, women's sports around the country began to become increasingly intercollegiate, with women from various colleges and universities competing against each other in events called "play days." A play day was a single day of competition between women at various schools with round-robin play among all of the teams and maybe a championship game. In many cases, there were no leagues or seasons. 

CMU followed this national trend of play days, with female athletes competing in areas such as field hockey, volleyball, and basketball. This trend would persist throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. CMU didn't enter its first modern intercollegiate women's basketball league until 1967—55 years after intercollegiate women's basketball was abandoned and 68 years after Myrra Hepburn took the field wearing the Central uniform.

In her treatise against intercollegiate women's athletics, Bertha Ronan wrote, "Do we realize the possibilities in intercollegiate basketball for women? Emphatically, no." For over half a century, Ronan was correct and Central did not realize the full potential in women's sports. When it did, the women of CMU would change not only the course of athletics at the university, but across the nation.