Looking back at Fairfield’s first girls’ basketball team

FAIRFIELD – In 1972, Fairfield High School opened the door to a new activity for girls: basketball.

Other schools in Iowa had been fielding girls’ teams for decades, and the first girls’ state basketball tournament was held in 1920. The Fairfield school district felt it was time for the school to get with the times, and asked Parsons College graduate Dan Breen to start a girls’ basketball program. Breen had just finished playing two years of basketball at Parsons after transferring from a college in his native Lorain, Ohio, where there were no girls’ sports of any kind.

On Friday night, the district honored Breen by renaming the FHS gymnasium after him. One of the highlights of the evening was welcoming dozens and dozens of Breen’s former players to stand with him at center court. Seven members of that first Trojanette girls’ basketball team attended the ceremony: Peggy Lane, Barbara Kistler, Mary Ahrens Louden, Jane Fritz Symmonds, Donna Hoyle Rugg, Deb Dickinson and Elna Haines.

The members of that inaugural team had many stories to share about what it was like to play organized basketball for the first time, and how they got along with Coach Breen.

Lane said that Breen was an amazing coach, and that she and her teammates learned so much from the drills he had them do.

“He stressed the fundamentals,” Lane said.

Rugg talked about how practices involved a lot of running. One of the running drills had the girls run from one end line to the other. Breen ran alongside the girls, but he did it going backwards.

“If we didn’t beat him, we had to keep running the lines until we did,” Rugg said.

Rugg said that Breen told the girls that winning and losing was less important than how they played the game. Kistler said that Breen wanted to see a good effort from his players, and that meant always moving their feet.

“You never wanted to be flat-footed,” she said. “There’s a picture of me in the yearbook, and it shows me standing there flat-footed. When I saw that, I said, ‘Oh gosh, Coach Breen is going to have a fit!’”

Symmonds said Coach Breen really cared about his players, and not just while they were on the court.

“If he caught us outside without a stocking cap, we had to run,” she said. “He wanted to keep us healthy.”

“We were family to him,” Rugg said. “When we felt bad, he felt bad.”

The Fairfield school district announced in the spring of 1972 that it would have a girls’ basketball program the following year. That summer, Parsons College hosted a basketball camp for girls, which some of the players attended to hone their skills before the season began. At that point, the only sports Fairfield offered girls were track, cross-country, tennis and gymnastics.

Even though the Trojanettes were in their first year, they won the consolation prize at district playoffs.

When asked why they wanted to go out for Fairfield’s first girls’ basketball team, the women gave different answers. Kistler said that her mother Rose played basketball in high school at Oxford, Iowa.

“She always lamented the fact they didn’t have girls’ basketball in Fairfield,” Kistler said.

Symmonds said she was already on the cross-country team, and was looking to add another sport to her resume, so basketball seemed like the right choice.

Quite a lot of girls in Fairfield were eager to try their hand at basketball. Symmonds said that about 130 showed up for the first day of practice at Pence Elementary School.

“All Coach Breen worked on was conditioning, so we ran outside, inside, and back outside and through the gym,” Symmonds said. “The next night, that number was cut in half.”

The women said that it was so much fun to be part of that first team. Rugg even told her mom that she wishes she had flunked senior year so she could have come back to play another year of basketball under Coach Breen.

Call Andy Hallman at 641-575-0135 or email him at andy.hallman@southeastiowaunion.com