Ann Johnson provided information from the Annandale Advocate, March 21, 2007. She had attended a program provided by the co-authors to the Hastings AAUW and noted that Annandale was not included in the book, Daughters of the Game.

Shortly after, her hometown newspaper, The Annandale Advocate, March 21, 2007, featured Pearl Glaim McAlpine who had played on the Annandale girls basketball team in 1930-1931. The article was written by Chuck Sterling.

The caption under the photo reads, "Pearl McAlpine of Annandale used to be called Pearl Glaim about 75 years ago when she played on the Annandale High School girls basketball team. Now almost 94, she's holding a 1930-1931 team photo, the only piece of memorabilia she has from those days."

Team members listed under the 1930-31 team photo include: front row, from left, Margaret Burgess, Mildred Lundsten, Ruth Ryti, Helen Haggerty and Lucy Kurz, and back row, from left, Pearl Glaim, Lila Madus and Florence Hackbarth.

The article continues: "Pearl Glaim was quite an athlete. She played baseball, softball and golf, and she did a lot of running.

'I played football with the boys even,' she recalls. 'As far as I know I was the only girl to swim across Pleasant Lake.' And she was a standout on the Annandale High School girls basketball team for four years.

But Glaim wasn't recruited to play college sports.

Family circumstances prevented that, but she also played in an era when education officials frowned upon intense competition for women and eliminated girls sports from Minnesota high schools for the next 40 years.

Now 93, Pearl Glaim McAlpine was a member of the AHS girls basketball team from 1929 to 1933, the last year girls took the floor until the 1970s.

Though she wasn't actually featured in Marian Bemis Johnson and Dorothy McIntyre's 2005 book, she was one of the 'daughters of the game' they wrote about.

'Daughters of the Game: The First Era of Minnesota Girls High School Basketball, 1891-1942' chronicles the rise and fall of the girls game.

McAlpine talked about her playing days during an interview at her apartment in Centennial Villa Assisted Living.

At 5-foot-6, she was the second-tallest member of the 1930-1931 team. McAlpine said, producing a photo of the squad.

She and the taller Florence Hackbarth were standing in the back row.

She didn't play like a boy like I did,' McAlpine boasted.

Basketball was just coming into its own because every town had its own basketball team and that was the big thing of the winter.

The girls and boys teams played in the old gym at what is now Annandale Middle School.

Big Crowds
We used to bring in the biggest crowds for an evening of basketball.

'We played first and the boys played second. We always said we brought in the crowds. When the teams played elsewhere, both boys and girls travelled on the same bus,' McAlpine said, pointing out that Jake Essen, who died earlier this month at 93, was a member of the boys team.

'We played almost all the teams around - as far as Buffalo (and) as far west as Kimball.'

'That included Maple Lake, Buffalo, Big Lake, Rockford and Kimball,' she said.

'Buffalo was the toughest team we ever played. Their women were like Amazons and I'll tell you they could tower over the rest of us.'

School Supt. Henry Swanson was the coach and he once pulled the girls off the floor in a game with Buffalo.

'They were so rough; they would punch and trip,' McAlpine said. 'That was the last time we ever played Buffalo.'

Maple Lake was another tough rival.

McAlpine played center-forward and most often handled the jump ball, which in those days took place after every basket. The girls played the game using only half the floor at a time, not the full court.

'They thought that was too much for the girls,' she said. 'It wasn't, really.'

McAlpine used a two-handed jump shot close to the basket. 'We had to use two hands.'

Farther out, she used a set shot, and she and others used an underhanded delivery at the free throw line.

'We didn't do any fancy shooting,' she said.

They played a different style of basketball than now, 'but it was peppy.'

McAlpine once scored 30 points in a single quarter against Big Lake. She doesn't recall her total that day, but she played only half the game.

According to a season summery in the March 23, 1933 Advocate, she scored 62 points that year, second-highest on the team.

The Only One Left?

'I'm pretty sure I am the only one left from that era,' McAlpine said. 'I've never heard from any of them...for a long time.'

She believes if she had played high school basketball today, she might have received a college scholarship.

As it happened, her mother died in 1932, leaving her to help care for eight younger children.

She married James McAlpine in 1934 and they had six children themselves.

The end of her playing days was also the end of girls basketball at AHS for many years.

'After I had played four years they quit basketball altogether,' she said.

'There just weren't any girls that were interested in it." The Advocate summary of that season, however, suggested a different reason.

'The Annandale girls team was handicapped by other schools dropping girls basektball which left as opponents only the schools with the better teams.

'With Glaim, Ryti, Reip and Heasley, all regulars, graduating, Annandale may next year be among those schools without girls basketball'

According to authors Johnson and McIntyre, girls basketball teams had spread like wildfire throughout Minnesota after the game's creation by James Naismith in 1891.

But 'in the mid-1920s, state and national groups came to believe that intense competition was filled with the potential for negative effects on young women,' they wrote in 'Daughters of the Game.'

Two of the organizations were the National Amateur Athletic Federation - Women's Division and The National Association of Secondary School Principals.

These groups took a strong position against interscholastic and intercollegiate competition as well as competition conducted by community and sports organizations, including the Olympics.

Information sent to schools across the country called for replacing girls and womens competitive teams with a recreational program open to all girls and women.

Minensota schools began to comply with the recommendations. The larger schools dropped girls teams in the 1920s while smaller schools held onto their teams but ultimately discontinued them in the 1930s.

It wasn't until about four decades later that girls basketball resumed in Minnesota high schools and at AHS.

That followed action by the Minnesota State High School League in 1969 to add girls sports to its competitive sports activities and the passage of Title IX into federal law in 1972.

Title IX required equal athletic opportunities for girls and boys, former AHS athletic director Denny Harmoning said.

'If you had a boys sport, you had to have a comparable girls sport.'

The resurrection of girls basketball meets with McAlpine's approval.

When her two daughters went to school there weren't any girls sports, while two of her sons played for Annandale.

'I think the girls need sports,' she said, 'I'm all for it.'