Dan Conrad, Minneapolis, researched the history of the Cokato girls basketball teams in 2005-2006. The full history is printed in an illustrated publication of the Cokato Museum entitled: 'Why Did They take That Game Away From Us?' It is available, for a charge, at the museum or via email at: cokatomuseum@cmgate.com.

Dan provided the following summary of the history of the Cokato girls basketball team:

"Cokato High School's first inter-school athletic contest of any kind was a girls' basketball game played on March 26, 1904. As the two schools have now merged, it is only fitting that the opponent that Saturday afternoon was their nearby rival, Dassel. The game was played before a large and boisterous crowd that packed in around the upstairs dance floor at Stevenson's Hall. The Cokato girls won the game, and the $17.50 they earned from gate receipts was enough to pay for their uniforms. However, the next year the girls were forced to play outside and to deal with mud and snow and cold and for this, and other less obvious reasons, girls basketball was not played again on a regular basis until 1919.

Girls basketball thrived again in Cokato throughut the 1920s. In those years the participation of girls in athletics was strongly encouraged by superintendnts N.N. Stevenson and Ernst Jacobson, and the girls were ably led by coaches, all of whom were women, who volunteered their services. Basketball was the 'biggest show in town' and the girls'and boys' teams played doubleheaders before large and enthusiastic crowds. The most common opponents were other towns along the Milwaukee Road line such as Delano, Montrose, Howard Lake, Dassel and Litchfield. They also regularly played teams from Buffalo, Atwater, Hutchinson, Silver Lake and Annandale. Students and villagers followed the team to road games by whatever means possible as illustrated by a 1923 newspaper article that commended the fans who followed the girls to a Friday night game in Dassel: 'The goodly delegation of high school students who braved 25 degree below zero temperatures in an open sleigh were well rewarded and should be decorated for bravery.'

Throughout most of the 1920s, games were played upstairs in the old Village Hall, where, as 97 year-old Adalyn Wright recalled in 2006: 'The floor was terrible. Some weekends they'd have the chicken show and it'd still be chicken feathers and straw on the floor.' Ms Wright also recalled the fierce rivalry that the Cokato girls had with Dassel and Howard Lake between whom, as she put it: 'it was dog eat dog.' She added: 'When we played Howard Lake one time we played in the town hall and while we were playing they threw our clothes out the window. So we had to pick our clothes off the street. That's how rivals we were.'

Cokato's greatest player in that era was Mildred Olson, a six-foot tall athletic forward who regularly scored in the 20s and 30s and whose 49 points in a 63-3 win over Howard Lake stands as Cokato's single game scoring record to this day. Cokato's other most notable star was a powerful farm girl named Anna Niemala who led the Cokato girls to their first and only Wright County championship in 1929.

The Cokato girls did not have long to celebrate their success. Just two years later, when the 1931 team was set to begin practice, they were met by the newspaper headline 'Basket Ball Practice Opens; Girls' Team Dropped This Year.'

And so it was - for more than forty years."

Photo identification:
1922: Mildred Olson, Evelyn Wagner, Edithe Lundborg, Irene Ekllof, Mildred Wagner, Mae Celine, Ruby Johnson, Constance Harkman and (seated) Miss Harriet Madigan, coach.

1929 photo of the Wright County Champions (see trophy on the floor) - Myrtle Ferrell, Clarine Harkman, Evelyn custer, Doris Rost, Hazel Dahlin, ElDora Calgren, Anna Niemala, Dora Anderson, Genevieve Holt and (seated) Miss Marion Wasson, coach.

Photos courtesy of the Cokato Museum and Ackerlund Studio.