Posted on April 9, 2013
A recurring theme here at CENTAUR SEASONS exclusively on HoopsU.com has been the idea that Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales in Center Valley, Pennsylvania — the school brand-new, we students its only resource – offered a uniquely interesting education to those lucky enough to have been there in the late ’60s, early ’70s.
If something needed to get done, we had to do it. Anything, it seemed, was possible.
The story of the Centaurettes first-ever women’s basketball team – first ever women’s team of any kind — is a perfect example. And with tonight’s NCAA Women’s Basketball Championship as backdrop, this seems a perfect time to tell it.
[All links refer to previous CENTAUR SEASON posts that address similar ideas (often as they relate to the men’s team).]
Sue McCandless Pfeil says she realizes now that what she did in 1971 was certainly a step forward for women at Allentown College.
But back then? She had no idea.
“As far as all that went, that was the furthest thing from my mind,” Sue says. “There was nothing about feeling that I was ‘entitled’ to do this. I just wanted to play basketball, you know? I wanted to have a team. And if we wanted to have a team, I knew we were going to have to do it ourselves.”
Sue enlisted a friend, Gail “Clyde” Roney and together they went to see Coach John Compardo, the Athletic Director and one-man-band of an athletic department.
Coach, we’d like to start a women’s basketball team.
By rights, Coach should have turned them down, in that gravelly gruff voice of his:
Eh, girls, now’s not the time, got no money, better wait.
“Coach,” says Walt Pfeil, who would soon be drafted to head the nascent team, “had the good sense not to say no.”
Eh, sure. I’ll see what I can do. Why not? Got no money, though.
Sue and Clyde beat the drum for players, going room to room in the dorms, talking up the team to the college’s 70 or so co-eds.
“I spent more time getting the basketball thing going than I did on any school assignment,” Sue says.
Sue and Walt, now onboard as coach, attended a meeting of the Lehigh Valley Colleges Women’s Athletic Association to gin up some games.
Walt shanghaied his roommate, Wayne Rizzo, into being co-coach.
With an eight or nine game schedule in place, preseason practice commenced. All they had to do now was, well, everything …
“What limited us gave us opportunity,” Sue says of her original basketball efforts, but she could be talking of any number of projects back then that seemed to spring up whole cloth at this tiny school in Center Valley.
‘OK,” Sue says, “There was no women’s basketball team established, but then we get to have the experience of getting it started and keeping it going so that it worked for us. We made it. We designed it. We created it. As opposed to it all just sort of being there for us.”
One more thing: “I wanted to have enough to have a real team,” Sue says.
Of the core group of eight women who signed on with the team, maybe half had never touched a basketball. “The player who could dribble the ball three times without it going off her foot became our point guard,” Wayne says.
A few women had played only during the six-on-six era, with three guards and three forwards relegated to one half of the court.
With no more court time to be squeezed from Billera Hall, the college’s overworked gym, Coach Compardo suggested the team practice up the hill, at Brisson Seminary. “Yeah, they’ll let a bunch of girls run around up there in their shorts, sure they will. Nothing will happen” Wayne says. (In fact, they did let them. And nothing happened.)
One woman had no sneakers; Coach Compardo scrounged some money (likely from his own pocket) to buy some Chuck Taylors. “I remember being very jealous,” Sue says, laughing at herself. “They were very cool sneakers!”
During games there would be shots made in the opponent’s basket. One Centaurette would make “a great layup, utilizing all the technique taught to her in practice,” according to written notes Walt put together for me. “The only issue was that the game was being played on the main court and the shot was taken and made on one of the side baskets.”
It would be so easy here to have fun, make fun.
But if I have tried to do nothing else with this CENTAUR SEASONS, it has been to declare that the effort we guys put into our game be given proper due – even while acknowledge that we were just … the Centaurs, playing for some nowhere, no-name school in the middle of some cornfields.
These women, these Centaurettes (yes, that is what they called themselves) deserve no less the same.
“We took it seriously,” Wayne says. “Walt took it very seriously. We practiced two, three times a week, a couple of hours a night, and then we had the games and stuff, all on the road. We all devoted a lot of time to it. We got into it. We wanted to make a good showing.”
Deborah Bubba Dolan came to the team with high school experience, “recruited,” kind-a-sort-a, the way some us were, by an Oblate priest who had played major college ball. Forty years later, Deb says, she still appreciates how diligently Walt and Wayne approached their charge.
Sue gets all the credit for stepping up and getting the team going, Deb says. “But had it not been for Walt and Wayne coming forward, we probably wouldn’t have played.” And Deb, a freshman that year, really wanted to keep playing basketball.
“These guys were just fellow students willing to take time out of their schedules to coach us, so we could have a team,” she says. “I think that shows what the college was about when we were there. How we were willing to help each other out. Here were these 20-, 21-year-old guys saying, ‘You don’t have a coach? We’ll coach you.’ And they didn’t get paid. They had to teach most of us how to play the game before they could take us on the road to play a game.”
I can hear the appreciation in Deb’s voice through the phone. I tell her as much.
“Oh, absolutely,” she declares. “I haven’t seen them in years, but I still have a great appreciation for them.” Then, unabashedly: “I think about them often. I do. Both of them.”
Some historical context.
This 1971-1972 Centaurette Season is the final gasp of the pre-Title IX world of women’s athletics. In that era, nothing — nothing — could be taken for granted.
“This team was all do-it-yourself,” Wayne says.
But in this same season Immaculata College, from outside Philadelphia, would now-famously win the very first women’s national college basketball championships. And on June 23, 1972, Title IX and its transformative possibilities for women’s athletics would be signed into law. No one in that moment knew what the future held, but it was a heady time to be thinking about it.
Meanwhile, for the Centaurettes that year, after a few weeks of preseason practice they get word that an informal scrimmage has been organized against the Lehigh University women’s freshman team, at their place. But when they arrive, the gym is set up for a real game, with clock, referees, scorers’ table, all that. It gets ugly quick.
“I don’t remember the score, but we were kept to single digits,” it says in Walt’s notes. “Our high scorer had two points.”
Back in their dorm room that night, coaches Walt and Wayne figure that this is likely it, that this women’s hoops experiment is over. “Had they been embarrassed enough to not want to go on?” But everyone shows up – “strong” and “determined” – for the next practice.
For the real games, Coach Compardo gets the team grey ALLENTOWN COLLEGE T-shirts, “and blue polyester shorts,” Sue says, dripping sarcasm. “And we were happy to get them.”
I can tell you that in 1971-1972 the first women’s basketball team at Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales went 0 and 8 or 0 and 9. As Walt has it in his notes: “We had a DEFEATED season.” There were losses to schools like Cedar Crest, Our Lady of Angels, Moravian. There was a tournament of sorts at the end with St. Joe’s and LaSalle, according to Walt and Wayne. I can’t tell you any scores, which is just as well.
Though that is also not the point.
“I was not an athlete,” Maria Martinez wrote to me in response to an all-points email. “I never played basketball before. But it didn’t matter. What mattered was that we were starting a program for the women.”
Which makes it all the more a shame that this first team (and the ’72-’73 team as well) has been left unrecorded in the otherwise mindboggling DSU athletic archives. There is nothing nefarious about this oversight, I am positive. The hope here is simply that Centaur Seasons can help fill in the blanks.
Because the very fact that Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales fielded a women’s team in that seminal season of Title IX is well worth celebrating.
“Not too many years after I graduated,” Sue McCandless Pfeil told me when we talked, “I saw in an alumni newsletter what the team was like. And it made me think, Wow, we just had what we had. Look at what they have now!”
She said that when she was at the college she didn’t – maybe couldn’t – see much beyond where she was right then.
That basketball team she spent so much time getting onto the court? “I thought we were just a little side note,” she says. “I didn’t see us then as us contributing to a ‘program,’ or building Allentown College into a place where people would really want to go. It just wasn’t something we thought about at all back then. We didn’t know what the future held for women athletes, in that moment in time.”
So what about now? These days the DeSales University women’s Bulldog basketball program is a perennial power, having won an average of 20 games a season over the past decade.
“Without us realizing it,” Sue says, “we really pulled something off.”
* * * * * *
The 1971-1972 Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales women’s basketball team: Kathy Anthony Gray, Deborah Bubba Dolan, Ann Conahan (manager), Mary Ellen Ewell Strohl, Julie Gleason, Maria Martinez, Molly Maclean Monte, Sue McCandless Pfeil, Violetta Romano-Lucey, Gail Roney Mallett, Stevie Tagye, Sally Wise Swanson. Coaches: Walt Pfeil and V. Wayne Rizzo.
The 1972-1973 Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales women’s basketball team: Kathy Anthony Gray, Deborah Barnak Burke, Deborah Bubba Dolan, Deborah DeNardo, Sue McCandless Pfeil, Stephanie Tagye, Regina Scirrotto Ivcic, Sylvia Stubits, Sally Wise Swanson. Coach: Mrs. Mary Wendell
There appears to have been no team in 1973-1974
Source: May 11, 1972 Allentown College 7th Annual Sports Banquet program (Tony Mazzeo collection); May 10, 1973 Allentown College 8th Annual Sports Banquet program (Steve McKee); DeSales University Alumni Directory, 2012 edition
And yes: Walt and Sue got married a couple years after they graduated.
- CENTAUR SEASONS: A new Inductee to the DeSales University Hall of Fame recognizes the contributions of the school’s orginal athletes … - September 18, 2013
- CENTAUR (OFF) SEASONS: A dozen ways to read the 97 posts in the scorebook thus far — until a new roster begins taking the floor in the fall - June 13, 2013
- CENTAUR SEASONS: In a ‘Carnival of Opportunity,’ One of Our Own Shines in an All-Star Game - May 14, 2013
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