Just three years later [after Naismith invented basketball], a group of young women at the University of Wisconsin joined a handful of other schools, including Smith and Mount Holyoke Colleges, by playing an organized game of basketball. Their court was inside Ladies Hall, later to be renamed Chadbourne Hall.
By 1896, with enough women participating in the sport, an interclass league was formed, and a championship team emerged from four groups during a tournament held in winter 1897. That event would be scheduled at the university for the next four decades, although during the early years, the players were challenged by the expectations of the era: competing enthusiastically, yet maintaining a “ladylike” demeanor (which resulted in slower-paced, less- aggressive rules for many years to come).
The women’s sport became so popular that the tournament drew hundreds of spectators for the two or three weekends when it took place. After a foray into arranging games with area high schools and the Milwaukee State Normal School, a faculty committee put an end to outside competition around 1900.
At the UW, women’s basketball preceded the beginning of men’s basketball by four years. The men played their first game in Milwaukee in January 1899, and by 1902, they had an all-away-games schedule. But through its early years, the women’s team remained the most popular women’s spectator sport on campus.
When the cramped facilities of Chadbourne Hall were replaced by the spaciousness of the newly built Lathrop Hall in 1910, the game and the tournament gained even more fans. Lathrop was viewed as a luxurious and much-needed addition to campus when it first opened, and it quickly became a home away from home for many of the 1,059 women then enrolled. The facility featured a cafeteria, reading rooms, a swimming pool, a bowling alley, and a gymnasium.
