Chesco’s Immaculata College won the first women’s college basketball national title on this week in Philly history
The women’s basketball team from the tiny Chester County school defeated fellow Pennsylvanians West Chester University in the title game.
Cinderella had nothing to do with it.
The athletes who formed the core of the Immaculata Mighty Macs weren’t an underdog, an aberration, or a flash in the pan.
They were just that dang good.
And when the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women held its first tournament, the Mighty Macs rose to the top.
The women’s basketball team from the tiny Chester County school, which had to sell toothbrushes to raise plane fare, were seeded near the bottom. And shocked the world on March 19, 1972, when they defeated fellow Pennsylvanians West Chester University, 52-48, in the title game.
They won the first-ever women’s national college basketball championship, and kicked off a dynastic run.
And in the process, they brought women’s basketball into the mainstream sports conversation.
“I just think Immaculata did a lot for the game,” head coach Cathy Rush, who was ultimately inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, told the Daily News decades later. “Before us, no one had ever watched the women’s game, and our players never got the recognition they deserved.”
The Frazer, Pa., school went on to dominate college women’s basketball in the early 1970s. They were led by Rush, only a few years older than the players she was leading, and went on to win three consecutive Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women championships.
The school won against a dramatic backdrop of social unrest amid the Vietnam War, as well as the feminist movement and Title IX.
The original squad included Rene Muth Portland and Judy Marra (who later married to Phil Martelli, who coached St. Joe’s from 1995 to 2019).
And Theresa Shank Grentz, whom Rush once called “the greatest player of the 1970s.”
Rush added: “And I worry that nobody remembers.”
The NCAA began holding tournaments for women’s basketball in the early 1980s, taking over for the AIAW. And Immaculata began competing in Division III.
“Once the NCAA took over the women’s game, it’s almost as if nothing happened before then,” Rush said in 2001. “A whole era has been discounted from existence.’’