It takes sustained excellence to win a college basketball title. But it is hard to believe that even the greatest March Madness teams could ever compile a winning record superior to that of the Edmonton Grads.
The Grads took part in more than 400 games between 1915 and 1940 and lost only 20, giving them a win ratio in excess of 95%, according to M Ann Hall, the author of the definitive account of the team.
The exact number of matches the Grads played is disputed, but it’s clear theirs was a long-term achievement better than the all-time records of the top NCAA men’s universities – the likes of Kansas, Kentucky, North Carolina and Duke, who have winning percentages in the 71-76% range. Better than the women’s powerhouses, Connecticut (84%) and Tennessee (81%).
Of course, the sports landscape was rather different a century ago, especially for women. Women’s basketball would not become an Olympic sport until Montreal in 1976, 40 years after the men and 52 years after the Grads played exhibition games in Europe in parallel with the 1924 Paris Olympics.
The Grads played in a livestock pavilion turned ice hockey arena in Alberta’s capital, paying for a wooden floor to be laid over dirt and sawdust in the warmer months once the ice had melted. They were renowned for their accurate short passing, which owed much to the small size of their practice gym. Heaters attached to the walls made straining to reach wayward throws and running at full pelt dangerous. “You had to watch out because when you went in for a lay-up shot, if you didn’t turn quickly, you’d hit the radiator,” player Babe Daniel told one author.
Amateurs with jobs, they were also known for their stamina. As Hall explains in her 2011 book, The Grads Are Playing Tonight!, lack of money during the Great Depression meant the team kept fit by walking everywhere, while starters usually played the entire game as the coach, J Percy Page, rarely used his substitutes.
Page, a popular, fastidious and detail-orientated teacher and future Lieutenant Governor of Alberta, held two evening practices a week that relentlessly focused on passing and shooting drills. He picked players based on character as well as skill: they were almost all graduates of the city’s McDougall Commercial High School (hence the team name) so he knew them well.
Building what sportswriters called the “Grad Machine”, Page developed a structured athletic club with a talent pipeline. To challenge his players he arranged matches against teams of young men from 1923, when the Grads switched from using six-on-six girls’ rules to the men’s five-on-five format. (The six-player version was founded on the basis that five-on-five was too strenuous for women and girls.)
Though the Grads were local stars making international headlines there were evidently worries about potential tensions between the Grads’ hard-charging, merciless on-court style – they did not ease off, winning some games by over a hundred points – and what was seen as ladylike behaviour. If they were redefining what women could do on the basketball court, the Grads were still subject to the era’s norms. “Whether they were travelling across Alberta or the Atlantic, the rules were the same,” Hall writes. “No smoking, drinking, swearing, or chewing gum, and always be smartly dressed. A lady is also polite, respectful, considerate, and discreet.”
One player, Kay MacBeth, told the CBC in 2017 that the Grads often practiced against men and failure to give full effort would result in being ordered to run dozens of laps around the court. But, she said, “We were told to be ladies at all times. You didn’t shove anybody around. You didn’t give them an elbow. Just played a nice lady-like game, be fast and smart.”
The Canada-born James Naismith, who wrote the original rules of basketball in 1891, sent a letter to Page after watching the Grads play in Edmonton in 1925. After admitting to concerns about the potentially damaging effects of the “boys’ style” five-on-five format on the Grads’ “social attributes” and “general health”, a relieved Naismith declared, “I can assure you it was with no little pleasure that I found these young ladies exhibiting as much grace and poise at an afternoon tea as vigorous ability on the basketball court.”
He added: “I feel sure that under proper management, and dominated with right ideals, basketball may be an efficient aid in developing in young women health, skill and refinement, and I would like to congratulate you and your team on the fact that while retaining their fine womanly instincts they have been able to achieve such marked success.”
From 1922 to 1940 the Grads used only 38 players (all now deceased) though marriage at a young age was both expected and career-ending. Many were the children of families who moved to Alberta for economic opportunities from the US, Ontario, Scotland and England, such as Glasgow-born Kate Macrae, a stenographer who married Eddie Shore, a legendarily violent defenceman for the Boston Bruins.
Connie Smith, a 5ft 9in centre and captain born in Walsall, England, was described by one paper as “a bear at tipping the ball” and “fast enough to stick like a leech to her opponent.” Winnie Tait, one of the top players, was blessed with quick hands: capable of typing 105 words a minute, she was the winner of her category in the 1918 Canadian Typewriting Championship.
As victories piled up and word spread the Grads attracted sold-out crowds of over 6,000 people at a time when the population of Edmonton was 60,000. Page became the team’s business manager as money poured in and the club was approached by outside promoters, though players and staff were not paid beyond travel expenses. Games were arranged against American teams named after sponsors, such as Ohio’s Warren National Lamps and the Cleveland Favorite Knits, the self-proclaimed world champions, who twice lost to the Grads in 1923.
That year the Grads won the Underwood International Trophy for American and Canadian teams and went on to hold the title for 17 years. (The Underwood Trophy was billed as a world championship, baseball not being the only sport in which a “world” series can take place between clubs drawn from only two countries.)
With North America conquered the Grads looked to Europe to bolster their credible claim to be the world’s finest and arranged exhibition games to promote the sport around the Olympics. In the summer of 1924 they arrived by ship to Liverpool, saw the sights of London then headed to Paris. After demolishing French teams they were declared world champions at a meeting of the International Women’s Sports Federation (IWSF), a group founded in 1921 by a French activist, Alice Milliat, in response to the reluctance of governing bodies such as the International Olympic Committee and the International Amateur Athletic Federation to promote women’s sports.
The team, Hall writes, were feted on their arrival home by thousands of fans at Edmonton train station and at a downtown ceremony with marching bands, fireworks, and an estimated 20,000 fans chanting “We want the Grads!”
They returned for another Olympics-linked continental tour in 1928, thrashing all their opponents. The Grads beat a French all-star team 46-14 on a sandy outdoor court to retain the world title and also played exhibitions after visiting Los Angeles to watch the 1932 Olympics.
Seeking the sole North American qualifying slot for the 1934 Women’s World Games in London, a rare setback ensued when the Grads lost to the American champions, the Durant Cardinals (a Presbyterian college for girls in Durant, Oklahoma) in a best-of-five series alternating men’s and women’s rules. Physically stronger, Durant ended the Grads’ 34-game winning streak and also won the next game.
For the third, Hall writes in The Grads Are Playing Tonight!, “A special phone number had been set up through the main telephone exchange where operators constantly updated the score. Over 50,000 people called the number, jamming the lines and causing the entire system to blow, resulting in a complete telephone blackout in the city for over 20 minutes.” The Cardinals scored in the final seconds to win 45-43, leading to angry scenes as some fans abused the referee from Oklahoma who was in charge along with a local official.
The Berlin Olympics of 1936 was the first to feature men’s basketball as an official medal event; the Grads again had to settle for playing demonstration fixtures on a European tour in uniforms emblazoned with “Canada” and a maple leaf logo, though Hall writes that they wore the official Olympic blazer as part of the Canadian delegation, watched events in the stadium and brought a fragment of the aircraft in which Baron von Richthofen, the German first world war ace known as the Red Baron, was fatally shot down while pursuing a Canadian pilot. This was to be presented to his mother as an “act of friendship” between Canada and Germany.
Page’s daughter, Patricia, who wrote a women’s sports column for the Edmonton Journal called Feminine Flashes, was in the Olympic press box and reported she was so close to Adolf Hitler that she could have tossed him a basketball. The Grads won all nine games; one team from Nice was dispatched, 85-9. “In the opinion of some European coaches,” Page told reporters, “my girls could have beaten many of the teams which played in the men’s basketball tourney at the Olympiad.”
But the 1938 Women’s World Games were cancelled after the IWSF folded and the outbreak of war saw the Grads disband in 1940. The federal government turned the team’s arena into a military training centre. Travel was difficult, the country was focused on the war effort and Page had a new job: member of the legislative assembly of Alberta. It was the end for the squad that Naismith once called “the finest basketball team that ever stepped out on a floor”.
