High school is a memorable time for many of us, but for Melissa Isaacson, it was more than nostalgia that made her write about the girls basketball team that won the 1979 Illinois state championship.

Melissa’s book, State: A Team, a Triumph, a Transformation, is about a team of girls who beat not only their opponent, but a society that only recently had let them be athletes.

“This story is about one group of girls sitting innocently at a monumental place in our nation’s history,” Melissa wrote. “It’s about the sheer joy of getting our first uniforms, packing the same school gym where we were once not allowed to practice, and gaining access to life lessons previously only available to boys.”*

The girls of the Niles West team of Skokie, Illinois, made their way onto the court in the early years of Title IX. They came from varied, and sometimes neglectful and even violent, families. They believe to this day that playing basketball not only changed them, but saved them.

They had strong backers and role models. Nicholas Mannos, the principal who fought for girls to have the same opportunities as boys. Their first coach, Arlene Mulder, who’d never coached basketball but who mastered the game and pushed the girls to be their best selves. Billy Schnurr, the boys basketball coach who secretly mentored Mulder and helped mold the girls into fierce competitors. Gene Earl, their second coach, who delighted in the girls’ spirit and took them to the championships.

Who’s that I see?

When the team arrived at the championship game in 1979, they found they’d be facing East St. Louis, a powerhouse of a team with a secret weapon — Jackie Joyner, the extraordinary athlete who went on to win six Olympic gold medals. That didn’t faze Melissa or her teammates.

“After 25 games, and for most of us, two or more years of running stairs and scrimmaging at five in the morning behind us, we could say with confidence that no team in Illinois was better conditioned or more in sync,” she said.**

It was a hard fought battle, but when the final buzzer sounded, they had won the game 63-47. Melissa, who had suffered an injury that year, only came in for the final minute. Holding the ball at the buzzer, she flung it skyward as the stands rocked to the chant, “We are! State champs!”

Years later, at a team reunion, Holly Andersen Blanchette shared what sports meant to her.

“People accuse me of being competitive sometimes,” she said. “But it doesn’t mean I’m a sore loser; it means that sports has empowered me. It gives you self-confidence and makes you more determined.”

A scandal spurs a career

Melissa played club basketball at the University of Iowa, where she earned her B.A. in journalism. Her interest in the profession arose from the seminal political event of the 1970s, the Watergate scandal.***

“Journalism was suddenly a glamorous profession. Reporters were celebrities,” she says. “And it was a natural interest for me, as I loved writing and lived in Chicago, a town that had three daily papers.”

For 30 years, Melissa was a sportswriter, working for the Chicago Tribune and USA Today among other newspapers. In the ‘90s, she covered the Michael-Jordan-led Chicago Bulls and the Chicago Bears, the first woman in those reporting roles. She worked for ESPN, covering everything up to and including the Olympics.

A woman sportswriter — in choosing her career path, Melissa opened up an avenue previously unavailable to women. Today she is a lecturer at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.  

Melissa once had the opportunity to interview Birch Bayh, the Indiana senator who co-wrote Title IX with Reps. Edith Green and Patsy Mink. She ended the call on a personal note.

“Thank you,” I told him. “What you did changed our lives…. it gave me and my teammates an identity and self-esteem that girls just a few years older didn’t have the same chance of having.”

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* Quotes in the present tense (says) are from my telephone interview with Melissa Isaacson on April 19, 2022. Quotes in the past tense (said) are from her book, State: A Team, A Triumph, A Transformation (Chicago: Agate Midway, 2019). https://amzn.to/3yBR0cf

** When the team suffered a rare loss that season, Coach Earl comforted the girls with this memorable thought: “Trust me,” he said. “You are not going to remember this when you’re giving birth to your first child.”

*** So I wasn’t the only one! I went into journalism because of Watergate, too.