The story of professional basketball for women dates back more than 75 years to a sleepy little town on the banks of the picturesque Roaring River in the Ozarks Mountains. The year was 1936. The town was Cassville, Missouri. The team was the All American Red Heads, now the first women’s team ever inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

The All American Red Heads set out on the first national tour in the fall of 1936. The Red Heads were the brainchild of a Cassville businessman who owned and operated several men’s barnstorming teams during the Roaring Twenties and the not-so-roaring Great Depression. C.M. “Ole” Olson organized his Terrible Swedes and Famous Giants in the early 1920s, turning what was a small basketball operation into big business by decade’s end. The Red Heads – the younger, prettier sisters of the Swedes and Giants – inherited the basketball blueprint of one-night stands played in one-horse towns in front of sellout crowds night after night. The earliest game on record was played on November 24, 1936, signaling the start of the basketball season in tiny Alpena, Arkansas.

Ole Olson was a dyed-in-the-wool basketball frontman with nearly twenty years of experience under his belt when he organized his first women’s ballclub. In the days when teams still passed the hat to make ends meet, Olson was booking his Viking crew for a guarantee and a percentage of the gate. He was the publicity man, booking agent, road manager, and player-coach. The Terrible Swedes stunned traditionalists with their fancy passing and trick shooting, but every night the fans filled the stands. Olson, armed with a sharp wit and a strong imagination, revolutionized the game with his famous “back-hand” passing. When the mood struck him, he bounced the ball off of his head on layups and launched shots from half court. He reveled in the spotlight, the basketball ringleader of a traveling road show that rivaled even the greatest vaudeville acts of the day.

The Terrible Swedes and Famous Giants enjoyed widespread approval during the golden age of barnstorming. But as professional basketball plunged headlong into the monolithic structure that ultimately defined the twentieth century, Olson’s men’s teams fell out of favor. Night was falling on the great barnstorming acts of the day just about the time the All American Red Heads were hitting their stride. The window of opportunity was wide open and soon Olson would turn all of his attention to running his all-female five.

The All American Red Heads were ahead of their time beating the boys at their own game. Running up and down the floor, hitting shots from thirty feet out, working the ball around the perimeter in the wheel-ball offense, the Red Heads played basketball “like the boys.” The action was fast-paced and the skill level of the girls was top-notch.

Race out to an early lead.

Ease up on the throttle to put on a show.

Finish strong and celebrate another victory. 

The system worked. While the exact record of the Red Heads remains obscured by the passage of time, scorebooks and newspaper accounts reveal that the girls won close to seventy percent of their games in most years. Winning was important, but how they played the game was what mattered most. The Red Heads played straight basketball to prove that they were serious ballplayers. But there was always more to a Red Heads show than just basketball. Like the famed Harlem Globetrotters, the Red Heads needed a gimmick to keep audiences interested, and to make losing to “a bunch of girls” a little more palatable to a population not quite ready to welcome women into sports. To be a Red Head was to be a precise passer, an accurate shooter, and an outstanding ball-handler. But above all, being a Red Head meant being a gifted entertainer.