Rebounding with Ellison in the 1940’s

If you are a regular reader of this paper, you know about Pages of the Past. As Steva Dooley peruses the papers, she lets Pam and me know if she found something of interest to us.
Recently she found sports stories titled “Rebounding with Ellison.” The stories were about the Basin Bobcat basketball team. The author wrote about the team’s place in the conference, fouls, etc. There were also predictions of winners for upcoming games of other teams in the area, including Powell, Riverton, Thermopolis, Lander, Worland, Lovell and Greybull.
The Republican Rustler has recently been advertising for a sportswriter to cover Basin/Riverside games. I took photos of the articles and emailed them to Nathan at the Greybull Standard. The subject line was “possible sportswriter”.
Nathan noted that in one of the stories mentioned a game between two long standing rivals.  The writer wrote “Speaking of fouls-that 28 fouls last week should have been 38 fouls called in a recent game. (You guessed it – the Greybull game!)”
Some things never change.  Knowing that Ellison is a family name, Nathan asked which one of my relatives wrote the stories. Probably thinking it was Grandpa Floyd or Uncles Floyd or Allen. Both uncles were amazing athletes. However, the writer was my mom, Barbara.
She said when the paper approached her to write sports, they purposely left her first name off. They were concerned that people might not be accepting of a high school female as a sportswriter.
Mom was an athlete in her own right, but sports for high school females weren’t what they are now. She did win that state championship in doubles tennis. She loved sports, particularly basketball.
When her brothers would come home from school, she would make them shoot 100 baskets before they could come in the house. Allen told the story about him coming home from football practice exhausted. Babs (as she was called then) threw him the ball and told him to start shooting. She turned away and he bounced the ball off the back of her head. This led to a fight between him and brother Floyd. He did credit her with helping them both be good players.
Mom also loved to run and was faster than all the boys. They didn’t have a female track team, so the boys coach had her be the pace setter for the boys running track. A many of man, including Jerry Porter, has said how much they enjoyed chasing her and how that helped them run faster.
After a while the readers figured out it was Babs writing the sports. Readership didn’t go down.