CRANBERRY TWP — Butler's current girls basketball success can be traced back to its roots.

Not back to the early 1980s, when the Golden Tornado began producing 1,000-point scorers.

Instead, you must go back to the 1920s, when Butler had an in-house girls basketball program consisting of six teams — two each at the sophomore, junior and senior levels.

Christine Osman, a 1989 Butler graduate and a freelance writer living in Cranberry Township, is writing an article for Western Pennsylvania History magazine about girls basketball at that time.

Her grandmother, the late Martha Merkner Lippold, played center for Butler from 1924-26.

"Women's basketball actually started 20 years earlier in Massachusetts,"Osman said. "But it wasn't widely accepted at the time.

"Some thought the sport was unfeminine. Some physical education teachers thought playing competitive sports could cause girls to suffer from nervous fatigue or cause reproductive damage."

Osman's article suggests that even influential women of that time, including eventual first lady Lou Henry Hoover, who favored recreational exercise for women, opposed women playing competitive sports.

Senda Berenson modified the rules for women's basketball in 1894 at Smith College in Northampton, Mass.

By 1925, 37 states held high school varsity basketball tournaments.

The adapted rules for women included using six players, dividing the court into three sections with players assigned to certain areas on the court and not permitted to leave that area.

Players were not permitted to "snatch" the ball from an opponent's grasp, hold the ball for more than three seconds or dribble it more than three times.

"Girls used to play in full-length dresses before they switched to bloomers,"Osman said. "One thing I remember my grandmother saying about playing basketball was that, 'It was my whole life, the most I got out of my high school experience.'

"She said that basketball was the first time she got to do much of anything outside of chores, and she cherished that time."

An article in Butler High School's "Senior Magnet" publication in June 1926 described the positions of center and side-center. Merkner and Mildred Domke were centers on that squad, with Nancy Atwell and Ruth Leetch playing side-center on the Senior Ainterclass games championship team.

Forwards were team captain Helen McElroy and Loretta Martis. Guards included Katherine Storey, Josephine Tiberi and Agnes Gormley.

Players on the 1924 interclass championship team included captain Margaret Goughler, Margaret Boyd, Grace Stanton, Charlotte Burckhalter, Helen Burckhalter, Genevieve Lowman and Pearl Skillman.

Some of the final scores in Butler girls basketball games of those years were 16-6, 9-7, 6-3 and 7-4.

"Butler has been known as a conservative town, but it was one of the first high schools in this region to start (organized)girls basketball,"Osman said. "Many of the games were played behind locked doors and no males were permitted to watch."

Osman is continuing to gather information for her article. Anyone who has information to contribute can contact her at 724-432-2177.