The Best Basketball Team You Have Never Heard About (Jan 14, 2024)
by Scott Sosebee
Texas has been the home of many successful college athletic teams, but would you be surprised to know that the sport in which the state has produced the most collegiate national championships is not football, or even baseball? It is basketball, but not men’s roundball; instead, it is the variety played by women. The University of Texas, Texas Tech, Texas A&M, Baylor, and Wayland Baptist University Flying Queens have worn the crown of national champion. And of those teams, would it further surprise you that it is little Wayland Baptist, in the small Panhandle burg of Plainview, that was the most successful? If it does, you are not alone.
Before the passage of Title IX in 1972, women’s college basketball did not formally exist. Instead, women had to play as part of the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU). While some of the players on the AAU teams attended college, most did not, and the women on these teams were essentially professionals. The teams were sponsored by local businesses and the players were usually “employees” of the sponsoring business, although they did little more than play basketball. Also, women did not play the same type of game the men did. Instead, it was “six-on-six.” Two players were designated as “offensive players” and never moved from their team’s goal side of the court. Two others were “defensive players,” and they remained stationed defending the other goal. Two more players were “rovers” who could move all over the court and play both halves.
Harley Redin, in 1946, was the only member of the physical education department at little Wayland Baptist, a school of about six hundred students in Plainview, Texas. Redin was only twenty-nine, a World War II veteran who coached the Wayland Baptist Pioneers, the men’s basketball team. One day, he was approached by the female members of the “Girls Basket-ball Club,” as it was known at Wayland, and they asked him if they could practice at the gym. Redin agreed to let them use the court after the men finished practice.
Redin got to know the women basketball players, and they him, so one day, as they came to practice, they approached Coach Redin and asked him if he could help them play games against a higher quality opponent. He asked them who they had in mind. One young woman replied, “We want you to help us schedule games against AAU teams.” Redin stared at the women and curtly replied, “Girls, this is Wayland Baptist. We don’t play AAU teams at Wayland Baptist.” But, the young women did not take no for an answer, so they asked if they could form a women’s team at Wayland. Again, Redin said no. Still, they did not give up, so in 1947 Redin approached Wayland’s new president, James W. Marshall, and asked if the Girls Basket-ball Club could play some AAU teams. To his surprise, Marshall said he thought that was a great idea. He thought it a great way to convince women to come to Wayland. He even asked Redin to coach the team. Redin turned him down, but Marshall kept the idea and convinced a local business, the Harvest Queen Mill and Elevator, to sponsor the team and pay for uniforms. He then talked to Sam Allen, a young member of Wayland’s public relations office, to coach the team. Because the company’s name was stitched on the uniforms, they became known as the “Queens.”
Allen coached the team, but he leaned heavily on Redin’s advice. The Queens played well enough to be invited to the AAU national tournament in 1949, but they could not compete with the powerhouse programs, many of whom had women who had played for teams for almost a decade. Marshall was determined that the Queens become ambassadors for the school, which meant they needed to be seasoned against tough opponents, not the few teams they could schedule in the region. So, he approached Claude Hutcherson, a local cotton farmer who also owned Hutcherson Air Service. Marshall asked Hutcherson if he would fly the Queens to games across the country, which would allow them to play better teams and not be exhausted from travel. Hutcherson agreed, and because flying to games was such a novelty in those days, they became known as the “Flying Queens.” Hutcherson also took over sponsorship of the team and bought them shiny new uniforms that said “Hutcherson Flying Queens.”
President Marshall also instituted full scholarships to Wayland, which was almost unheard of in women’s sports at the time. This allowed the Wayland/Hutcherson Flying Queens to recruit the best high school players in the nation. The Flying Queens became almost unbeatable. They made it to the 1952-53 AAU finals, where they lost to perennial power Hanes Hosiery Girls. Coach Allen then moved on to become an evangelist, and Wayland hired Caddo Matthews, who was a legendary women’s high school coach in West Texas. The Flying Queens reeled off an incredible 131-game winning streak. Fifty-two games into the streak, and with two championship banners hanging from the gym ceiling, Matthews retired, and the saga of the Flying Queens came full circle when Harley Redin took the reins as coach. Redin continued the winning ways, and the Flying Queens claimed two more titles for four in a row. The Flying Queens also developed legendary women’s players like Lometa Odom, a young farmer’s daughter from Dimmit who became the most dominant women’s player in the nation. It is still the longest women’s basketball winning streak in history: twenty games, longer than the University of Connecticut’s 111-game streak. Wayland continued to have strong women’s teams well into the 1970s, an impressive feat for the team hardly anyone has heard of… until now.
The East Texas Historical Association provides this column as a public service. Scott Sosebee is a Professor of History at Stephen F. Austin State University and the Executive Director of the Association. He can be contacted at sosebeem@sfasu.edu; www.easttexashistorical.org.