Nov 8, 2017
Canada's most iconic basketball team, the Edmonton Grads, are finally getting their very own Heritage Minute.
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Canada's most iconic basketball team, the Edmonton Grads, are finally getting their very own Heritage Minute.
March Madness - The Edmonton Commercial Graduates Basketball Club was founded in 1915, when graduates of the local high school girls basketball team convinced their coach to create a club team for them as adults. The team would travel across the world, earning a 502-20 record in 25 years and unofficially winning four Olympic titles.
"Leading lights of the basketball world, J. Percy Page and Margaret MacBurney, coach and captain, respectively, of the Edmonton Grads, the championship girls' basketball team of Canada, are shown above. For years the Grads have dominated in feminine cage company and their success is largely due to the ability of Page as a coach. Miss MacBurney is one of the stars of the team and in the final game of the series with Vancouver, in which they again qualified for the Canadian finals, she scored 14 points." - from the Kingston Whig-Standard. May 2, 1933. Page 10.
March Madness Is Here
March Madness Is Here
(WINDSOR, ON) Avid basketball fans and casual observes of round ball are finally settling in for the 64 NCAA college team basketball extravaganza to crown the U.S. national champion. It is a tradition, South of the transcontinental CanAm border, that is also known as the “Road To The Final 4”. More often the ever, there are also Canucks suited up on some of top ranked D1 contenders in the land.…
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The Edmonton Grads: a great sports dynasty
By: Nathalie Batres, Marketing Officer
An exciting story you will see in our new Human History gallery is that of the “Edmonton Grads”, one of Canada’s greatest sports dynasties.
The Grads were an astoundingly successful women's basketball team that, during their 25 years as a team (1915–40), won 95 percent of their matches. To celebrate their accomplishments and to mark #InternationalWomensDay, we interviewed our historian, Pat Myers, on the Grad’s amazing sports legacy.
Would you mind introducing yourself and your role at the museum?
Pat Myers: I’m a Historian here at RAM, working on story development for the new Human History Gallery. I also work with curators on writing the texts for both the Human and Natural History galleries. I’m now working on developing some of the museum experiences you’ll have outside of the gallery spaces, in the lobby and other public areas.
Basketball was a relatively new sport when the Edmonton Grads formed, and it was (like most sports) originally intended for male athletes. Could you give us some history into the formation of the Edmonton Grads?
PM: Actually, Lacombe holds claim to having the first girls’ high school basketball team in 1904. High schools in Edmonton had a basketball league for girls’ teams by 1914, and McDougall Commercial School had a team. When some of those girls graduated they wanted to keep playing and formed the Commercial Athletic Society, open to students and graduates of the school, as well as students at other schools pursuing business careers. They were called the Commercial Graduates, and that soon became the Grads. That was in 1915.
What are some of the challenges the team overcame to become world champions?
PM: They were not paid, of course, and as many of them were working women they had to take unpaid time off from work to travel to the championships. They played on rudimentary courts, sometimes just dirt, outside and in all kinds of weather. Equipment was hard to come by. One player said that at one championship, if they had lost their ball, that would have been it.
What made The Grads such a significant/successful team?
PM: They worked hard, they practiced hard, and they played as a team. They were always looking for a good pass to a player that was in a superior position to shoot. Gladys Fry, for example, had a “wicked sizzling shot,” according to the newspaper. They believed in crisp, sharp passes. As Grad Edith Stone said, “dribbling slows the game…we hardly held the ball.” Newspaper reports described the Grads’ playing with a “speed that left the spectators as well as their opponents gasping.”
As we celebrate International Women’s Day, what would you say is The Grads greatest legacy?
PM: That’s harder to answer. They were world champions, provincial champions, dominion champions. They took on all comers in Canada and the United States in a challenge cup and won it every year from 1923 until the team disbanded in 1940. They were dedicated to their sport, and for them, success came from hard work. Maybe that’s their legacy.
On this day in 1915 at Edmonton AB, the graduates of the McDougall Commercial High School started the Commercial Graduates Basketball Club, later known as the "Edmonton Grads". They would go on to win 502 of 522 games over 25 years. The Grads swept four consecutive Olympic Games from 1924 to 1936, winning all 27 Olympic matches they played and out scoring their opponents 1863 to 297. There were no medals awarded however as women's basketball did not become an official Olympic sport until the 1976 summer games in Montreal.
Dr. James Naismith, the inventor of basketball, called the Grads the "finest basketball team that ever stepped out on a floor."
Formal portrait of World Champion Edmonton Grads (1928) (by Provincial Archives of Alberta)
On this day in 1939, James Naismith, the father of Basketball, passed away in Lawrence, Kansas at the age of 78. Originally from Almonte, Ontario, Canada, he was a multi-sport athlete at McGill University in Montréal and spent three years studying theology at the Presbyterian College there. He then moved to the USA and developed the game at the YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts. Naismith became a US citizen much later in life, as is common for many transplanted Canadians, at the age of 64. Basketball remains as one of the great global team sports, being played by over 300 million people. It was a sport well suited to cross the sexual barrier of professional team and individual sports. Witness the amazing success of the Edmonton Grads, a women's team from Alberta Canada, who over a 25 year period amassed a record of 502 wins versus only 20 losses! Hats off to Dr. Naismith for his enduring legacy.