The Rise Of Women's Basketball: ‘Those Building Blocks Came From Kansas City'

Press release from the Kansas City Public Library:

August 9, 2021

The Tokyo Summer Olympic Games wrapped up this weekend. But did you know that Kansas City was actually the training ground for what was supposed to be the first U.S. women’s Olympic basketball team?

For this installment of “What’s Your KCQ?,” a partnership between The Star and the Kansas City Public Library, we respond to one reader’s question: What’s the history of the women’s basketball team, the Raytown Piperettes?

Before the 1972 passage of Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in education programs or activities that receive federal money, many American colleges and universities simply didn’t have teams for young women.

Amateur Athletic Union teams provided another option for women with a passion and talent for basketball. AAU teams were typically sponsored by businesses, although some represented colleges. Notable teams included the Hanes Hosiery team from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which won three consecutive AAU national titles, and the Wayland Baptist Flying Queens from Plainview, Texas, who won 10 AAU titles and had a 131-game winning streak from 1953 to 1958.

The Raytown Piperettes were an AAU team sponsored by Leroy Cox, a local businessman and the first mayor of Raytown who helped lead the efforts to incorporate the city in 1950, and his wife. Cox owned J.L. Cox & Son, a pipe stringing company, which gave the Piperettes their name.

A love of basketball was part of the family. Leroy Cox’s wife, Alberta Smith Cox, had been the coach of a girls basketball team in Quincy, Kansas, according to Raytown Historical Society records.

But it was their daughter, Alberta Lee Cox, who was the avid player. Alberta Lee, whose friends, family and players affectionately called “Bert,” played on the Raytown High School team and in area AAU games as a teenager, according to a 1996 Raytown Dispatch article. After graduating high school in 1949, she would drive home from college on weekends to play for the Piperettes.

“Her two great loves were basketball and horses,” Cox’s cousin Nancy Galloway said in an interview with The Star. In addition to basketball, Cox also bred and competed in showing American Saddlebred horses for much of her life.

“She would command a room when she walked into it, her physical stature, her presence” Galloway said about her cousin, who she described as a second mother to her. “But she was very, very kind and very generous.”

“There were people saying basketball is too hard on girls. Well, that’s bull,” Cox told the Dispatch in 1996. “They called me Babe sometimes and people would ask my father, ‘Aren’t you concerned about Babe playing all this ball?’

“He would say, ‘We know where she is during the day and when she comes home, she’s tired. We think it’s great!’”

Cox eventually earned a spot on the National AAU team, which she played on from 1955 to 1965, according to a 2002 profile of Cox by The Star. Among her many achievements, she was a five-time AAU All-American and represented the U.S. in the second and fourth FIBA World Championships for Women, now called the FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup, in 1957 and 1964.

After retiring as a player in 1965, Cox served as coach for the women’s national team, leading them in the 1967 and 1971 World Championships and the 1967 Pan American Games. She was also the first woman to coach a USA women’s basketball team internationally. Cox started coaching the Piperettes in 1963 when she was still a player, according to a 1965 story by The Star.

The Piperettes were consistently highly ranked in the AAU women’s basketball tournament, records indicate. The 1965 Star article announcing Cox’s retirement as a player states her team had placed third in the nation the two previous years.

A 1982 tribute to Leroy Cox in the Congressional Record states, “He sponsored the Raytown Piperettes women’s AAU basketball team which has ranked fifth or above nationally for 15 years and has also served as benefactor to numerous college students through the years.”

This press release was produced by the Kansas City Public Library. The views expressed here are the author’s own.