Women’s Basketball (11:30 Class)

Our group chose to do our Sport Centennial project on the Women’s Basketball program here at BGSU for several reasons. The program has a rich history and is a very successful and popular team on campus. Members of our team also have personal connections to the sport of basketball and the Women’s team in particular. We knew when we chose Women’s Basketball that we would be able to get a lot out of doing a project about this team, an idea that proved itself as the semester went on.

In our research, we’ve come across more information about the team and its history than we could have ever imagined. We chose a very diverse group of people to interview about their experiences with the program which gave us a lot of information that we never expected. From Jessie Tamerlano, who played on the team as a freshman last year, to former coaches including the first head coach, Sue Hager (Below), we gathered plenty of information that we would never have found or heard about if we didn’t have those interviews.

Sue Hager was able to give us many stories about the time when the program was just starting up, which was around the time that Title IX was implemented. So we were able to not only get stories about the team’s beginnings, but also ones about how different the sport itself was at the time women were first allowed to play. Jessie Tamerlano (Below), on the other hand, provided us just as valuable information about the team as well, but from a current perspective.

We’ve found that there is an incredible amount of information out there on the team, which is obviously a good thing, but can also be bad for putting a project together. We learned that there are disputes about the history and timeline such as what years coaches were here, the overall record, and even the exact year that the program began. Even former coaches dispute the media guides’ information that we found. So that seemed to be our only issue and we think that BGSU should make an effort to try to get an accurate history of the program for future projects like this.

Members of this group include: Maureen Carr, Matt Dittoe, Lindsay Helm, and Tyler Schaefer