A Slam dunk: women’s high school basketball in rural areas

As a young girl on my high school’s varsity basketball team, I faced inequalities plaguing women’s sports in general: although we had a better record, only the boy’s team had cheerleaders, students made attending the boy’s games, not ours, a part of their social life, and when we scrimmaged with the boys during practice, we could count on not being passed the ball.

All that to say, outside of our parents, my team and I didn’t feel externally supported or valued for our skills.

During my sophomore year, my suburban high school had an away game at Ramona High School, situated in the rural town of Ramona in San Diego County which, as of 2020, had a population of about 21,468.

The particulars of the game are lost to time, but I do remember playing in front of the loudest and biggest crowd I’d ever faced. We weren’t rivals with Ramona, and this wasn’t a playoff game. It was a random day in December in a town once known as The Turkey Capital of the World. Yet, parents, students, and what felt like the whole town, was packed into the stands chanting and cheering for their team. While it wasn’t fun to be the opposing team in that scenario (and yes, we did get crushed), I marveled at what it would be like to have a strong support system.

Of course, I don’t mean to imply female athletes in rural areas don’t face the same problems affecting female athletes at large. In her past blog, “Are rural girls more interested in sports than their urban counterparts,” Professor Lisa Pruitt wrote that her rural hometown of Jasper, Arkansas followed boys teams more closely than girls teams, and it took litigation in 1980 to get the girls basketball teams from playing 3-on-3 on half-court to playing full-court 5-on-5.

Thus, while acknowledging similarities in challenges I faced on my team and what the female athletes at Ramona likely faced, the strong community support I saw almost ten years ago was completely foreign to me, and inspires me to look at high school sports in rural areas, specifically in regards to women’s sports.

According to a 2021 Aspen Institute Report, nationally 73 percent of rural public high schools offer interscholastic sports, more than the 70 percent of suburban or 63 percent of urban schools. And, when sports are offered, rural students are the most likely to play. According to the same study, 42 percent of rural students play on high school teams, compared to 41 percent of suburban students and 33 percent of urban students. Therefore, in general, high school sports seem to be more part of everyday life in rural areas compared to suburban areas.

High participation in sports could be, as Professor Pruitt discusses in her blog, because many high schoolers already perform physical activity in their daily lives on a farm or the countryside, or because sports is an attractive option when there is little else to do.

In “Health needs and challenges of rural adolescents,” the authors describe how focus groups in rural communities expressed concern that the lack of healthy forms of recreation in rural areas leads to boredom. Thus, it would make sense that rural residents use sports, both participating in or watching, as an accessible, healthy activity to combat boredom.

Often, I’ve seen the discussion about rural areas and high school sports focus on football. For example, in “Football in rural America bonds communities together” for The Mountain Citizen, Kyle Lovern, a journalist in Tug Valley, explains how people in rural communities, especially Appalachia or the South, love football. He describes people showing up to games on Friday nights:

 [They] may have a family connection with a specific team, the cheerleading squad or the marching band. Or [they] may just be the alumni of a certain high school who still loves to cheer and support [their] team … People rally around sports teams of all kinds everywhere, but it seems even more special in rural areas and small southern towns.

 Likely, this enthusiasm translates to basketball. In Ramona, people could have had loose connections to the team and still showed up to watch. Additionally, girl’s basketball may be more popular in Ramona than my hometown and mean more to everyone involved. The survey by the Aspen Institute found that rural girls play basketball at a higher rate than urban girls, and rural students in general had the highest rates of participation in basketball. Additionally, winning games and making their family feel proud seemed to matter the most to rural students, and rural girls in particular.

I checked Ramona’s record the year we played them, and they were an impressive 18-8 overall. It becomes a chicken or the egg question — did people only attend that game because the team was good, or was the team good because of consistently strong attendance? The under-appreciated high school version of me likes to think their success can be attributed, at least in part, to the support of their community.