Blast from the past

A banner, picturing seven women, hangs in the east hallway of Mizzou arena.

It’s the first women’s basketball team in 1974. Debbie Fowler Lovejoy was a junior then and a guard on the team. She attended Missouri’s game against Truman State on Saturday, not to cheer on the Tigers, but to watch her niece, junior Katie Fowler, play for Truman.

“I’m cheering for my niece,” she said, pulling down her denim jacket to reveal “Fowler Fan Club” printed in white letters on the back of her purple Truman shirt.

Lovejoy hasn’t kept up with her old team since moving down to Houston. She said she does attend some games when the women play teams close, like at Texas A&M. But this is her first time in Mizzou Arena. During her years playing, the basketball teams played in the Hearnes Center. In addition to the improved athletic facilities since Lovejoy was at Missouri, she’s also impressed with increased quality of the athletes and coaches in the program, even though she’s never met coach Cindy Stein.

After the 94-36 exhibition win over Truman State on Saturday, Stein was hesitant to comment on certain players’ chemistry on the court, especially against a Division II school. But Stein said that the starting line up — Kassie Drew, Blair Hardiek, Tiffany Brooks, Carylnn Savant and EeTisha Riddle — set a good tone for the game.

“I couldn’t see that there was a glaring lack of chemistry at any point,” Stein said, after experimenting with several different lineups throughout the game.

“Obviously we have some things we got to work on,” Stein said. “Mainly, eliminating penetration, a little better help on our weakside defense, a little tweaks here and there. But for the most part, I like the way our team worked hard. I thought we played really well together, I thought we shot the ball pretty well.”

Stein was impressed with the abilities of her four freshman and pointed to Toy Richbow and Jessra Johnson as two who stood out. Freshman Amanda Hanneman took her first shot of the game only to have it completely miss the goal, but came back to sink a 3-point shot.

“That’s huge for somebody to get back to the flow of things and not hesitating,” Stein said.

Standing in the hallway of the arena, Lovejoy looks up as her niece puts in one of her own 3-point shots against Missouri. Members of her family walk by and pat her on the back and take pictures of her. She just rolls her eyes. All of her siblings went to MU, but Lovejoy is the only one who played sports. It took a lot of convincing for her sisters to get her to stand under the banner for a picture.

“They’re giving me a lot of grief today,” she said. “They always have.”

She was a junior when the team became recognized after Title IX. She said that year recruiting started, MU started paying for necessities for the team, like uniforms, and a reporter started to cover games.

“When I was playing, they were offering the first scholarships and they were just partial,” she said. “It’s amazing to see the difference in how the women’s programs have developed through the years. And you know, Title IX is what really got it all started.”

Starting senior guard Tiffany Brooks said that the presence of one of the pioneers of Missouri women’s basketball was powerful.

“It means a lot and it’s shown how far we’ve come and for women’s athletics,” Brooks said. “I think sometimes we take for granted what we have now.”

Poor facilities and driving in vans for hours to and from games were ways Stein characterized the era of women’s basketball pioneers in the 1970s.

“When you talk about the 1970s, you talk about them playing for the pure love of it, because there usually weren’t very many scholarships,” she said. “It’s a whole other era that our players have no idea about. So the things that they went through are huge.

“At the same time, I think we’ve advanced the program really well and I think that our kids are laying a really good foundation, keeping a strong foundation.”