Gym floor wasn't level when this girl played

It would be difficult to find a sport that has been transformed as dramatically in recent years as girls' basketball. As high school tournaments get under way this week, this two-part series -- about school stars past and present -- illustrates just how much has changed.

LACONIA, N.H. -- Every day, Pat Corliss is surrounded by all manner of plants and flowers as she tends to her garden center in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire. It's easy to imagine the lush greenery serving as a metaphor for Corliss's long-ago basketball achievements. Once her reputation and future in the sport bloomed, bright and dazzling, but almost as quickly it withered away, as forgotten as a summer garden in January.

A little more than three decades ago, Corliss was known as Pat White, one of the most talented high school basketball players in New England, leading one school to a state championship and another to a league title. She became one of the earliest female 1,000-point scorers in New Hampshire, if not the first.

But Corliss's career was truncated by a sports establishment that gave scant attention and little support to athletic achievements by girls.

The story of Pat White is a tale of potential unfulfilled, of an era when scholarships were the province of boys only, and it serves as an example of what life was like for talented female athletes in the days when Title IX was just a little-known piece of new legislation.

"The greatest thing girls have today is the opportunity," said Corliss. "We actually had no direction at all."

Or, as one of her high school coaches put it: "That's just how it was back then."

Relegated to background
The panel on the Inter-Lakes High School athletics website, stating "Patricia White 1,014 points," and the painted basketball in the school's trophy case from the 1973 Class A state championship game represent the only public evidence of Corliss's accomplishments in her Inter-Lakes career.

Her personal cache of newspaper clippings, now fraying with age, detail her pioneering accomplishments while also revealing the quaintness of a bygone era. Take the players' attire. Uniforms often consisted of short-sleeved blouses and tied-down pennies that bore a number. Sometimes short-sleeved jerseys were worn, but shorts were often replaced by skirts. And the sneakers looked better-suited for gardening than running down a hardwood court.

"We just thought it was the greatest thing when we got a pair of Converse sneakers," said Corliss.

Like the uniforms, the style of play when Corliss first made the varsity in 1969 as an eighth-grader is also obsolete. It was the last season that six-aside basketball -- complete with limited dribbling and severe restrictions on player movement -- was in widespread use.

Corliss had picked up the sport in the fifth grade, joining her brothers and sisters in neighborhood games. Organized youth leagues did not exist for girls. At Inter-Lakes, White didn't see much action her first season, scoring about only 50 points. But it's not as if many people were on hand to watch her play, anyway. Girls games were played in the afternoon, hardly good for attendance, and if it weren't for a couple of loyal fans, many times the team would have played before an empty house.

"There was Mrs. Chatterton and Mrs. Isabelle, two stay-at-home moms, and that was about it," said Corliss.

Corliss and her older sister, Sue Adams, played together on three Inter-Lakes teams.

"When we would play in the state tournament before big crowds, we weren't used to it," said Adams. "We'd freeze up."

But that wouldn't always be the case.

Led by Corliss, a 5-foot-4-inch guard with a deadly short-range jump shot, the Lassies went to back-to-back state Class A finals, losing each time. But Inter-Lakes didn't fall short in the 1972-73 season, finishing first in its league with an 18-1 record and earning another trip to the state finals.

As the Laconia Evening Citizen reported: "The town of Meredith was the scene of considerable celebration last night starting at nine thirty when the girls basketball team from Inter-Lakes High School returned home from Concord High School with the state championship in Class A. They had beaten Newfound, 32-20.

"The test for the crown was a milestone for Pat White in another way. She scored her 1,000th point for Inter-Lakes High School in the opening moments of the contest."

With her parents relocating to a small town in Western Massachusetts ("I didn't want to go; I delayed as long as I could"), a reluctant Corliss would spend her senior year in an unfamiliar environment.

And if she had known what was in store for her final year of high school basketball, chances are Corliss would have done everything in her power to stay in Laconia.

Opportunity lost
When tryouts were held for the South Hadley High basketball team in the fall of 1973, Sue Tyler could barely believe what the transfer gods had dropped into her lap.

"She has skills other players didn't have back then," said Tyler, then a physical education teacher in her first full season of coaching. "She wasn't just a great shooter, she was quick defensively. She knew how to box out going for rebounds and how to play under the basket."

Behind White's 20 points per game, the Tigers finished 14-3, won the Valley Wheel title, and seemed a sure bet for a high seed in the first Western Mass. girls' tournament. Schools now automatically qualify based on winning percentage, but in the early days of the MIAA tourney, athletic directors would have to apply for inclusion.

Still, that was seemingly no problem, until Tyler had a disconcerting conversation with a member of the selection committee.

"She said, `Hey, how come you're not going to the tournament? You'd be a 1 or 2 seed,' " said Tyler. "I said, `What are you talking about?' She then told me that they had never received the application.

"I confronted our athletic director, who said he had forgotten to send in the form. He said to me, `What are you going to do about it?' I said I would do something about it, but then I realized there was nothing I could do about it."

Almost 31 years later, the oversight is vivid in Tyler's memory.

"It was so unfair, particularly for someone like Pat, who had won a championship and had a chance to win another," said Tyler.

Corliss, who moved back to New Hampshire that April and graduated with her class at Inter-Lakes, finished her high school career with 1,365 points -- and no chance at a second championship.

A couple of years later, Tyler was playing for a Northampton-based team in a semi-pro league. During a game in Derry, Tyler did a double-take when she saw her former star player on the opposing bench.

With no other outlet for her basketball, Corliss made the two-hour round trip from Laconia after work to play in the league. It was her last organized play. "And that was the end of it," said Corliss. "By the age of 22."

Beginnings of change
Girls who can score and defend are in demand on recruiting lists these days, but in 1974, the landscape was much different. Title IX had been in place for less than two years, and it would be a while before it generated wholesale changes. Recruiters went only to boys' games, and athletic scholarships for girls were far off in the future.

"None of us got scholarships back then," said University of Massachusetts coach Marnie Dacko. "You went to a school with a good teaching program."

Dacko, who also graduated from high school in 1974, helped Southern Connecticut State to four top-10 rankings, and upon graduation began her coaching career as an assistant at the University of Wisconsin.

But for someone like Corliss, financial aid was critical.

"My parents were both hard-working people, but they had six kids to support," said Corliss. "And I had no direction; the guidance counselors weren't doing their jobs, not meeting kids one on one.

"I know my coach at Inter-Lakes [Jan Parissi] would have helped me if she knew there was a way to get people interested in me."

With higher education not an option, Corliss worked in a factory for two years, then launched a series of small businesses, working in landscaping, cleaning, and growing and selling firewood. Ten years ago, she opened the garden center.

Considering the road she has traveled, Corliss's words in a long-ago newspaper story have a prescient ring: "Women should have equal rights -- scholarships, too, because there are some good players around. They should be recognized."

That once-distant dream has been realized -- just a little too late for some.
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