Decibel levels in the arena
were so loud the day the University of Wyoming Cowgirls won the
Women’s National Basketball Championship, no other sound
could be heard in all of Wyoming.
House finches
couldn’t hear their would-be mates entice them to nests.
Antelope couldn’t hear the crunch of truck tires on gravel
roads and were nearly struck by energy-company trucks. The air
vibrated from 15,462 pairs of lungs chanting: C-O-W-G-I-R-L-S! If
the sound hadn’t died down after three hours, no one in
Wyoming would be able to hear today. Yes, I exaggerate. But not by
much.
My ears are still ringing from that home court
scream-fest in March, when the Cowgirls defeated the Wisconsin
Badgers 72-56. But my lungs were never in jeopardy, because I was
not at the game. I was at the previous Final-Four game three nights
earlier, in which the Cowgirls needed triple overtime to overcome
the Wildcats of Kansas State. Leaving the arena after 10 p.m.,
drained after being surrounded by more than 12,000 passionate
people, I’d decided not to stand in line to buy tickets. Who
knew the game would sell out, overnight, in 12 hours? I should have
known.
Four years ago, the university hired Coach Joe
Legerski, who wondered why the women’s team played in a
rundown field house, when the men’s team had fantastic
facilities in the domed Arena Auditorium. He got the women’s
team moved to the “Dome of Doom,” too. Before long,
their games were being broadcast on a radio station heard around
most of Wyoming.
It was about this time that I and a lot
of other bandwagoners became aware of Cowgirl basketball. I was not
one of the few hundred people who abjectly but loyally attended all
the women’s games, from the team’s earliest days 20
years ago. I was one of the fans who attended only men’s
basketball, who assumed that the power and derring-do of male
players far outshined the women. I imagined women players like the
girls who played on my high school’s team, whiffing jump
shots and whizzing passes out of bounds.
But my high
school days were many years ago, when most women’s sports of
any kind were truly amateur. That was in the days before Title Nine
encouraged young girls to take their sports seriously and opened
the way for them to receive athletic scholarships to college and
then on in to the professional life of their choosing.
Wyoming seems a natural place to celebrate the accomplishments of
women. After all, we are known as the Equality State, first to have
a woman governor or female jurors. In a competing bid for
nicknames, we are also a conflicted Cowboy State. As itinerant
energy-boom workers and absentee vacation-home billionaires scatter
themselves around our 97,000 square miles, we’ve found our
identity harder to pinpoint. We’re still the state of
ranchers, but we’re simultaneously the state of meth labs,
trailer parks, man camps, sex shops, drive-through liquor stores,
wind farms, diploma mills, tax breaks, snowmobilers and we top the
nation in suicides.
But we came together when the
Cowgirls started to make their run toward victory in the
Women’s National Invitational Tournament. People in Wyoming
transformed themselves into residents of the newly minted Cowgirl
State — all of us joined under one, even if temporary, identity.
We became obsessed with women most had never heard of a few months
before. Hanna and Rebecca, the Australian warrior goddesses.
Justyna, playing for Wyoming by way of Poland. Jodi, not recruited
by the Big-12 college in her own hometown. Megan and Aubrey, both
daughters of Wyoming. Elisabeth, 6 foot 1 inch center, and
Dominique, point guard running the plays.
Because I
couldn’t get tickets to the final game, I watched the
broadcast on a national sports network. The commentators seemed
impressed with the Cowgirls’ ability to draw huge crowds that
nearly filled the arena. They kept saying, “How wonderful
that it isn’t just the University of Wyoming students who
support the team. It’s the whole town of Laramie.”
We’ve got news for you, folks: All of Wyoming
filled the arena that day, in person or in spirit. Our
state’s chi could be felt through our collective yelled
prayer to believe in something incontestably worthy, to each and
every one of us. And if you look closely, you can still see the
letters C-O-W-G-I-R-L-S formed with our collective breath, flying
in the prevailing winds, somewhere over Nebraska.
Julianne Couch is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). She
cheers and writes in Laramie, Wyoming.
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