The women’s game shines in Basketball: A Love Story

“I am woman hear me roar. In numbers too big to ignore”

The World’s Most Famous Arena held only two WNBA games this season. With New York Liberty owner James Dolan looking to sell the team, the team was relegated to the Westchester County Center.

But, before the New York Liberty, Immaculata became the first college women’s basketball team to make the MSG crowd roar. At the suggestion of Ann Myers-Drysdale, Klores tracked down Immaculata head coach and 2008 Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame inductee Cathy Rush.

“Now, I knew of Ann Myers because I’m old enough to remember seeing her husband … pitch for the Dodgers, Don Drysdale,” recalls Klores. After securing Ann for his project, the former UCLA Bruin and WBL first-round draft pick pointed him to another must-have story.

“Ann Myers says, ‘you can’t do this without speaking to Cathy Rush.” Myers has long been a keeper of forgotten women’s basketball history. Basketball: A Love Story seemed the perfect fit to bring the Immaculata story to the masses.

Set behind the soundtrack of women’s empowerment anthems sung by Helen Reddy and Carole King, Klores tells the story of the Immaculata women’s basketball team that won three consecutive AIAW national titles and played to a crowd of thousands at Madison Square Garden. The run was short-lived, ironically because of the rise of Title IX.

Having seen only her clips from the WNBA short, Ackerman was pleased to hear Immaculata was featured in Klores’ film, “I mean, women’s basketball has a long history,” she reflected. In many ways, the pre-Title IX era history has disappeared from the greater women’s basketball conversation, but Basketball: A Love Story brings it back.

Ackerman received one of the first scholarship female student-athlete scholarships awarded by the University of Virginia. In a way, she opened the doors for Dawn Staley, the UVA alumna who coached the last two WNBA Rookie of Year Winners (Allisha Gray and A’Ja Wilson) at the University of South Carolina.

Staley also led the US Women’s National Team to a third consecutive FIBA World Cup Title (10th overall) last month. Ackerman, Meyers-Drysdale, and Klores by way of his film, tie all roads back to the popularity of Immaculata.

Klores was brought to tears when he first heard the story of Immaculata taking on Queens College in the first women’s college game held at MSG.

“That scene when they talk about after the game thousands of women came down to the court to stand in line to shake the hands of all the women who play that game; that made me cry,” Klores said. “And there was no footage of that. So I had to invent it. I had to invent it.”

He does so masterfully in a bittersweet story of the first women’s basketball powerhouse—one that opened way for Pat Summitt, Geno Auriemma, and in turn, the greatest rivalry the women’s game has ever seen.