I am going to tell you a story about a game today.
There is a great chance you have never heard of this game before. There is an equally great chance you will not find any evidence of this game on the internet, in print, or virtually anywhere else except for in the minds of the players who played in it.
However, if you have lived in Warsaw for long, there is a better than 50-50 chance you know one of the players who played in it … and you never realized it.
In 1975, Indiana accepted girls basketball as an official sport. It was not the first time girls were allowed to play basketball, but it was the first time schools put teams on the court. The GAA program was in place prior to that, and the high quality of play in those years laid the foundation for a strong start to the IHSAA years (see the two banners hanging in the Tiger Den). Many of those girls went on to college, where there was no formal infrastructure in place either. But it didn’t bother them, and they blazed the trail for what we have today.
That same fall, Grace College fielded a women’s basketball team and it was a good team.
Notre Dame was getting ready to graduate its first-ever class that included women. In 1972, ladies were allowed to cross the street from St. Mary’s and attend Notre Dame for the first time. They offered their first women’s basketball team for competition in 1977.
They had a team before that. Call it a club team or an extra-curricular organization or whatever you want, but they had a team that had Notre Dame printed on their uniforms, and in the winter of 1975-1976 Notre Dame and Grace played a women’s basketball game against each other.
That game was played on the grandest of stages – the Athletic and Convocation Center on the campus of Notre Dame (now called Purcell Pavilion). You can imagine that in an arena of 9,000 seats, it felt like hardly anyone was there watching. But they played just the same with the echoes of the coaches’ instructions, the bouncing of the dribbled ball and the huffing and puffing of the players rattling around the catwalks of the ACC’s domed ceiling.
And Grace won.
You read that right ... the Grace College Lady Lancers won, and they won big.
Again, you won’t find evidence of this anywhere. YouTube was unimaginable. Pods were for peas and the net was what you grabbed to help you haul in a big fish. You can’t find stats from this game or even the final score. Notre Dame doesn’t acknowledge anything before 1977-78 so all you get from them are their wins over Grace in January of 1978 (68-25) and in the North District Tournament game played in Angola, Ind., in February of 1980 (61-45).
But ask Val Weinstein about it, and she will tell you that Grace beat Notre Dame in women’s basketball that night.
She knows. She was there.
Val was a prominent member of that team. She remembers that night well, but some of the details have escaped her over the years.
Mostly, she remembers being on a team that can say forever that it beat Notre Dame.
This weekend, Grace College will honor her and others by inducting them into their Hall of Fame. A plaque with her picture and list of accomplishments will be displayed in the south upper concourse.
Since her playing days ended, she and her husband Bryon have taught and coached thousands of middle school and high school kids. They have been a Rock of Gibraltar for young people who needed them desperately in their lives. They have coached them in sports, taught them in the classroom and shared their faith in God with them. She was the official scorekeeper for Lady Tiger Basketball for a long stretch.
You can’t sit in a restaurant on a Sunday afternoon and not have at least one person or family come up and say “hi” to them because the two of them have impacted so many people in our community.
And that kind of support has been most appreciated lately.
Val has battled and beaten cancer once and seems to be on her way to doing it again. She’s done it with the same dogged determination that she employed as a basketball player at Grace College and in the fight for the lives of the kids she’s overseen. She smiles, but behind that smile is the mind of a warrior and beneath it is the heart of a champion. I am sure that at some point, someone at Grace this weekend will welcome her, and she will respond with “glad to be here” and mean it more than about anyone else ever could.
She is soft-spoken, but when she speaks her words are bold, truthful and sometimes painfully honest – and that’s the best kind of friend you can have in this world.
I am sure glad to call her my friend, and I wouldn’t have her any other way.
So this weekend we celebrate Val Weinstein’s induction into the Hall of Fame at Grace College. We celebrate her fight, we celebrate her spirit, and we celebrate her contribution to Grace College and our community.
And we remember that quiet night in the winter of 1975-76 when a group of Grace College women’s basketball players went to Notre Dame and beat the Fighting Irish.
