Connecting BlogConnecting People Through Blogs

We have seen basketball grow in popularity with women since the WNBA opened up for business. Women now have a chance to continue their basketball careers past their college days and can get paid nicely for it too. This is great news for the girls that are currently playing basketball at a high level in high school. At the southern end of my county is a high school called Etowah High School. Number 25 in the picture above is Ashley Renfro; who was taking a jump shot in a recent high school girl’s game. It must be a much different thought process for girls now like Ashley that can work on their basketball game and actually earn a living from it one day. This wasn’t always the case and just a couple of decades back, there was no professional basketball leagues for women.

At the northern end of my county in Georgia is a high school called Cherokee High School. This is the closest high school to my house and the one I attended when I was in high school. Number 10 in the photo above is Alyssa Howell for the Lady Warriors of Cherokee. Now Alyssa for Cherokee and Ashley from Etowah is probably not the best of friends. They are actually enemies, but they probably don’t know it yet. This is because there is a big rivalry between the Cherokee Warriors and Etowah Eagles. At least this was the case a long time ago; when these were the only two high schools in the county. Now there is 3 new high schools in Cherokee County and the rivalries are not as clearly defined. I’m sure Cherokee probably considers the Sequoyah Chiefs as their main rivalry now; while Etowah’s would probably be the Woodstock Wolverines who is just down the road from Etowah on Towne Lake Parkway in Woodstock..

I can see the changes just in my county over the years and how it affects the high school girls team in basketball. We are a lot larger now and this means more and more girls to play basketball in just Cherokee County alone. Once you start to multiply this county by county and then go state to state, you see the pool is much larger now for girls wanting to play high school basketball. This growth carries over to the college levels and these girls continue developing their talents into their late teens and early twenties.

After the college years are complete, these young ladies have a real chance to get drafted by a WNBA team and this job will pay them as well, if not more, as any other female could make with a college degree. The times have certainly changed for women in basketball and don’t look for them to go away anytime soon. Expansion will continue to happen in the WNBA and we even have a team in Georgia now called the Dream. The women in the WNBA is still a long ways from making what the men do in the NBA, but it is still a big accomplishment and shows just how far we have came. I can only imagine some of the talented high school girls in the past that gave up their basketball playing days after high school, since there was no future in it. You can bet that mindset has changed now and going to college and continuing to improve their basketball skills could have real benefits. Even if girls like Alyssa and Ashley fall short of the WNBA, they still have the opportunity to get a good college education and girls before them, may have not even got that far, since basketball for women had no happy endings.