Lusia Harris

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Basketball player
Lusia Harris
Player information
Nickname Lucy
birthday 10th February 1955 (age 65)
place of birth Minter City , Mississippi , United States
size 191 cm (shoes: US 11)
Weight 84 kg
position center
High school Tucker Young Junior High School,
Amanda Elzy High School
college Delta State
NBA draft 1977 NBA Draft , 137th Pick , New Orleans Jazz
league Women's Professional Basketball League (WBL)
Jersey number 45
Clubs as active
1973-1977 United StatesUnited States Delta State Lady Statesmen
1979-1980 United StatesUnited States Houston Angels
National team
1975-1976 United StatesUnited States United States
Lusia Harris medal table

Basketball (women)

United StatesUnited States Team USA
Olympic games
silver 1976 Montreal Team USA
Pan American Games
gold 1975 Mexico City Team USA

Lusia Mae "Lucy" Harris-Stewart (born Lusia Harris on February 10, 1955 in Minter City , Mississippi ) is a former American basketball player . She was a pioneer of women's basketball, and as such was honored with induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame .

Career

Lucy Harris was the tenth of eleven children of Willie and Ethel Harris and, as was customary at the time in the delta region of the Mississippi northwest, had to contribute to the management of the household and farm in the local cooperative (English: sharecropping ). She played with great success for the Amanda Elzy High School in Greenwood in the high school state championship without ever achieving it and received after graduation the offer of a scholarship to the Delta State University in Cleveland , Mississippi. This means that in addition to participating in Lily Margaret Wade's basketball program , she had to make a living .

Place name sign of Minter City

In the first year of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW), athletic scholarships were still excluded. Initially, the organization had preferred sports activities in the sense of sports education, from which it had itself emerged, to the model of sports competition in the athletics departments. In the course of the discourse about the educational amendment Title IX against sexual discrimination, however, the desire for competition and scholarships quickly crystallized. Even if the AIAW changed its statutes, it took a while for substantial scholarships to gain acceptance. After the Mighty Macs of Immaculata College won the first three AIAW championship tournaments, Coach Wade, sophomore Harris and the Delta State Lady Statesmen replaced them from 1975 to 1977. Only then did the large schools prevail - initially under the leadership of the AIAW - starting with UCLA .

Harris, after visiting a completely African-American high school now often the only black student in the class, was a diligent student, a three-time All-American basketball player and was by her fellow students 1975 Prom Queen ( Homecoming Queen selected). Harris played with the United States women's national basketball team at the 1975 Women's Basketball World Cup in Colombia, finishing 8th. After gold at the Pan-American Games in 1975 , she transformed the first US Olympic basket at the Olympic Games and won the silver medal. Even after the university integration by James Meredith in 1962 , African Americans were far from normal at Mississippi's universities in the 1970s, which makes the fact that Governor Cliff Finch sent a delegation to Cleveland and a Lusia Harris after the Montreal Games Day in Magnolia State.

Harris-Stewart was selected as the second woman in history in the 1977 NBA draft by New Orleans Jazz in the seventh round in 137th place, but had no interest in the National Basketball Association (NBA) and was pregnant at the time of training camp anyway . Instead, she played a season for the Houston Angels of the Women's Professional Basketball League (WBL) in 1979/80 .

Lusia Harris-Stewart was elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame along with Nera White in 1992 and was inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame with its opening in 1999.

See also

literature

  • Russell T. Wigginton: The Strange Career of the Black Athlete. African Americans and Sports. Westport / London, 2006: Praeger Publishers. ISBN 0-275-98223-8 (in English).
  • Jason A. Peterson: Full Court Press. Mississippi State University, the Press, and the Battle to Integrate College Basketball. Jackson, 2016: University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-1-4968-0820-2 (in English).
  • George A. Sewell, Margaret L. Dwight: Mississippi Black History Makers. Revised and Enlarged Edition. Jackson, 1977 and 1984: University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-1-60473-390-7 (page 387f, in English).
  • Kelly Belanger: Invisible Seasons. Title IX and the Fight for Equity in College Sports. Syracuse, 2016: Syracuse University Press. ISBN 978-0-8156-3470-6 (in English).
  • Julie Byrne: O God of Players. The Story of the Immaculata Mighty Macs. New York, 2003: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-12749-9 (in English).
  • Cait Murphy: A History of American Sports in 100 Objects. New York, 2016: Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-09774-6 (pages 181-186, in English).

Web links

Commons : Lusia Harris  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Margaret Roach (AP): Women's Fives Making the Big Time. From: New York Times website; New York City, NY, November 20, 1977. Retrieved February 20, 2020.
personal data
SURNAME Harris, Lusia
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Harris-Stewart, Lusia Mae (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American basketball player
DATE OF BIRTH February 10, 1955
PLACE OF BIRTH Minter City , Mississippi , United States