A compelling history of a great basketball team

“Your record is without parallel in the history of basketball. There is no team that I mention more frequently in talking about the game. My admiration is not only for your remarkable record of games won, but also for your record of clean play, versatility in meeting teams at their own style, and more especially for your unbroken record of good sportsmanship.”

If anyone should know basketball, it’s James Naismith, the person who actually invented the game. He wasn’t talking about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls or any of the great modern teams, however. He died long before any of them came to prominence.

No, he was referring to the famed and fabled Edmonton Commercial Graduates Basketball Club, known by most people around these parts as the Edmonton Grads. For 25 years, they absolutely dominated the sport that Naismith only created about two decades previously. From 1915 to 1940, there was very little doubt about their ability to shoot hoops. They compiled a record of more than 500 wins with only 20 losses. That record still stands today as the best winning percentage of all time.

If you didn’t already know, the Edmonton Grads was also a women’s team. Take that, Kareem Abdul Jabbar!

Since their legend is not just such a huge part of basketball lore but to Edmonton’s sports scene as well, it’s high time that someone came along to put pen to paper and get it all published. M. Ann Hall is just that person. The physical education and recreation professor emeritus at the University of Alberta previously wrote about Canadian women in sports so it only made sense for her to tackle this task.

The glaring omission in the annals of history has now been quite satisfactorily filled. While the Grads disbanded long ago, and without any of the few remaining members to get any kind of substantive interviews from, Hall still managed to go back to the beginning and recount, like a play-by-play commentator, all of the action.

Long before they came along, the sport was introduced to high schools in the early 1900s. The town of Lacombe had the first team with Edmonton following suit soon after. The John A. MacDougall Public School, opened in 1913, was meant to teach mostly business and secretarial skills to the young women. Little did they all know that coach J. Percy Page would give them something else to do with their time.

Hall delves into the stories surrounding the Grads and then goes into detail with each player, which was necessary but actually takes a lot of the energy and momentum out of the book. Since this all takes place so long ago, it’s hard not to be caught up in the nostalgia and the electricity of a winning team. I much preferred to read about their travels, their fantastic rise to glory and all of their adventures in discovering how this one game changed their lives and brought Edmonton to world sports prominence.

How is it that Edmonton doesn’t even mention the Grads in reference to its claim as the ‘City of Champions’? Neither the Oilers nor the Eskimos could even come close to being in the same league of champions as the Grads. Maybe this book will give the Grads a little justice and a lot of respect.