The Legendarium: The Longest Flight
Wayland Baptist is one of the true 'forgotten pioneers' of women's basketball. How the owners of the longest win streak in American pro or college hoops history got their start.
Kaye Garms walked into the huddle and knew it was inevitable. For years, she and her Wayland Baptist teammates hadn’t experienced anything like this. They had quite literally never lost. It never went this way. The Flying Queens never shot this poorly. They never made such bad decisions on the floor. They never entered a huddle with a minute or two left and saw resignation on the face of their coach Harley Redin.
“‘We’ve had all these wins,’ he told us,” remembers Kaye. “‘You guys have all been gracious with your wins. Let’s be gracious with this loss.’”
After 131 straight victories, one of the most dominant athletic runs in American sports history came to an end. But there would be no time to sit in the misery. Wayland would have to play again the very next night, a third place matchup in the AAU National Tournament in St. Joseph, Missouri. They would win that game, return to the locker room and take it all in. Among the idle postgame chatter, Mona Poff piped up to where Kaye could hear her.
“Well,” Mona reportedly said, “One down. 131 to go.”
The First Flyers
Wayland Baptist was founded in 1910, at the advent of a movement that would come to define women’s sports for decades ahead. Since the early 1900’s, basketball began to gain popularity with girls in high schools all over the country. While some, like the Illinois High School Athletic Association, responded to the wave by banning girls interscholastic sports, others states like Texas, Colorado and Indiana welcomed new leagues and tournaments. In 1924, women’s basketball was an exhibition sport in the Paris Olympics, the game was included in the first International Women’s Sports Federation Games and the AAU held it’s first national basketball tournament for women.
But, even still, debate raged about the future and how society would evolve — or whether or not it could — to the point of not associating sports and masculinity to the detriment of perceptions of women. The Women’s Division, National Amateur Athletic Federation (also known as ‘The Women’s Division’ or ‘WDNAAF’) adopted a platform rooted in the idea of sports for women, by women and without the influence and need to emulate the men’s game. However, part of their 1931 platform also implied that it came with a cost.
2. Promote competition that stresses enjoyment of sport and the development of good sportsmanship and character rather than those types that emphasize the marking and breaking of records and the winning of championships for the enjoyment of spectators or for the athletic reputation or commercial advantage of institutions and organizations.”
In short, no true competitive basketball. By 1927, they successfully pressured officials in Wichita, Kansas, one of the biggest hotbeds for the sport at the time, to cancel the AAU National Women’s Tournament. The contest eventually resumed in 1929 but the damage was just being done. States like Kentucky and Ohio started to ban interscholastic competition for girls basketball at the high school or college level under pressure from groups like WDNAAF. But Texas, along with other states like Iowa, Tennessee, California and New York to name a few, opted to continue allowing competition that had all the same incentives that the men’s game did.
For decades, Universities would take their best and play against traveling semi-professional teams sponsored by companies like American National Insurance Company (ANICO) or Sunoco. And, quite often in fact, the universities would win.
One of the ways they were able to compete with sponsored teams — comprised of ten year basketball veterans in some cases — that could pay was by offering full scholarships, something that was permissible under AAU rules. Unlike their male counterparts playing under the NCAA, there were no guidelines at all on what you could offer college students or what kind of benefits they could receive. Through this entire period, Wayland maintained a women’s basketball program, albeit a club team that played high schools. But in 1948, the school became a four year institution and decided they were going to fully establish an athletics program. That’s where things, sometimes figuratively but more often literally, took off.
Queens-In-Waiting
Kaye Garms was from Oklahoma, the youngest of seven children. Alice Barron, the oldest of her family who everyone called ‘Cookie’, grew up 27 miles north of Austin, Texas. By the time they were playing high school basketball, the reputation of Wayland Baptist wasn’t yet what it eventually became.
“It was the one program where you could get a scholarship and have your secondary education paid for,” says Jody Conradt, who played high school basketball in the mid 1950’s when Wayland’s success was established. “Every little girl and every young woman who was playing basketball probably got a letter that said ‘if you come to plainview, Texas on this date, you will be allowed to try out for the Wayland basketball team.”
But just a few years earlier, word was spreading quietly and organically about a program in Plainview offering scholarships to play girls basketball. Cookie Barron was in the Austin suburb of Georgetown when two Wayland ministerial students came to town for a Baptist church summer revival. She learned about the team and their tryouts but didn’t ask her parents to send her because she knew they didn’t have the money.
Instead, she ended up at Cisco Junior College, playing in the 1953 AAU National Tournament in St. Joseph, Missouri. Wayland Baptist was there, as was a makeshift “all-state” team comprised of Kingfisher County, Oklahoma’s best girls basketball players.
“That’s where [Wayland Baptist head coach] Harley [Redin] saw me play and that’s where he saw Kaye play,” Barron remembers.
Redin invited Barron to tryouts and her parents bought her a bus ticket to go. She found herself in a group with 42 other young women including that girl from the Kingfisher County team who was driven to Plainview from Oklahoma by a local banker’s wife: Kaye Garms. By the end of the four day tryout, Barron, Garms and Marion Brown received scholarships and were headed to Wayland.
What they were walking into was a fully operational machine that just needed someone to take it a level further. University president J.W. Marshall had spent the last six years putting the pieces into place.
“He was a visionary,” says Barron.
Under his watch, Wayland Baptist became the first four-year liberal arts college in the former Confederate states to voluntarily admit black students on an equal basis with white students, three years before Brown v. Board of Education. Marshall also placed an emphasis on international students, launching a program that would become one of the biggest by percentage among American colleges. Every initiative fed his mission; that of a former Baptist preacher who wanted to use the school as a means to advance the message of the church. It was during this push that the Wayland Baptist women’s basketball team was asked to play a game in Mexico City in 1950. To get there, Marshall enlisted the help of a local businessman and pilot named Claude Hutcherson.
“On the way back, he said, ‘Claude’, why don’t you sponsor these women?” Barron adds. “And he talked him into doing it.”
Kaye and Cookie quickly found out that they came to a school that had the first ‘megabooster’ in collegiate women’s basketball history.
“He was very generous,” Kaye says of Claude, “And [his wife] Wilda was a sweetheart. Both of them would have our team over for holidays or if somebody went home, he flew some of us home for Thanksgiving or Christmas holidays and then he’d come and pick us up!”
It seemed random for a charter air pilot, former champion Welterwight boxer and entrepreneur who made money through banking and ranching, to take up this cause. But he was a man of interesting tastes.
“He supported the women’s and men’s bowling team in Plainview,” adds Kaye, “and, of course, he had his boxing.”
Throughout the entirety of the 1950’s, Hutcherson would fly the team all over the country to face off against the best AAU competition they could find. With no NCAA-like restrictions, he could be as generous with the players as he wanted to be and not worry about repercussions over their eligibility.
“Kaye and I both worked for Claude in the summer at his airport and one time he gave us a car and a credit card,” Barron says. “Of course, that would be all illegal. He told Al, one of his pilots…he said ‘Al, teach them how to fly.’ So he would take us up. I logged eight hours.”
Some players didn’t enjoy flying very much (some even to this day) and safety issues with small commercial aircraft were a regularity in the 1950’s.
“We took off and after we were in there,” Kaye explains, “the door flew open. The three of us all strapped up right there.”
Every former player has a story of experiencing some level of turbulence in the air or plane mechanical issue. But it never stopped Wayland from stepping on the court when they reached their destination and dominating their opponents.
No matter where they were, Hutcherson spared no expense. For their first AAU championship matchup, he flew fans up from Plainview and enlisted local St. Joseph musicians to comprise a makeshift Wayland band. From 1954 to 1957, the now dubbed ‘Flying Queens’, won four straight AAU National Championships, beating everyone from college teams like Iowa Wesleyan to traveling shows like Omaha Commercial Extension. Over the course of this period, they didn’t lose a single game. Ten by ten, the wins piled up until they 1958 season where Wayland surpassed the 100 straight win mark. No one could beat the Flying Queens and they felt they couldn’t be beat either.
Wayland Wonders
As visionary as Claude Hutcherson and J.W. Marshall were off the floor, Harley Redin was just as transformative on it. Initially, the Marine Corps veteran bristled at the concept of coaching a women’s team but, from 1948 until 1954, he would help out here and there. Sometimes it was scouting, sometimes it was assisting during games until eventually he joined the team in a full capacity ahead of the ‘54 season. It was a mystery to many why head coach Caddo Matthews left the team fresh off the program’s first national title. Redin believed it was to coach a small school near San Angelo where his family ran a church. But, for whatever reason, Matthews left behind a 52-0 career record and a juggernaut roster.
So Redin joined the team and wanted to push the boundaries of what the game allowed. During this time, women’s basketball was a six-on-six game that demanded the player dribble three times or less before having to either pass or shoot the ball. Redin implemented a faster paced offense and pushed for the thirty second shot clock as well as unlimited dribbling in the women’s game. Eventually his advocacy opened the door for the full court five-on-five style that the men played.
“He kept saying, we can’t compete internationally if you don’t have a five player game,” Barron says.
“He was always well organized,” adds Kaye. “He never talked about losing and he never talked about winning. No ‘we got to win this one.’”
Regardless of his message, the team won. And they won. And they won. Over and over and over again. The streak lasted so long that Cookie Barron never lost a game in a Wayland Baptist uniform. Kaye Garms played the 1958 season and the winning continued up until the 1958 AAU National Tournament Semifinals in St. Joseph. The Flying Queens streak ended at 131 straight victories but the national championships didn’t stop. While they never put together the same type of streak, they’d win another national title in 1959 and again in 1961 before losing to Nashville Business College — a professional team sponsored by the school — in seven of the next eight years.
But those losses didn’t deter Hutcherson’s investment or Redin’s consistency as a coach. As players like Garms and Barron finished up their playing careers in Plainview, their names rang throughout Texas and through the rest of the Great Plains states. The brand of Wayland Baptist had become synonymous with winning, scholarships and opportunities for women’s basketball players to feel like pros. It was so strong that it changed the course of Cathy Wilson’s life with just one phone call.
In 1971, just one year before Title IX, Wilson was a top high school player in Texas and, like Garms and Barron did before her, competed in the AAU National Tournament. But with no real options to play postgrad, she packed her car and registered for classes at Texas Tech. But Harley Redin called and asked if she wanted a chance to play at Wayland so she re-packed her bags and turned the car in the direction of Plainview.
“It has been a legacy program,” Wilson says.
Her experience was no less glamorous than Kaye’s and Cookie’s, even as momentum started to shift away from Wayland’s dominance. They still flew private for games, a luxury even the men’s team didn’t have at WBU. And they were still very much a known commodity in the Plainview area and beyond.
“People knew who we were,” adds Wilson. “On campus and in Plainview, we had great support. And a lot of that was Wilda Hutcherson. She was really the woman behind the man.”
As long as Claude and Wilda Hutcherson were involved with the program and the team could still compete at the highest level, there would always be investment. Claude worked to get a new gym built for the university, which would break ground in 1971. Wilda stayed involved with players after their graduation and mentored people like Cathy.
But the era of dominance would slow and as Redin retired, Title IX was passed and governance of women’s basketball shifted to the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women. For the first time in a long time, the Flying Queens were about to experience a degree of turbulence.
Headwinds, Hiccups and Harder Days Ahead
In just about every way, the passage of Title IX in 1972 was a landmark victory for women in sports. The floodgates opened almost immediately as smaller schools took advantage of the opportunity while more moneyed public universities followed. States that had essentially outlawed interscholastic competition in girls sports now were mandated to reintroduce it. But, of all the schools that benefitted, Wayland Baptist might have been one of the few places in the country to not stand to gain anything from the legislation.
“It was totally different,” says Cathy, who played under both the AAU and AIAW in her playing career.
The game moved from six-on-six to five-on-five, as Redin had long advocated for. But the great advantage Wayland enjoyed — the ability to offer scholarships to players — was starting to wane. They still were able to give girls that chance but the arrival of schools like the University of Texas and the emergence of Stephen F. Austin under former AAU superstar Sue Gunther meant that the Flying Queens monopoly on players was also threatened in Texas. Harley Redin retired and Dean Weese, a legendary high school coach in the state, took over.
“Very different styles, very different expectations,” Cathy explains. “But we were very successful under both Harley and Coach Weese. Of course, at that time things were changing. We were playing more colleges like Kansas State.”
Under Weese, Wayland would regularly make the AIAW National Tournament but would lose to early dynasties like Immaculata or Delta State. They’d then usually enter the consolation bracket, which was called the National Women’s Invitational Tournament. From 1969-1977, the Flying Queens were NWIT champions. But the winds continued to change as bigger schools like LSU, UCLA and Texas started to invest in their programs and leverage their brands to overshadow smaller schools like Wayland, Missisippi College for Women, Delta and Immaculata. In 1979 Wayland lost their first ever matchup against Texas and from that point on, the Flying Queens never beat the Longhorns again.
The decision was made around that same time, just as the NCAA was exploring the possibility of taking over governance of women’s basketball from the AIAW, that Wayland dropped out of Division I athletics. They found a home in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, or NAIA where they’ve been ever since. Over time, the exploits of Kaye Garms, Cookie Barron, Lometa Odom, Rita Alexander and Cathy Wilson, faded behind the superstardom of Cheryl Miller, Dawn Staley, Diana Taurasi and others. But the echoes of the Flying Queens have always been there, hiding one layer below plain sight.
Flying Forever
Most days in Plainview, Kaylyn Bean is handling duties at a museum on the Wayland Baptist campus.
“This was a project that had been decades in the making,” she explains.
As time went by and women’s basketball started to gain a foothold in the American public consciousness, several former Flying Queens, from Cathy Wilson to others like Marsha Sharp, began a foundation that would safeguard and maintain the history of the program.
“It’s thanks to the women who went through this program and felt like what they did was important and worth preserving,” adds Bean. “They said ‘our history is important and it needs to be preserved and displayed and shared with everyone.”
The renewed interest has come along recently, according to current Wayland Baptist women’s basketball coach Jason Cooper. He played for the school’s men’s program and came up hearing about the legacy of the women’s program and the level of success they found here. But it was until recently that there has been an injection of energy around the history of the Flying Queens as a result of the explosion of interest in the game writ large.
“It’s all over the country, this connection, this network where everywhere you go, there’s somebody that has a connection to the Flying Queens,” he says. “[The museum] is kinda like a past, present, future mindset in there. They’re keeping new stuff in there. If a kid makes All-American, they put them in there. And so these kids are taking pride in it.”
Wayland was one of the modern forerunners for what a successful collegiate women’s basketball program, or even WNBA franchise looks like. There is a direct line one can trace from a passionate booster like Claude Hutcherson to a deep pocketed owner like Joe Tsai. So serious was Hutcherson’s devotion to the program that in 1961, there was talk in Plainview of eliminating the women’s basketball program. Some say it was because the school was spending too much on scholarships and not enough on academics. Some say it was because the women were becoming too free-willed and not epitomizing Baptist values by doing things like drinking or playing dominoes.
So Hutcherson got Plainview’s business community and effectively fronted the money for the scholarships and expenses themselves. Public opinion was so in favor of the team that the school president, Dr. Albert H. Owen, and other administrators backed down.
With the support of a booster and the charismatic coach Harley Redin, Wayland built a dynasty and win streak so indomitable it’s still unbeaten in men’s or women’s basketball. The closet team in the NCAA era to it was the UConn Huskies, who won 126 regular season games between 2014 and 2019. Five games off a record that still belongs to Wayland Baptist. But the legacy is deeper than something like a record. For many like Kaye Garms and Cookie Barron, two of the original foundational figures in the first dynasty in women’s basketball nationally, the legacy lies in everyone who came afterward.
“I think it’s maybe not letting that tradition and history fade and die,” says Barron, who now lives with Kaye in Colorado. “The program is not there anymore, like it used to be, but it’s not dead and it’s not forgotten because they have the history recorded pretty good.”
“It’s kind of like they stood on our shoulders as we were building the interest in women’s basketball,” adds Cathy, who went on to coach the Flying Queens after Dean Weese retired. “They were really the backbone of how all this has evolved to give these kids opportunities that they have now which is wonderful to me.”
These days, Wayland Baptist is ranked in the top 25 of the NAIA national poll, 16-2 with a game against Texas Wesleyan on deck. Jason Cooper will get his team ready, Kaylyn Bean will tend to the museum and former players will check in on how the Flying Queens are doing whenever they get the chance. And as modern women’s basketball ascends to heights that some might not have thought imaginable, there’s a group of women who played in Plainview, Texas that experienced the future long before anyone else did. A small taste, courtesy of some forward thinking men and women, of what women’s basketball deserved and what it had the potential to be with the right investment.
“It’s such an important part of not only sports history, but women’s history,” Bean finishes. “And it’s been really great to see these living legends and be a part of making sure that the next generations will also get to see that.”
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