Potter College for Young Ladies Exhibit
Bowling Green, Kentucky
1889-1909

Sports at Potter

Potter College's third floor gymnasium was equipped with parallel bars, climbing equipment, dumbbells, tenpins and pulleys.  A piano also stood at one end, used for group drills and for students' reward at the end of class: a few minutes of waltzing.

Team sports attracted much more enthusiasm than gymnasium instruction. Students enjoyed bowling in their own private bowling alley, built behind the college in 1903.  Many also played tennis. Their long skirts made it difficult to do much more than demurely
bat the ball back and forth; nevertheless, the school magazine observed that many girls "play very spectacular and exciting games."

Students' greatest passion, however, was reserved for basketball.  Introduced by a teacher at Smith College to her students in 1892, the game achieved instant popularity among young women and, more than any other, shook prevailing assumptions about their lesser physical, mental and competitive capacities.

Ignoring their elders, some of whom thought that basketball was too rowdy and scrappy for females, the Potter girls formed teams like the "Sunny Jims," the "Gocatcher," the "Mohawks" and the "Bull Dogs." Despite a makeshift outdoor court and little equipment (practice was delayed in fall 1905 because the ball required repair), they played with intensity, making up rules, quarrelling over fouls and showing off their "splendid training."  A much-talked-about incident occurred in 1904 when sophomore Lyda Bunker had her nose "badly bruised in the practice."

Students also enjoyed golf, croquet, sledding and winter skating on a nearby frozen pond.  Though quick to complain about lapses in athletic spirit, they still understood what was required of "young ladies":  in the 1906-1907 school year, over three-quarters of them studied piano.

- Tennis team, 1898

- Basketball team, 1898

- Basketball team, 1907