Long before Tennessee and then UConn dominated the women’s college game, tiny Immaculata College came out of nowhere to build a college basketball dynasty. How it happened is one of college sports history’s most improbable and inspirational stories.
Cathy Rush during her IC coaching days (Immaculata Athletics)
It’s 1971 in East Whiteland Township, PA, population 7200 back in the day (14,000 today), a rural area about 30 miles northwest of Philadelphia. Immaculata College, run by the Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, is located there.
Enrolling about 400 students then, athletics was an extracurricular activity designed to round out the higher educational experience. Still, the school played intercollegiate sports, and the president was in the market for a new basketball coach. Cathy Rush, a former collegiate player at nearby West Chester University and not long out of college, got the job. Just married, she was the spouse of NBA referee Ed Rush. It was Cathy Rush’s first full-time coaching job.
Soon after accepting the position for a salary of $450 a year, Rush learned that the team had no place to play. A fire had destroyed the school’s gym, and all games had to be played on the road until (and if) the arena was replaced. IC went 9-18 on the court in the three years before Rush took over the program, never winning more than three games in any season.
Rush rebuilt the team quickly. IC went 6-4 in 1970-71 and then 12-3 in 1971-72 (18-7 overall). Then came an unexpected and miraculous run.
Over the next five seasons, Immaculata won three consecutive national women’s championships (the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women administered the game in those days) and followed that up by finishing twice as national runners-up. One of Rush’s teams was undefeated, another squad lost only one game, and Immaculata went 73-13 (85% win rate) over Rush’s final three years as head coach.*
Along the way, Immaculata literally earned its moniker “The Mighty Macs” by knocking off major programs, including Philadelphia’s “Big Five” schools–Villanova, Temple, Penn, LaSalle, and St. Joseph’s–and a slew of prominent public universities, including Maryland, Indiana, Kansas State, Wisconsin, Texas, North Carolina State, Rutgers, and Penn State. The Mighty Macs played in the first-ever nationally televised women’s game (1975), beating Maryland by 32 points, and the team also played in the first women’s game at iconic Madison Square Garden in New York City.
The on-court performance was flat-out spectacular, and the story surrounding it was even better. It’s the type of storyline from which Hollywood films are made, and that’s exactly what happened. The award-winning The Mighty Macs (2011) features Carla Gugino as Rush and Ellen Burstyn as Immaculata’s president.
Cathy Rush made the impossible happen at a place where athletic miracles don’t happen. Her story shows what can happen when the right person is at the right place and right time, and has the skills and vision to make history. Rush refused to accept the prevailing philosophy and approach that dominated women’s college sports at the time—including strong beliefs about gender roles in society writ large.
Rush traveled a different path. It wasn’t easy. It never is and never will be. But people like Cathy Rush don’t care about that. They have the stuff of what trailblazing leadership is made of, including the gumption, grit, and singularly-focused persistence to make a difference.
Now ensconced in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, Rush is at the head of an impressive women’s coaching tree that includes college and pro coaches who either played for/coached under her or were players/coaches of her immediate basketball “offspring.” The list includes two former Big Ten women’s coaches, Rene Portland (Penn State) and Theresa Grentz (Illinois).
What can we make of this phenomenal story? Rather than view it as a historical artifact, I believe it is as relevant today as it was five-plus decades ago. It’s a story about the heart and soul of intercollegiate athletics, thematically identical to the Boys in the Boat narrative (film and book) about the U of Washington JV men’s crew team winning Olympic Gold at the 1936 Munich Olympics.
What happened at Immaculata and U of Washington is also about an experience that stays with those involved long after their playing days are over. That’s why heart-and-soul stories–no matter the sport or era–never go out of style.
Let’s remember those stories, share those stories, and, above all, promulgate those stories as exemplars of what collegiate athletics can and should be about.
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*Statistics are drawn from Immaculata’s athletic website.
This article is dedicated to Charlie Fisher, a former college football star who embodies what this story is about.
