By Kalle Oakes,Staff Writer

Mike McGraw thought he took girls’ basketball seriously.

Six years after his previously unbeaten Lewiston High School team suffered a stunning, one-sided loss to Mt. Blue in the Class A championship, the former head coach admits it’s the one memory of his three decades on the bench that still gnaws at him.

Did he internalize it too much? McGraw thought so, until he encountered a spectator who took that March evening at Bangor Auditorium to extremes.

“I’ve had a guy come up and tell me he lost $100 on that game,” said McGraw.

So one fan’s priorities are a trifle out of whack. Elsewhere, Maine’s fascination with girls’ high school hoop is a healthy shade of rabid.

Girls’ basketball turned 30 this winter. The Maine Principals’ Association, which oversees competition in 18 different scholastic sports, started sanctioning a state tournament in 1975.

And yes, you can make a compelling argument that girls’ basketball has evolved into the most popular game in Maine.

Bigger than football. Bigger than ice hockey or soccer. Even bigger than boys’ basketball.

“I’m not saying it’s going to keep growing forever,” said Doug Lisherness, who has coached the girls’ varsity program at Mt. Abram High School in Salem for 19 years. “But the way these girls are going after it now, I can see the women’s game overtaking the men’s game.”

Comprise a quick list of the 20 most famous figures in Maine sports history, and interspersed among boxers, baseball old-timers and stock car drivers are at least two basketball players. Both are female.

There’s Cindy Blodgett, the court prodigy from Fairfield who led Lawrence High School to four consecutive Class A titles from 1991 to 1994, then graduated from the University of Maine as one of the most prolific scorers in NCAA Division I history.

“My kids went to a clinic that Cindy conducted in Waterville, and her autographed picture went right up on their wall,” said Tammy (Anair) Anderson, who set tournament scoring records at Winthrop High School in the early 1980s and now coaches Leavitt Area High School in Turner. “And boys want that autograph just as much as girls do.”

And there’s Rachel Bouchard, the 6-foot-1 center from Hall-Dale High School in Farmingdale who put up numbers thought to be the boys’ exclusive domain in the mid-1980s.

Before those two, the slick ball-handling and smooth shooting of Anderson and Lisa Blais Manning of Westbrook stole our attention. Later, it was Heather Ernest, the lithe, deceptively strong Mt. Blue marvel, who broke McGraw’s heart and stopped us in our tracks.

Teams at Dirigo, Portland, Cony and Catherine McAuley have enjoyed lasting excellence.

Best of all, in many spectators’ eyes, they’ve done it without the obnoxious trappings that have soured so many competitive sports in their generation.

“The team I had at Lewiston, out of 12 girls, I had at least 10 honor roll students,” said McGraw. “They were more than good athletes. They were great people.”

Law paved the way

Title IX opened the door to myriad athletic opportunities for young women in America and quickly changed the landscape of girls’ sports in Maine. Prior to the educational amendment in 1972, the state only awarded girls’ team championships in skiing and gymnastics.

Legally given the right to equal footing on the playing field, girls were allowed to compete for swimming, tennis and track and field titles in 1973. Basketball joined the fray two years later.

Club basketball teams had existed for many years. On the wall adjacent to the trophy case at Winthrop High School is a dog-eared team photo from the 1920s, with girls in full uniform. At the time, that meant a blouse, knee-length skirt and stockings.

Even when high-top sneakers, short-sleeved jerseys and shorts came into vogue, girls’ basketball wasn’t high fashion.

“When I was in high school, the girls played right after school, not in the evening. Only a few parents attended the games,” said Ray Convery, a Dixfield native who has coached girls’ basketball in Winthrop and Monmouth for 30 years. “There were six players, instead of five. Two played offense, two played defense and two were allowed to go full-court.”

The toddler years of the tourney were a separate-but-equal situation, at best.

In 1975, the girls’ playoff was completed before the opening tap of the boys’ tournament. The Augusta Civic Center hosted four state finals on the first Saturday of school vacation week in February.

A year later, Convery remembers seeing the Class B teams shuffled to the University of Southern Maine in Gorham, while Class C and D teams drew less-than-prime starting times in a supporting role to the boys’ tournament at Edward Little High School in Auburn.

So what changed?

By the early 1980s, Augusta and Bangor became one-stop shopping for basketball enthusiasts who wanted to catch the B-C-D tournaments.

In Western Maine, pioneering players Anderson and Bouchard grew up only minutes from the new tournament site, and they drew a crowd. The buzz when they scored 25 or 30 points in a game was no different than the reception for a boy.

Hidden in the throng were third- and fourth-grade girls, many of whom made the life-altering decision that it was cool to play sports.

“It’s just like in golf when you had Tiger Woods come up,” Convery said. “Certain people have come along in the last few years, and other girls have said, I want to be that girl.'”

Changing the rules

McGraw, who coached the Lewiston varsity in its first tournament-eligible season of 1974-75, believes some coaches have elevated the stature of girls’ basketball.

Many have been forgotten. Somebody, for instance, had the foresight to teach girls a 1-3-1 zone defense, or a half-court trapping scheme that capitalized on their quickness and low center of gravity.

But McGraw is partial to three men who are still coaching: Ed Feeney of Portland, Paul Vachon of Cony and Gavin Kane of Dirigo.

Their programs are so consistently good that girls from surrounding communities strive to play there. They’ve weathered the jealousy of rivals who accuse them of “recruiting.” They’ve also dealt with the accusations that they’re too loud, too intense.

“They’ve treated their girls like athletes,” said McGraw.

Coaches build the infrastructure, but fans from first-grade “lady dribbler” teams to grandparents flock to the gymnasium every winter because of the athletes and the game itself.

In the mid-1980s, one subtle rules change and one painted line transformed girls’ and women’s basketball forever.

High school and college federations adopted a regulation basketball that is one inch smaller in circumference than the one men and boys use. McGraw remembers reluctance among the players, at first, until they realized that a tighter grip on the ball did wonders for their jump shot.

That set the table for the next change. In 1988, every field goal behind a stripe 19 feet, nine inches from the basket became a 3-pointer.

Female basketball players of all ages adopted the bonus ball as their version of the slam dunk; a momentum-changing, show-stopping play that didn’t require a 6-foot-7 frame and a 42-inch vertical leap to master.

“We practice the 3-point shot daily at the varsity level,” said Anderson. “Plus, I coach a travel team for the little ones, and it’s amazing how many of them even at an early age will pick up a ball at practice and head for the other side of that arc.”

Making splash without flash

Some critics say the no-look passes and look-at-me antics of the National Basketball Association have trickled down to the college men’s and boys’ high school levels. No surprise, then, that purists and casual fans alike flock to girls’ games.

In addition to scoring oodles of points and winning thousands of admirers, Blodgett, Ernest, Manning and Anderson were notoriously selfless. Two of this year’s premier high school players, Alexa Kaubris of Dirigo and Cony’s Katie Rollins, live up to that team-oriented tradition.

“The women’s game is a more pure form of basketball,” McGraw said. “It’s kind of like the men’s game was in the 1950s and ’60s.”

Lisherness said there’s a good reason that star players are willing to share the wealth. The girls’ basketball talent pool is deeper than ever before.

He coached his daughter’s team to a Class C championship in 1991. While Lisherness has watched Dirigo, Jay and other programs take over the spotlight, he said that even his current team has more depth and skill these days.

“It seems like even the players whose names you don’t read in the paper because they’re scoring 20 points a game, those players are much improved over what they were when I started coaching,” Lisherness said. “They all seem to handle the ball better, run faster, jump higher. They saw Cindy Blodgett and decided they wanted to go to camps, play summer basketball and do all the things they needed to do to be like her.”

For Anderson, who lives in Greene, it doesn’t take much more than a trip down College Road to Bates to give her daughters a fervor for the game.

Bates is one of three Maine schools ranked in the top five of NCAA Division III.

“I think the overall love of the game has spread,” said Anderson. “My girls watch the WNBA (women’s professional league). If you have cable, you can find a major college game any night of the week.”

If you prefer to stay closer to home, though, the product at your local high school has exploded beyond recognition.

And unlike the fate that befell Mike McGraw’s compulsive friend, this one’s a sure bet.

“You know, winter’s a long time in Maine. A lot of people really struggle with winter,” said Convery. “People look for something they can rally around. And now they have girls’ basketball players in town who work on their skills all year long and love to play.”