On this day, March 25, 1978, Maryland and UCLA made women's basketball history

[mahatmakanejeeves]

On March 25, 1978, before the NCAA sanctioned women's basketball, the two programs played on national TV for the AIAW national championship.

Maryland Terrapins
Maryland and UCLA meet again in March, 41 years after they made women’s basketball history


Maryland Coach Chris Weller during the AIAW national championship game at UCLA. (Courtesy of Maryland Athletics)

By Ava Wallace
Reporter covering local colleges and universities
March 24 at 8:49 PM

When she arrived at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion on March 25, 1978, Chris Weller decided she wasn’t going to look up. ... The Maryland women’s basketball coach had put her heart and her nerves through quite enough just to get to that court, where the Terrapins were set to face the Bruins for the national championship of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, the predecessor to the NCAA women’s basketball tournament. Not only had Maryland arrived at the title game by pulling off upsets over No. 1 Tennessee and No. 2 Wayland Baptist, the crème de la crème of women’s basketball at the time, but it had literally arrived on a plane.

It was the first time the team had flown to a game, and it was Weller’s first time flying. ... Had the coach looked up, she would have seen the 9,351 spectators in Pauley Pavilion, the most to witness a women’s title game at the time. Had she looked around, she would have seen NBC cameras, there to televise a women’s college basketball championship for the first time. ... “I kept my head down and tried to concentrate on us, period, end of sentence,” Weller said Sunday. “It was absolutely the biggest game I’ve ever coached in. I can’t even tell you, when it was something big like that. … I don’t think it hit me, the historic event that it was going to become.”

On Monday, No. 3 seed Maryland (29-4) and No. 6 seed UCLA (21-12) will meet in the second round of the NCAA tournament in College Park exactly 41 years after the Bruins beat the Terps, 90-74, in a title game that was heralded at the time as the arrival of women’s basketball on the national stage. ... It was the first time two mainstream national powerhouses met in a final, as women’s basketball had been dominated by smaller colleges such as Wayland Baptist of Plainview, Tex.; Immaculata, a small Catholic school in Pennsylvania; and Delta State in Cleveland, Miss. Tennessee was just beginning its ascent.

[ Before there was U-Conn., the Wayland Baptist Queens ruled the basketball court ]

It was also the first time the AIAW tournament, in which women’s teams competed from 1972 to 1982, had copied the final-four format of the men’s tournament. Before then, the tournament was a four-day extravaganza.

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Ava Wallace covers college sports with a focus on Georgetown, Navy and Maryland, as well as tennis and the WNBA for The Washington Post. Before her current role, she covered Virginia and Virginia Tech athletics for The Post. Follow https://twitter.com/AvaRWallace

Mon Mar 25, 2019: Maryland and UCLA meet again in March, 41 years after they made women's basketball history

[rurallib]

1. thanks for the memory