Denise Long Rife

Rife was the first woman drafted by a National Basketball Association team, although NBA Commissioner Walter Kennedy vetoed the pick because the NBA on grounds that the league did not draft players straight from high school at the time, nor women.[2][3][4]

San Francisco Warriors owner Franklin Mieuli picked her in the 13th round of the 1969 NBA draft, but she played for a women's team—the "Warrior Girls Basketball League"[1]--that the Warriors sponsored for one season[3] rather than for the Warriors themselves.[5]

According to the Warriors' YouTube channel, she was picked to be the league's star.[6] She was 19 years old, 5'11" tall, and a graduate of Union-Whitten High School, where her class had only 34 students enrolled; the opportunity to go to San Francisco was irresistible.[3] While there she met Wilt Chamberlain, who joked that she had broken his triple-digit shooting record.[3] In 2018 the Warriors invited her and some of the other women from her league to a halftime ceremony honoring them during Women's History Month.[3][6]

Rife played forward and was best at the long shot (before the 3-pointer became part of the game). At a time when "combined final game scores often finished well above 200 points,"[3] she repeatedly scored over 100 points in a single high school game.[2][1] In one game, Rife recalled, a forward ended up guarding her because all the guards on the opposition's team had fouled out trying to keep her from scoring.[1] Her career record of 6250 points lasted until Lynne Lorenzen bested her in the mid-1980s by nearly 500 points.[3] She was inducted into the Iowa Girl's Basketball Hall of Fame in 1975.[7][1]

In pre-Title IX America, "girls’ basketball in Iowa did not need a federal mandate to be more popular than boys’ basketball. ... The television audience for the girls’ championship game drew as many as 3.5 million viewers in nine Midwestern states,"[2][5] and championship game week was the biggest week of the economic year for Des Moines merchants.[8] The 1968 championship game that her team won is available on YouTube.[3] As Rife noted, for girls in small-town Iowa, basketball could be a lifesaver.[1]

Her prowess led to attention from Sports Illustrated, which described her as "all swiftness and grace";[8] The Tonight Show, hosted at the time by fellow Iowan Johnny Carson;[2][3] the Wall Street Journal,[1] and other American media outlets. She was offered college scholarships but pre-Title IX women's college basketball was too limited to appeal to her.[3]

In the era in question, women's high school basketball generally had 6-member teams and it was played as a half-court rather than full-court game, in which some of the offensive team players stayed back at their end of the court while the defensive team members followed their opponents to the other end of the court. During the summer of 1973, Rife played for the Venture Victory Team, "a Christian team where we went over and gave testimonies and sang Christian songs at half-time" during games against the Olympics teams from various Asian countries.[1] This was full-court basketball, which she found challenging. In an interview with the Iowa PBS network, Rife discussed significant differences between the two versions of the game, explaining why women's basketball in her era was so exciting for audiences.[1]

After basketball, she studied at various colleges where she got degrees in physical education, in Bible theology, and eventually a degree in pharmacy from Drake University.[3] She worked as a pharmacist until retirement.[2]