Making 100

Women’s basketball has changed significantly over the years.

There have been rule changes, the number of players on the floor at one time and their roles and after five-on-five became established, the sport has revolutionized in its athletic ability.

Gamesmanship has gone up considerably. When girls basketball went to rovers in the fall of 1970 in Georgia high school ball, there were many mentions of how exactly this would work out. Many coaches felt they only had one or two players capable of playing both ends of the floor (two rovers crossed the center line). Rovers went out in 1975. Today, of course, all teams have five players who have to go end to end.

Quality of play is better, but there is something missing from the era of forwards on one end and guards on the other: crazy stats.

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Early school surveys by the Department of Education

“The building was so inadequate and over-crowded that no inspection was made and no attempt at educational measurements could be made on account of the crowded condition.” – From M.L. Duggan’s survey of Gwinnett County schools, 1923.

In preparing for updates for the Minimum Foundation Program in the 1950s, nearly all Georgia school systems prepared a survey of school needs. These alerted the systems, citizens and state as to the deficiencies within the schools.

The surveys were a massive undertaking and it took more than a decade for all the associated building projects to be completed.

These were not the first surveys ever to be done. Nearly 40 years earlier, a series of them were done by Mell L. Duggan, Georgia’s Rural School Agent.

Starting with Rabun County in 1914, for the next 10 years, Duggan was essentially a one-man crusade visiting schools and making suggestions as to how rural counties could improve the education of their children.