INDIANAPOLIS — Twinks is here, and she’s standing in the front with Hud and Moe, who are hunching forward so Peep and Deb Day don’t get blocked out of the picture. This isn’t necessary, of course — those two are just as tall now as they were in high school.
Most of the old gang fills in the rest of the photo: there’s Smitty on the end, and she’s next to Hands, famed for her hands, and between Twinks and Peep is Avril Fisher, the one who helped everything get off the ground 50 years ago back when her name was still Avril Callahan.
“Make sure to get my good side,” Twinks says, and Moe, not passing up the easy dunk, says, “Do you even have a good side anymore?”
Swish.
The Lady Pioneers banter like this all afternoon, just like they did back in the ‘70s. And for some of them, this is the first time they’d seen each other at all since then.
A lot happens in half a century. Twinks grew up to be Tami Litten, vice president of the massive real estate firm F.C. Tucker; Deb Mohr (Moe) works in communications at the statehouse in Indy; Beth Piepenbrink-Schweke (Peep) had an illustrious basketball career post-high school, eventually being inducted into both Butler University’s and Indiana Basketball’s hall of fames — the list goes on.
The many twists and turns in their lives led them all back together again last weekend, gathered to watch the Indiana Fever take on the New York Liberty. It was a fitting site for a reunion — an arena full of people cheering for women, 50 years after the original Mooresville Pioneers were lucky if they could get their parents to show up at their games.
The Correspondent was invited to join them in their suite at Gainbridge Fieldhouse for the occasion, and between commercial breaks, the old teammates laughed and shared stories of their Pioneer days as they remember it.
And despite what they’ll tell you, they remember it pretty well, and what they couldn’t remember was filled in by their teammates. For the most part.
Just playing around
The Indiana High School Athletic Association sanctioned the formation of girls basketball teams throughout the state in 1975, three years after the passage of Title IX, which outlawed the exclusion of girls from federally-funded school athletic programs. With IHSAA approval, Mooresville Schools quickly moved to form the Lady Pioneers, who would play their season concurrently with the boys in the spring of 1976.
The girls played under first-time head coach Joe Johnson, who had hoped to coach the boys team but they weren’t hiring.
“(The girls) didn’t know a whole lot (about basketball),” Johnson remembers of that first squad. “Some played against their brothers as kids, others had never played at all. But they were very hungry to learn.”
They learned fast. After losing their first game, the Lady Pioneers would go 6-3 for the rest of the regular season, and would play all the way to semi-state before being eliminated from the IHSAA tournament.
That first Pioneer team had one main advantage: height. Three girls in particular were nearly 6 feet tall or more.
“Believe it or not, I was one of the shorter ones,” Deb Day remembers, standing at 5’10”. “The three of us would walk down the halls together and people would be in awe. Like, ‘Oh, we have to play them?’”
But that was just about where the advantages ended. Mooresville’s first girls basketball team was scrappy by necessity.
Instead of practicing in the main gym like the boys team did, the girls were made to practice in what was known as the “mini gym.” Rather than proper uniforms, the girls had only their T-shirts and practically see-through shorts to play in.
(The shorts were retired after one game because everyone could see Piepenbrink-Schwecke’s camouflaged underpants that said, “Property of the USMC” on them. The track coach came to the rescue, offering to lend them the track team’s hand-me-downs.)
Sherry Stewart, a former speech teacher at Mooresville and friend of the team, remembered the challenges the girls faced as they got their program going.
“Most people did not recognize that girls could play basketball,” Stewart said. “The prevailing attitude was that they were not on the same par as the boys.”
Stewart would frequently attend those early Pioneer games, cheering on the girls even when practically no one else did. She remembers going to one game that was attended only by herself and Johnson’s mother.
“People thought the girls were just playing around in the gym,” Piepenbrink-Schwecke said. “But they did come to the games once we started to win.”
The girls would win frequently in those early years, being perennial post-season contenders and making the Final Four in the 77-78 season. And when the tournaments came around each year, there wasn’t an empty seat to be had in the house.
Through it all, the girls became a tightly-knit unit, giving one another the nicknames they still call each other to this day.
Litten — the only girl on the team to wear makeup and a “pretty good shooter until (she) started noticing boys” — was called ‘Twinks’ (think Twinkle Toes) because of her distinctive way of running. None of the women could remember exactly how Twinks used to run, but they all agreed it was funny.
Hud (Lee Ann Hadley Baldridge) got her nickname after The Mooresville Times misidentified her as “Lou Ann Hudley” in the coverage of one of the Pioneers’ games. The Correspondent vowed not to make the same mistake.
The camaraderie the girls share is still apparent after five decades. In one memorable moment last Saturday, Baldridge was gushing over Piepenbrink-Schwecke’s achievements in collegiate basketball, clearly testing the latter’s modesty.
Why are you so hesitant to talk about your basketball talent?
“I didn’t do it by myself!” Piepenbrink-Schwecke said. “I had all these people around to pass me the ball.”
Now you know
Early on in the game against New York, the Fever’s star point guard Caitlin Clark — who had just returned from injury after missing several games — nailed her third triple in a row to give the Fever a lead they would pretty much keep for the rest of the game.
The crowd roared, its volume not at all unlike the crowd the night before, when the Pacers played Oklahoma City in Game 4 of the NBA Final.
The Pioneer suite was no exception — when Clark shot a three, they cheered, and when the refs made a bad call, they booed with the rest. Their love of the game has not diminished one bit over the last 50 years.
“There was no 3-point line 50 years ago,” Litten said. “We had several people who could do it though,” she added with a grin.
When they aren’t being thrilled by Clark hitting Aliyah Boston from across the court for a layup, the Pioneers have a general sense of awe when they look around at a packed arena all come to watch women’s basketball.
“I love seeing this because I was on the first of every team,” Avril Fisher said, having been a senior during Mooresville’s debut year. “It gives me chills and brings tears to my eyes to see this place packed.”
Dara Williams, who joined the Pioneers during their second season, concurs.
“Little girls today have no idea,” Williams said. “My nieces and nephews have a hard time believing that I was literally not allowed to play sports.”
“It’s absolutely unbelievable,” Deb Day added. “We were all tomboys, and so we always got left out. But seeing a full arena is just plain awesome.”
The WNBA still has a long way to go, with far fewer teams and a lot less money involved than their counterparts in the NBA. But there is a lot of truth in the Fever’s 2025 ad campaign slogan — “Now you know.” You didn’t know women could play at an elite level, and now you do.
Johnson, who still coaches Mooresville basketball all these years later, compared the sport’s growth to a child growing up to maturity.
“I’m a very proud dad,” he said.
But there would be no Caitlin Clark, no sold-out crowd and no clueless nieces and nephews without those Lady Pioneers who practiced in the mini gym in their see-through shorts years ago. Without them, none of this would be possible.
And they could not have done it without each other, too.
“This was more than a team,” Baldridge said. “This is a lifetime of friendships. We were in each other’s weddings, family funerals and births.”
To put it another way, they passed each other the ball. And because they did that — often to an audience of themselves alone — little girls now hold up signs cheering on Caitlin Clark at professional basketball games, a small thing that would have been quite impossible for the Lady Pioneers to do not so long ago.
