Local grannies still balling after all these years

   MONONA — Who says basketball is a game for young people? MFL MarMac High School basketball fans saw that it isn’t Friday night when one of the nation’s top Granny Basketball League teams staged an exhibition during halftime of the high school varsity boys’ basketball game.

   The Harpers Ferry Fireflies, winner of the past three national Granny Basketball League championships, demonstrated a game that looks nothing like the up-and-down game that today’s kids and young adults play.

   “It’s full gym but it’s divided into thirds,” Jackie Friederick, a player from Prairie du Chien, said. “You get a third for the forwards, a third for the centers and a third on the guards.”

   The game was founded in Lansing by Barb McPherson Trammell, who said on the Granny Basketball web site that she came up with the idea while helping her father, a former girls’ basketball coach from the 1940s and 50s, write his memoirs.

For more of this story see the Jan. 16 Outlook.