Retro
HOOP DREAMS: Ruth Terrett Earle helped organize the first women's basketball team at Virginia Tech. (right) A page from The Tin Horn, an alternative yearbook created by the female students, highlights the early women's basketball team.
“She was almost unflappable, let’s put it that way,” her son, Sherod Earle, said during a phone conversation in January.
Earle also is credited with spearheading the university’s first women’s basketball team, which legend says came about partly due to skills female students developed from avoiding water thrown at them by cadets.
In 1921, Ruth Terrett Earle, then Ruth Terrett, was one of the first five women to enroll full-time at Virginia Tech, then Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College and Polytechnic Institute. In 1925, she would become the first woman to earn an engineering degree at the university.
“We became exceedingly alert and quick movers. In fact, we became so efficient in dodging water that we decided to extend our athletic ability even further, and as a consequence of this we had a basketball team,” one female student of the time reportedly said.
NOT MUCH COULD GET UNDER RUTH Terrett Earle’s skin.
68 | HOKIE NATION | RETRO
The first team, the “Sextettes,” formed in 1923 with Earle as the captain. Despite the male students attending games and rooting for the opposition, the team went 3-2 that season. The women scored victories over Blacksburg High School and Concord Teacher’s College, while losing to Radford College and the YMCA of Roanoke. And the 1925 Tin Horn, an alternative yearbook that the women created after being denied entry into the Bugle, said Earle “stirred up an enthusiasm for basketball.”
VIRGINIA TECH SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
JUST ADD WATER
