Under the orange book jacket, the hard cover of Emma Baccellieri and Jordan Robinson’s Court Queens: Celebrate the Players, Teams, and History of Women’s Basketball, is covered in photos of women’s basketball players throughout the years. At the bottom right in full color stands a celebrating Caitlin Clark, mid cheer while the crowd is roused behind her. 

Next to Clark is a black-and-white photo of an Iowan teenager from the 1960s, jumping above another player for a layup with a sky hook. Baccellieri doesn’t know who the girl is or even the exact date her game was played, nor do the archivists she worked with to write Court Queens—it’s a mystery. But, Baccellieri says, she represents every player never recorded. 

“You have Caitlin Clark, a player anyone who picks up this book is going to recognize, and then you also have someone who can stand in for every girl, every woman who’s ever played,” says Baccellieri. 

Emma Baccellieri. Photo credit: Anna Meyer Photo; courtesy of the author

Baccellieri, a D.C. resident and Sports Illustrated journalist, and Robinson, an L.A.-based freelance journalist and co-host of The Women’s Hoops Show podcast (with three-time Olympic gold medalist Sheryl Swoopes), grew up watching basketball. Their coffee tables were adorned with large books that introduced them to sports history and memorabilia; it wasn’t until later that Baccellieri realized those only chronicled the history of men’s sports.

“There wasn’t anything that we could have gone through as a young girl that really served as a capsule of [women’s] sports history, of how it had got to where it was, of how it was going to get where it was going next,” she says.

Released on March 17, Court Queens, vivid with imagery that spans the birth of basketball in the 1890s through its modern-day icons, is Baccellieri and Robinson’s attempt to rectify that gap in sports history. Indeed, it bears much resemblance to those same coffee-table books the two reporters read growing up.

The book touches on women’s basketball at the high school, collegiate, Olympic, and national levels, chronicling players and coaches who paved the way, the moments that built the WNBA, and the evolution of the game that at one point had its players in ankle-length skirts. But it’s by no means a comprehensive history. Instead, Court Queens is a love letter to the sport, and a starting point for future accounts of its history. 

“You see so many different books filling the shelf covering men’s basketball in a bookstore,” says Baccellieri. “I would love to get to a point where it can be the same for women’s basketball. And I think there easily could be—hopefully soon.”


Wiota, 1940s. From Court Queens: Celebrate the Players, Teams, and History of Women’s Basketball, by Emma Baccellieri and Jordan Robinson

Baccellieri, who began writing for Sports Illustrated in 2018, started out covering men’s baseball, but found time to report on women’s sports whenever she could. Today it’s her primary focus. As a journalist, she isn’t partial to any one team, but the first WNBA game she attended was for her hometown Washington Mystics in 2018. As a fan, she says one of the perks of living in D.C. is having a women’s team in the city and being able to catch others as they come through.

To write Court Queens, Baccellieri and Robinson interviewed athletes, old and young, with varied playing experiences over the course of eight months. More than one of those players shared shoeboxes of old photos from their time on the court. “Some of these women had been carrying these stories forever without really getting a chance to fully share them,” Baccellieri says. The amount of history they uncovered still stands out to her, so much so, in fact, that she says the book is “just stretching the surface of these vibrant women and teens.” (She notes that many could “easily merit their own books” and some already do.)  

But most importantly for Baccellieri is that Court Queens captures the joy of women’s basketball, rather than focusing on the hardships and barriers players and coaches faced while establishing a place in the game. “This is a history of struggle, and there’s [no] erasing that,” she says. “But we wanted to place that in a context where the core theme was the women who were playing regardless of what they had to do in order to play, regardless of what that play looked like, to really center it on the players, the coaches, and what they did to be on the floor.”

Court Queens: Celebrate the Players, Teams, and History of Women’s Basketball, by Emma Baccellieri and Jordan Robinson, was published by Black Dog & Leventhal on March 17. hachettebookgroup.com. $35.

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