Christina Batastini, one of Rhode Island’s best basketball players ever, remembers the days when girls lived their hoop dreams through CYO and town recreation leagues or, if they were lucky, high school, and if really lucky, college.
Those days 35 years ago were better than the Dark Ages of the first half of the 20th century, when girls couldn’t dribble beyond half court or run distance races. Why? Men in charge determined they would damage their reproductive systems.
In her mid-40s now and mother of 14-year-old basketball-playing Ryanne Sheehan, Batastini marvels at what girls and young women are doing today.
“They can play on a zillion AAU teams,” she told me last week. “They can turn on their phone or tablet or TV and watch any game they want to.”
Women’s basketball has arrived BIG TIME thanks to a spectacular 2024 NCAA tournament that starred an undefeated team and the most prolific scorer in college basketball history.
“This year was a tipping point,” Batastini said. “Not just girls were watching, but men were, too. They know who Caitlin Clark is, who Paige Bueckers is, who Dawn Staley is. They know them now.”
She referred, of course, to Clark, the Iowa superstar who became the face of women’s basketball while breaking the all-time college scoring records for men and women. Bueckers, the UConn star. And Staley, coach of the undefeated NCAA women’s champion South Carolina Gamecocks.
We know them because the NCAA finally promoted them and their tournament — still not as much as men’s March Madness but more than in previous decades. And because ESPN brought them into our TV rooms, sports bars and, yes, even man caves, from coast to coast.
We saw the fiery spirit of the 2023 champion LSU Tigers. The grit of South Carolina playing for a perfect season. The cool calm of Clark launching threes from ridiculous range. The determination of Bueckers, who won every award imaginable as a UConn freshman in 2021, missed all of 2022-2023 with an ACL injury and this season returned and became the Big East Player of the Year and a consensus All-America.
We saw the coaches. Kim Mulkey of LSU, Lisa Bluder of Iowa, Geno Auriemma of UConn — yet again — and Staley, who took a moment during her team’s second championship celebration in three years to thank Clark for all she did for women’s college basketball.
Thank you, ESPN and ABC, which, as USA TODAY columnist Nancy Armour wrote, “gave the women’s Final Four the Super Bowl treatment.” Indeed, they did, a big reason an average of 18.7 million viewers — with a peak of 24 million — watched the final between Iowa and South Carolina. That total exceeded any basketball game — college, pro, men’s or women’s — since 2019 and was an 89% increase from last year and a 285% jump over 2022.
Stunning!
Batastini was a hoops pioneer of sorts, a girl with abundant talent but fewer opportunities than girls enjoy today. She grew up in working class Providence, played CYO basketball at Saint Pius for her dad, the legendary coach Armand Batastini, and became a star at Classical High School in the mid-1990s.
She was different from most girls back then.
“When I was in high school, there was little opportunity for girls. There was one AAU team for every age group. You had an opportunity to make one team. If you didn’t make it, you didn’t play. Now there are scores in each age group,” she said.
“I was one of the first to have an individual coach, Tommy Cannon. Now, everybody has a personal coach, or two or three. Normalcy is there. In 1992 when I went to the gym on a Sunday afternoon to work out with a personal coach, it was not normal. Now, it’s done all the time.”
Batastini was so good that Stanford University gave her a full scholarship. She played on three Pac-10 championship and four NCAA tournament teams. Stanford reached the Final Four in 1997, her freshman year. Her coach was Tara VanDerveer, who just retired after 38 years.
“Her preparedness was meticulous. Her practices ran like clockwork . . . you had to show up every day,” Batastini said.
After Stanford, Batastini played in Europe for four years, coached youth teams and was player-coach for a top Swiss pro team. Returning to the U.S., she was a practice player for the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun, an assistant coach at Brown for a season, head coach at the Lincoln School for seven years and at Mount Saint Charles Academy.
She has directed her own basketball school, instructed in clinics here and abroad, and now coaches the girls basketball team at St. Andrew’s in Barrington, a prep powerhouse. Six players from her 2023 team went to Division I colleges and one to a Division II school. Along the way Batastini met and married Frank Sheehan, an assistant football coach at Brown at the time, earned a master’s degree in education at Harvard, and raised her daughter.
Last summer she was head coach of the U.S. team in the U23 Nations League 3×3 tournament in Rancagua, Chile. Among her players were LSU star Hailey Van Lith, Stanford standout Cameron Brink “and a bunch of other young women who are super talented. I got a first-hand look not only at their talent but also who they are as people,” she said.
Batastini has seen the world of basketball change for girls and women. She glimpsed the future while playing for a Connecticut AAU team. They were sitting on “a huge bus at a big tournament when Geno [Auriemma] walked out of the gym. The girls started screaming and banging on the windows. He waved,” she said, chuckling at the memory. “That’s when I realized something may be happening in women’s basketball.”
Exposure through social media has made a huge difference. Uniformity was the norm in Batastini’s day. “You couldn’t stand out. I had my own ankle braces but at Stanford was told I couldn’t wear them. I had to wear theirs,” she said.
Today, we cheer for college women who dribble with painted nails, head fake with long, multicolored braids, look as if they could model for a fashion spread and reap the financial rewards of name, image and likeness.
“They are stars as players and also as influencers,” Batastini said.
Most of all we watch and cheer because women today can really play this game, and play it well. Bigger, faster and stronger than their predecessors, they can run, jump, shoot, rebound, and defend with confidence and skill that were just dreams when Christina Batastini played CYO ball for Saint Pius so many years ago.