“If this had happened two years earlier,” Judi Warren said, “it would have been Pam Noble who would have been the first Miss Basketball.”
“A big key for us was that we had Jan as the coach,” Noble said of Janice Soyez, who coached Warsaw from 1968-78 and was inducted in the first Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame class to include women’s players, along with Warren, in 2002. “She coached every sport that we had. That’s just what was expected. She was the one who kept the ball rolling. We played regular games against other schools like Elkhart Memorial and Elkhart Central.
But that did happen soon enough, at least at Warsaw. Warren had grown up in Claypool, located a few miles south of Warsaw and watched the boys’ games at Claypool, where her dad had played in the 1940s, as a youngster before the school consolidated. She was hooked at an early age. “We had a lot of quickness and great defense,” Warren said. “We just never had an opportunity to play in the tournament. We didn’t know how good we really were. There were a number of good players in those years like Pam, but they just didn’t get the opportunities.”
“Many were amazed that girls could play basketball so well and that it was so entertaining,” Roy told IndyStar. “I remember going to lunch one day and overhearing some men talking about the tourney. It seems they had tuned into a college game and switched over to the girls during halftime. They became so engrossed they never turned back to the college game.”
Noble might have been two years too early to get a chance herself as an athlete, but girls' gains had an impact in her professional career. In 1979, she was hired at Connersville, where she became athletic director. In the still-early stages of sanctioned girls’ sports, she had her challenges. “Then we were packing the Spartan Bowl with 5,000 people because they wanted to see April play,” Noble said.
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