Granny Basketball League becoming a sensation

	Even if the participants in the Granny League can throw down a dunk, you won't see it happen. Dunking is against the rules. Courtesy of Barb McPherson

Muriel Cooper climbs into gyms across eastern Iowa, plunks herself down on the hardwood benches and jaws at her daughter Jean Ann. She cringes at bad passes. She flails her arms at missed shots. Her stand-by favorite is, "You're just not trying hard enough!"

"She's 96," Jean Ann Weymiller sighed, "and she's still critiquing my game."

No, that's not a typo. Muriel is 96, Jean Ann is 74 and Jean Ann plays basketball in a league with a bunch of other grandmas -- who are known to get a wee bit feisty.

"Oh, you can see the juices start flowing," Weymiller's husband Franklin said, his voice fully serious. "That's why I won't referee."

It all started two years ago, when Barb McPherson thrust a clipboard in front of Jean Ann at church. "Sign," McPherson said. "For what," Weymiller asked. "We're going to play basketball," McPherson said. "I don't think so," Weymiller said.

But McPherson's a bulldog and, at 60, she knew she needed exercise. Richard Simmons-style aerobics weren't doing it for her and bicycling, she said, "hurt my butt." So McPherson called her fellow psych nurses ("Which probably explains a lot," she gamely said) and all her women friends who'd hit 50. They could train to play a game at Lansing's Annual Fish Fry, she said. Somehow she convinced Weymiller, who way back when played for McPherson's basketball-coaching dad and who also happened to have a pair of Muriel's old bloomers stored away.

See, McPherson figured the best brand of basketball these women "of a certain age" should play was the one their 1920s forbears did. Six on six, with the two guards manning the back third of the court, the two centers the middle third, and the two forwards the front, basket-scoring part.

There's no running ("You hurry," McPherson said) and no jumping ("They take away my baskets when I jump," Weymiller groaned) and no dunking ("Like that's going to be a problem," Franklin Weymiller said).

And it's all done in the middy blouses, stockings and black bloomers women hoopsters wore in the 1920s.

"Are you kidding?" McPherson said when asked about this-century clothing. "The uniforms cover up all our flab. Who would want to wear shorts?"

Now at eight teams, the league plays roughly once a month from January through May, in high school gyms. Except for the Cedar Rapids Sizzlers -- they play in a church.