08/19/2026
Take over a girls basketball program today and the problems are usually familiar.
Maybe the program has been losing for years, participation is down, culture needs to be rebuilt.
Maybe a coach is trying to get more kids into the gym, convince talented athletes to stay with basketball or get a community excited about the girls program again.
Barb Crill had a different starting point.
She was fighting to get shoes on their feet and a name to call themselves.
When Crill started the Marquette Senior High School girls basketball program in 1969, girls athletics barely had an identity at the school. The girls initially had to provide their own uniforms. The boys had priority when it came to gym time, so the girls worked around their schedule. There wasn't even a nickname specifically associated with the girls basketball team.
Before Crill could worry about building a winning culture, she had to help establish that the girls belonged in the gym in the first place.
She pushed for fair practice times. She pushed for the school to provide uniforms and basketball shoes just as it did for the boys. She started girls programs and helped expand athletic opportunities at a time when there simply weren't many available.
Former players remembered the first time the school bought their basketball shoes because of what it represented.
They had arrived.
But Crill wasn't simply trying to give girls something to do after school. She believed they were athletes, and once she got them onto the floor, she treated them that way.
That meant expectations, accountability, and looking years ahead.
When Karen and Kaye Levandoski were young players with limited basketball experience, Crill saw potential. She wanted them to attend Michigan Tech's basketball camp, but their family couldn't afford it.
Crill found another way.
She arranged for the twins to work as lifeguards at the Marquette pool so they could earn the money themselves.
There was one problem: they couldn't really swim.
So Crill taught them.
She prepared them for the lifesaving requirements, helped them become certified and gave them an opportunity to earn the money that allowed them to attend basketball camp.
They would continue working as lifeguards throughout high school.
And that story says almost everything about how Crill built the program.
She didn't wait for perfect circumstances. She created solutions. She was already thinking several years ahead.
Former players remembered Crill sitting them down when they were barely teenagers and laying out a plan. They would improve. They would compete. They would eventually make deep tournament runs.
And, Crill told them, they could win a state championship.
That prediction didn't seem nearly as wild for long.
By 1974, Marquette was already becoming one of the state's elite programs. The Redettes won 17 straight before Grand Rapids Christian ended their season in the regional final.
In 1975, they took another step.
Marquette overwhelmed much of its schedule, outscoring opponents by an average of roughly 68-26. The Redettes beat Sault Ste. Marie 109-16 in the district final and Portage Central 72-18 in the Class A quarterfinal.
Their season finally ended in the state semifinal when Farmington Our Lady of Mercy edged Marquette 62-57.
At that point, Crill had a completely different problem than the one she had faced only a few years earlier.
She wasn't trying to find shoes anymore, she wanted competition
The Upper Peninsula had helped shape Marquette into a powerhouse, but Crill knew dominating local opponents wasn't necessarily preparing her team for what waited deep in the Class A tournament.
So before the 1976 season, she went looking for something better.
Except one issue: there was no luxury charter bus waiting outside Marquette Senior High School to bring them.
The girls headed south packed into Crill's blue Chevy pickup and a station wagon supplied by one of the families. A parent essentially gave up the family vehicle so the team could make the trip.
The girls brought sleeping bags and stayed on the floor at Harsens Island.
They squeezed together for the long ride downstate because Crill wanted them to see teams like Detroit Dominican, which had already won multiple Class A state championships, and other programs with the size, athleticism and experience they would eventually have to confront.
It is one of the best images from the entire story.
A girls basketball program that had once fought simply to get basketball shoes was now borrowing a family station wagon because its coach couldn't find enough competition close to home.
The players never forgot arriving.
After spending hours packed into vehicles, they climbed out and stretched. Across the gym were bigger, more athletic players. Girls who could jump. Programs accustomed to competing at the highest level in the state.
And some of those players apparently looked at Marquette as if they wondered why this group from the Upper Peninsula had traveled all that way.
Then they played.
And Marquette discovered something.
They belonged.
That may have been the most important thing Crill brought home from the trip.
Her team had seen what waited downstate.
They no longer had to imagine whether they could compete with it.
They knew.
The 1976 season opened with Marquette beating Gladstone 71-19.
Then Negaunee 87-21.
And it kept going.
The Redettes ran through the regular season unbeaten. They averaged roughly 81 points per game while allowing about 25. Their competition was often themselves. Practices remained demanding. Even after blowout victories, Crill found something that could be improved.
The moment her players believed they had arrived, she believed they would stop getting better.
So they kept working.
By tournament time, Marquette wasn't simply piling up huge scores anymore. The competition became stronger.
The Redettes beat Escanaba 71-29 for a district championship.
They defeated Benton Harbor in regional play.
Then Grand Rapids Union 48-34 for the regional title.
They handled Lansing Eastern 67-37 in the quarterfinal and Flushing 62-46 in the semifinal.
Waiting in the Class A championship game was Farmington Our Lady of Mercy.
The same program that had ended Marquette's season one year earlier.
This time there would be no close ending.
In front of approximately 5,000 spectators in Grand Rapids, Marquette won 68-41.
Shelly Chapman scored 23 points. Janet Hopkins added 19. Caron Krueger scored 14.
The program that had once been searching for an identity was now the Class A state champion.
And the players didn't disappear when high school ended.
Chapman went on to Stanford before eventually playing at Pittsburg State with Crill. Karen Levandoski played at Northern Michigan University. Krueger also played at Northern before transferring to New Mexico State. Hopkins went to UCLA, earned four varsity letters and was part of the Bruins' 1978 AIAW national championship team.
The talent had been there.
Crill helped create the opportunity for people to see it.
That is why the story still matters 50 years later.
Girls basketball has come a long way.
Today, players such as Caitlin Clark can become some of the most recognizable athletes in American sports. Women's basketball leads national sports discussions in ways that would have been difficult to imagine when Crill started coaching. High school girls basketball is covered, debated and promoted far more seriously than it once was.
And you can see the cultural shift inside high school gyms.
Male students show up for the girls.
Boys basketball players sit in student sections and cheer for classmates who will return the favor when they play.
A huge girls game can become a community event on its own, not something treated merely as the game before the boys take the floor.
That doesn't mean every difference has disappeared or every program receives exactly the same attention. But the distance from where girls basketball stood 50 years ago is enormous.
A coach taking over a girls program today might have to rebuild confidence after a 4-18 season.
Barb Crill had to help build the idea that the program deserved to exist.
She fought for gym time, uniforms, shoes and an identity and eventually got all four.
Then she found jobs for kids who couldn't afford camp, taught girls to swim so they could earn their own way there, demanded they become better after victories and eventually packed them into a pickup truck and a borrowed family station wagon because the Upper Peninsula could no longer give them what they needed.
She helped lay the foundation brick by brick.
And 50 years later, they aren't remembered as an early experiment in girls athletics.They're remembered as one of the most dominant girls basketball teams Michigan high school sports has ever produced.
Barb Crill's greatest accomplishment wasn't simply getting her girls onto the court.
It was showing what could happen once somebody finally gave them the chance to find out how good they could be.
The work Crill did simply to give women opportunities was legacy alone, being better than everyone else? That made her a legend.
