But while men’s basketball is on the verge of a boom, with this fall’s introduction of the new professional league, the women’s game seems to be losing some of its luster. The 1950s and 1960s were glory years for women’s basketball. The ROC national women’s team, drawn from club team players, regularly beat their counterparts from Japan and Korea. Fans paid them back by packing the stadiums at nearly every game.
In the 1970s, however, basketball suffered as Taiwan was blocked from a series of international competitions due to pressure from Mainland China. At the 1972 Asian Cup championship held in Taiwan, Japan did not attend because its government had just broken diplomatic ties with the ROC. In 1976, the ROC walked out of the Olympic Games and did not return until 1984. With the chance to compete internationally snatched away, local teams began to stagnate and enthusiasm for the sport dwindled, especially for women’s basketball. During this year’s Asian Games, the ROC women’s team ranked fourth, and in the 1994 Jones Cup international basketball tournament, Taiwan’s favored women’s team, 1993 club champion Cathay Life, lost every game to teams from Japan, Korea, Kazakhstan, Canada, and United States.
Today, coaches and players say it has become increasingly difficult to find young women willing to devote themselves to playing basketball. “Right now I can’t find any players,” says Chen Huang-ying (陳黃鶯), assistant coach of the Formosa Plastics team. Chen, who continues to play center for the team, is a twelve-year veteran of the club league and a former national team player. “Actually, there are many girls who like to play basketball, and they are adventurous and good players,” she says. “Playing is fun, but the daily training is very tough and the coaches yell at you. You must put up with a lot to get better. The new players ask, ‘Why should I put myself through this?’”
When Chen was recruited by the Formosa Plastics team at age fifteen, it was considered a great opportunity. “At that time it was not easy to go abroad, but Taiwan teams often went overseas. My father thought I would be able to travel all over the world,” Chen says. “Also, women’s basketball was very popular—everyone watched it. My father wanted me to be famous.” Chen’s mother also encouraged her. “She thought kids should not only study, but should get out and see things,” she says.
Today, players are not as grateful and parents are not as supportive, says Lai Shu-min (賴淑敏), who competed on Taiwan’s first club championship team in 1950 and now coaches the Far Eastern Textile team. “Social conditions are not the same,” Lai says. “Now players are given a stipend. When we played, it was just out of interest. Today, the coach has to force the players to practice well. It is not voluntary.”
Despite increasingly liberal views toward women pursuing careers, Chen says parents have become more hesitant about allowing their daughters to compete in sports. “Values are changing. Parents now really shelter their kids,” she says. “They think playing basketball is too tough. Now, when their daughters complain, ‘It’s so tough, so tiring!’ their parents just take them home.”
Shooting guard Chen Yu-mei (陳玉梅), 24, has also seen interest in women’s basketball diminish among potential players and their parents during her eleven-year playing career with the Taiyuan team. “The current generation of women do not really approve of basketball because there is not much of a future in it for girls,” she says. “After the club league, there is nowhere to go, and Taiwan’s performance has not been good in the World Cup or the Asian Games in recent years.” Particularly disheartening is the dwindling fan support. “The crowds are not as enthusiastic as before,” she says, “because we haven’t been winning international competitions.”
Chen joined the club league in her second year of middle school and now manages the Taiyuan team in addition to playing. She says it is difficult to play basketball while also competing academically in Taiwan’s cutthroat school system. Most junior high students spend virtually all of their free time in cram schools or doing homework in order to prepare for the high school and college entrance exam. Only those scoring in the top one-third are accepted into public high school. “It is impossible to study well and play basketball—the sport takes too much time,” she says. As a result, many parents will not let their daughters divert their energies away from schoolwork.
Social pressure also keeps girls off the basketball court. “The common perception is that sports are not good for girls,” Chen says. “In our culture, girls are supposed to be quiet.”
For these reasons, finding players has become a major headache for the women’s league. “You must put a lot of time and effort into finding high school players,” says Yang Chen-ho (楊鎮河), head coach for Formosa Plastics. “Then after a little while, they are gone and you have to look all over Taiwan again.”
The teams recruit most of their players from middle school or high school teams. Once recruited, players live in the team dorm and go to class during the day and practice at night. The teams practice up to four hours a day, seven days a week, all year-round, breaking only for holidays and several short vacations. Coach Lai says the tough schedule is necessary to keep Taiwan teams competitive with other Asian teams. “The Japanese and Koreans practice even more than we do,” she says. “If we didn’t practice so much, we’d certainly lose to them.” After practice, they eat and sleep in the dorm, and abide by curfews and team rules. Long-time players continue this lifestyle through college and even beyond graduation, when some begin working at day jobs.
Despite the drawbacks, there are still many benefits for young women willing to devote themselves to basketball. Players are provided free housing, meals, and transportation. Students receive tuition for high school or college plus a small allowance; graduates receive a monthly salary of US$1,100 to US$1,500 (although some supplement this with outside work). And after their playing career ends, many are offered jobs with the sponsoring company. The government-owned Taiwan Power Co., for example, attracts top players with its policy of providing sought-after jobs to retired players.
Lai says the teams can be a good influence on the young women, many of whom come from poorer families. “Basketball is a good road to follow,” she says. “If they weren’t on the team, studying together, they might turn out badly. Being on a team, it’s difficult to get into trouble.”
One major frustration voiced by women’s club teams is that Cathay Life and Taiwan Power have had the strongest teams for many years because they offer better bonuses and benefits and have the best reputations. These teams typically hire twenty to thirty players, while the other four teams sometimes can find as few as ten. This makes for a highly uneven playing field, and a rather predictable season outcome year after year.
The other five teams have turned to recruiting foreign players as a way to be competitive. The league allows each team two foreign players. Women from Mainland China, South Korea, the United States, and Russia have joined the league. This year, six foreigners have been hired, including three top U.S. players.
Foreign players can have a significant impact on a team. Travesa Gant, a graduate of Lamar University in Texas, joined the Formosa Plastics team this past summer for the prestigious Jones Cup international tournament. Not only did Gant earn tournament MVP honors, but she helped Formosa beat rival Cathay Life and teams from Japan and Canada.
But some teams consider importing players to be an unsatisfactory solution. “I would prefer we not have foreign players so we can develop our own players,” says former Taiyuan coach Chien I-fei (錢一飛). “The problem is that the top two teams monopolize the best local players.”
Formosa Plastic’s head coach Yang Chen-ho is pushing the ROC Basketball Association to create a draft system by selecting a pool of talented young players island-wide from which teams could choose players. “The last place team would have first pick, and so on,” he says. “Gradually, teams would get stronger until they are all about the same, and games would be better. As it is, a couple of teams always win the champions and a couple of teams always finish at the bottom.”
In line with the Japanese, Korean, and Mainland Chinese models, Yang also advocates taking better care of players so that they don’t have to study or work but can focus solely on their game. He would like to see players receive higher pay and guaranteed jobs with the sponsoring companies after their playing careers end.
He is also pushing the basketball association to give more financial support to high school programs, since only a small number of schools currently have a well-developed women’s basketball team. Another problem is that many coaches are not well trained. “Coaches need to be more professional,” he says. “Foreign coaches can be invited to instruct the teams.”
Such measures are needed, Yang believes, to stop the Taiwan women’s club league from falling behind its regional competitors. “We’re at about the same skill level as we were fifteen or twenty years ago, but foreign teams—Japan, Korea, Mainland China—have improved a lot,” he says. “So in comparison, we’ve gotten worse. We do not have a good system, so we haven’t made much progress.”
-by Jeffrey Wilson