Editor’s note: The following story is Part 1 of a two-part story. The second part will appear in the Journal Tribune on Saturday, April 7.

BIDDEFORD — Women’s basketball has evolved a lot in the past 20 years, most notably at the collegiate level as the NCAA women’s tournament, while not as popular as the men’s event, demands a lot of media attention.

In the past five years, the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team made prominent national headlines as the Huskies roared to a 90-game winning streak, which is the longest in men’s or women’s NCAA Division-I history.

One Saco woman said she likes to think she was a small part of that historic evolution.

Martha Olsen, 66,is a part of women’s basketball history. From 1964-65, she played for the All-American Redheads, the first professional women’s basketball team that barnstormed across the world playing men’s teams.

The Redheads won their fair share of games against their male counterparts and helped paved the way for women’s basketball today, Olsen said.

“We were the pioneers,” Olsen said.

Today, the Redheads are waiting to hear if they will be inducted into the 2012 Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame ”“ a recognition Olsen feels they deserve.

“The Redheads should get recognized,” Olsen said. “We were the leadership.”

The Redheads began in 1936 when C.M. “Ole” Olson decided to compile a collection of top female basketball players to travel the country and play men’s squads. Wilbur Surface coached the first team in 1936, during a time when Americans didn’t feel women would fare well against men on the basketball court. The Redheads won nearly 50 percent of their games that season, proving the critics wrong.

They played by men’s rules, which in that time was unheard of. Women’s rules required that six players were on the court at a time for each team and only three were allowed to cross the court to the offensive side.

“The Redheads were certainly trailblazers,” said Gary Stevens, athletic director for Thornton Academy. “They were the pioneers. They were the people who went out, riding around in vans and bringing the women’s game to the people.”

The league went defunct in 1986 for financial reasons, but it paved the way for today’s women’s game, Olsen said.

“Back then women were not considered athletes,” Olsen said. “I think we helped change that perception.”

Olsen, who grew up in Saco and played high school basketball for Thornton Academy, vividly remembers when she got the call from legendary coach Orwell Moore to join the Redheads.

She had starred for TA in the early ’60s under the tutelage of long-time coach Dorothea Vlahokas.

Vlahokas contacted the Redheads to tell them of her star player.

“I got a knock on the door from Moore,” Olsen said. “He had a contract and asked if I would be willing to play with them and go to Arkansas to be a part of the team.”

It was a big decision, said Olsen, who was 18 at the time and hadn’t traveled far from Maine.

She told her parents of her decision and headed for Carway, Ark. Her first stop was New York City. She said she chose to stay the night in the city and continue her travels to Arkansas the next day after arriving at the Port Authority.

“I had never been there before,” she said. “I didn’t know if I would ever see the place again, so I took advantage.”

She stayed at the Hotel Dixie near Times Square and quickly learned that she was a little out of her element.

“When I arrived at the hotel, I tipped a man for helping me at the hotel. I gave him $5, which was almost all of the cash I had because I was using traveler’s checks,” she said. “When the porter helped me to my room with the bags, he held out his hand for a tip. I only had a little bit of change to give him and it was then that I realized I had tipped a wino on the street.”

Olsen ran into a high school classmate during her day in New York City and together they went to Times Square and saw the Merv Griffin show.

The next day, she arrived in Arkansas to begin her career as a Redhead.

Her only season was memorable and she had fun, but she also struggled, she said.

The Redheads traveled for six straight months and “that takes a toll on you,” Olsen said.

She decided to leave the team after the 1965 season when she learned she had fibromyalgia, a medically unexplained syndrome characterized by chronic widespread pain and a heightened and painful response to pressure, according to Web MD.

“It was too strenuous,” Olsen said. “The wear and tear on your body was hard, and the stress was just too much. We traveled by bus all the time, lots of times sleeping on the bus. We would also play five to six games in a week. It was demanding.”

At times, the competition could be hard to take.

Olsen recalled a game where the man who was guarding her kept flailing his elbows after grabbing a rebound. She asked him to stop, but he did it several more times, eventually hitting her hard in the head.

Olsen said she could play that game, too.

“He wouldn’t stop, so I butterflied him, too,” she said. “I nailed him in the groin. He yelled at me and asked why I did that and I told him that I had to do something because I had asked him to stop his rough play because we were just trying to have fun.”

Playing against men and under men’s rules was fun, Olsen said, but at times the games would become too serious.

“The men would think they were going to beat us, but a lot of them learned pretty quickly that we could play,” she said. “When this happened, some of them would get very rough and mean during the game. That took some of the fun out of it.”

The team was also under constant surveillance, especially when walking down the street in a town where they had just beaten a men’s squad.

“We were watched 24-7,” Olsen said. “We didn’t know what could happen, especially if some of the men were mad at us.”

Olsen lived in Boston for a while and then moved back to Saco. She worked for several years in the area and then in her early 30s helped put together a charity basketball game to help raise money for the Saco recreation building.

She organized a women’s team to play against the Saco police department. She said she remembered the start of the game when she jumped for the ball against Saco detective and future Saco police chief Richard Nason, who stood 6-foot-3.

“The ball went into the air and I jumped up with him,” she said. “We were eye-to-eye and he asked me ”˜What are you doing up here?’ I loved it.”

What Olsen got from that game was more than a chance to raise money and show off her basketball skills. What she got was her parents’ ”“ especially her father’s ”“ appreciation.

She admits that she didn’t have the strongest relationship with her parents and that fundraising game was the first in which they had seen her play.

“My father told my mom that he never realized I could play the way I did,” she said. “That meant a lot.”

Olsen will be anxiously awaiting the results of today’s nominations for the Basketball Hall of Fame. The Redheads have some stiff competition against whom they are competing, such as NBA legend Reggie Miller and coaching legend Rick Pitino.

Regardless of what happens, however, Olsen’s son, Dan Libby, said he feels his mother and her predecessors are a major part of women’s basketball history.

“I’m quite proud and impressed of what she’s done,” he said. “They deserve their recognition.”

— Contact Al Edwards at 282-1535, Ext. 323.