Pioneers exude pride, not envy, for Valkyries and how the pro game is today for women

San Francisco Chronicle​

14-07-2025

Whatever sadness and regret the old San Francisco Pioneers carry, they checked at the door of the bar Sunday when they gathered for a reunion.
Sure, the promising basketball careers of these nine women and other teammates got cut short when the Pioneers went out of business after two seasons, but there's no crying in basketball.
The Women's Professional Basketball League, America's first attempt at women's pro basketball, lasted just three seasons (1978-81). The Pioneers joined the league after its first season.
But these OGs didn't come to Rikki's Women's Sports Bar in the Castro to cry in their beers. They came to drink to the glory.
Gerry Booker recalled her first day at open tryouts in the Potrero Hill gym. Undrafted and unknown, Booker simply showed up. One of the men running the tryout told her to play defense, then he dribbled hard into her. Booker took the charge without flinching.
''Sign her! Sign her right now,'' Booker remembers the man saying, and so it was that she became the Pioneers' enforcer.
'Nobody messed with us because of Booker,' said Cindy Haugejorde, the Pioneers' All-Star forward.
They blazed the trail, these women. They played in the spotlight briefly, then got yanked back to the real world. Booker became a schoolteacher — music and drama — back in her home town of Charleston, S.C. She never talked about the Pioneers. When her former high school recently informed her that a ceremony was in the works to retire her high school jersey, Booker's daughter Krin looked at her mom and said, 'Who ar e y ou?'
All Krin knew was that mom is crazy competitive.
'Candyland, whatever, she just won't lose,' Krin said. 'She will slap the ball from a 3-year-old.'
They're all creeping up on 70 now, these girls of winter, but the decades-old memories are fresh.
Haugejorde recalled her first practice. She's about 6-2 and was standing under the hoop next to 5-9 Cardte Hicks.
'Cardte went up for a rebound,' Haugejorde said. 'She didn't get the rebound, but she grabbed the rim. With both hands.'
Oh, Hicks had hops. She was the first woman to dunk in a game, in a pro league in Holland in 1978. For the Pioneers, she was an All-Star, a scorer and rebounder who sometimes sang the national anthem before the games at the Civic Center Auditorium (now the Bill Graham Auditorium).
The brief experience changed the Pioneers' lives.
Roberta Williams played for Milwaukee in the league's first season. In her scrapbook are a few bounced paychecks from that team. Then she got traded to the Pioneers, where the checks were good, if not large.
'This was my dream spot,' Williams said. 'I stayed here.'
She played one season in Italy, then returned to San Francisco and became a high school counselor, then a construction worker. A plasterer by trade, she did work on the Getty mansion. So she worked for the Gettys twice, since Ann Getty was a minority owner of the Pioneers.
Basketball wasn't something these women did, it was something in their blood.
Anita Ortega was not well treated by the WBL, but her good memories cancel the bad.
Ortega had led UCLA to a national AIAW (precursor to the women's game becoming part of the NCAA) championship and was the Pioneers' star that first season, their leading scorer (24.1) and playmaker (5.2 assists). But in the second season, when Ortega protested a pay cut from her $15,000 salary, team coach Dean Meminger traded her. Ortega got to her new team in Minnesota just in time to walk out with her new teammates to protest bounced paychecks, and that was the end of her WBL career.
Ortega became an assistant college coach, then had a double career as a police officer in Los Angeles and a Pac-12 referee, a job from which she retired just last season.
Basketball lifers, these women. Molly Bolin (now Bolin Kazmer) arrived in town that second season as a free agent. 'Machine Gun Molly' was the Pioneers' marquee player, the prototype for Caitlin Clark.
Molly's fame and her high-volume shooting might have sparked resentment, but she fit in beautifully with the Pioneers.
'It's so amazing I was able to bond with these teammates,' she said. 'We had a blast. It was so much fun.'
The get-together at Rikki's was organized by Maya Goldberg-Safir, a freelance writer and creator of 'Rough Notes,' which covers the history of women's basketball. She has been intrigued by the spiritual connection between the Pioneers and the newly minted Golden State Valkyries.
When the WBL folded, there was a 15-season gap before women's pro ball restarted, with both the WNBA and the American Basketball League. The ABL, launched in 1996, lasted three seasons. Joe Lacob, the Valkyries' owner, had a team in that league, the San Jose Lasers.
The Pioneers' contribution to the evolution of women's pro ball was to be honored Monday night at the Valkyries game at Chase Center.
The Pioneers should be envious of the Valkyries, who need not live in fear that their league will fold underneath them. But to a woman, the Pioneers love the Valkyries.
'I went to their first game, and I was like a little kid,' said Booker. 'I had tears in my eyes.'
Anna Johnson, who was born and raised in Oakland, bought Valkyries season tickets.
Ortega feels a bond with the Valks.
'Their coach (Natalie Nakase) and I were walk-ons at UCLA,' Ortega said.
The 45 years between the Pioneers' death and the Valkyries' birth makes it hard to connect the two, but the OGs know in their hearts that they got the party started.
Hicks, the first dunker, standing straight and tall despite multiple surgeries and a recent cancer scare, said it best:
'We're the ones that gave them the ball.'