Tucked away in a family collection for decades was a maroon blazer, its three pockets crowded with embroidered badges and dates. It belonged to Kath Williamson (née Wright), captain of the Queensland women's basketball team at every Australian Championship from 1955 to 1959. That blazer is now the starting point for one of the most important pieces of basketball history Queensland has produced: Kath's Blazer, written by Terry Doherty and Bob Godbold.

READ AND DOWNLOAD KATH'S BLAZER HERE

Why a blazer?

When Doherty and Godbold set out to trace the early years of women's basketball in this state, they hit the same wall every sports historian runs into: the written record is patchy, and what does exist tends to focus on the men's game. Kath's blazer changed that. Its embroidered pockets, tracking her years as a player, captain, coach and umpire, gave the authors a physical timeline to work from and a reason to start digging through newspaper archives association by association, town by town.

What they found was a story that had never really been told properly. Women's basketball in Queensland didn't arrive as a tidy, top-down initiative. It grew out of grassroots persistence in the early 1950s, often against real resistance about what women should and shouldn't be playing.

Where it all started

The book traces basketball's development across the state: Charters Towers, where Phil Schober built a genuine competition for women from 1950; Brisbane, where Agnes Doo fought to establish American rules basketball for women and later founded the Queensland Women's Amateur Basketball Association; and Kingaroy, Townsville, Toowoomba, Rockhampton, Cairns, Mackay and Ayr, each finding their own path into the game through the mid-to-late 1950s.

Agnes Doo emerges as the central figure of the era. She pushed for interstate competition, secured the rights to print the American rules in Australia, and was instrumental in getting Queensland to the very first Australian Women's Basketball Championship in Melbourne in 1955. Her daughter, Kath Williamson, captained that inaugural team, and every Queensland team for the next four years.

Why this matters

Kath's Blazer isn't just a nostalgic look back. It fills a genuine gap in the record of how this sport became what it is today in Queensland. It gives overdue recognition to the women who built the game from nothing, often while juggling resistance from the sporting establishment of the day, patchy facilities, and long train trips to compete. Many of them, including Kath Williamson (inducted into the Queensland Basketball Hall of Fame in 2025), Ellen Coates and Waverley Young, are still with us and were able to contribute directly to this second edition.

It's also a reminder that Basketball Queensland's history is richer and more complicated than a single thread, and that preserving it properly takes real, patient work.

Thank you, Terry and Bob

Basketball Queensland is enormously grateful to Terry Doherty and Bob Godbold for the work they've put into this project. Both are lifelong contributors to the sport in this state, Terry as a referee and referee coach, Bob as a representative player and coach, and their care for getting this history right shows on every page. Tracking down 1950s newspaper archives, chasing family photo collections, and interviewing players now in their eighties and nineties is not quick or easy work, and it's work that very easily could have been left undone. We're lucky it wasn't.

Kath's Blazer (Second Edition) was released in April 2026 and continues to be updated as new records and photos come to light.