Well before there was the WNBA, before there was an NCAA women’s tournament and before women were playing basketball in the Olympics, Bonney Lake’s Joan Rupp was making a name for herself on the hardwood.

“I was good,” said Rupp, 77, with a twinkle in her eye. “It was the best six years of my life.”

As a member of Dempsey’s Texas Cowgirls in the 1950s, Rupp was a pioneer of women’s basketball, barnstorming from town to town all across the country in a Mercury Station Wagon playing everywhere from small high school arenas to the most famous courts in the nation.

“We’d come into the town and play the big shot who owned the stores,” she said, adding that sometimes they’d play the local Jaycees or Lions clubs, sometimes the local high school teams.

Like the Harlem Globetrotters, with whom they sometimes performed, the Cowgirls would wow the crowds with their ball-handling routines or Trotter-like pranks of hogtying one of the opposing players and then got down to the serious business of basketball.

“We wanted to beat the guys,” she said. “And the crowd would go nuts.”

Rupp grew up in Marshall, Minn., a self-described “ornery and determined” young woman who started playing basketball in 1952, her senior year of high school, after the Cowgirls played a game in her hometown.

“I though ‘Dang, I want to do that,'” she remembered.

She talked to the coach and the following year traveled to Beloit, Wisc., to try out for a spot on the team.

“I thought I was good, but I wasn’t good enough and they sent me home,” Rupp said.

Rupp got a job as a file clerk in Minneapolis and continued to practice throughout the year and in 1954 Rupp made the cut and was officially made  Texas Cowgirl.

At close to six feet tall, Rupp played forward and sometimes center and has several newspaper clippings of her out-reaching her male counterparts during the jump balls that opened each game.

The Cowgirls, led by coach Dempsey Hovland, were a barnstorming team, going from town-town on a circuit that led all across the country.

“We went East Coast to West Coast, did our own driving,” Rupp said.

They traveled in a station wagon with “seven or eight grils piled in there,” Rupp said, driving from town to town and state to state, wherever the next game took them.

“I’ve been in every state in the union in the five years I played,” she said.

In some towns they played in high school gymnasiums or YMCA clubs while in the big cities, the ladies often took center stage on some of the biggest arenas in the world.

“Madison Square Garden (in New York City) and the Cow Palace (in San Francisco) were my favorites,” Rupp said.

Along with local politicians and former high school stars, the Cowgirls took on all comers. In one memorable game in Wisconsin, Rupp and the Cowgirls took on Green Bay Packers legend Bart Starr.

“We played against him; he was a real man,” Rupp remembered.

The Cowgirls even traveled with the Globetrotters and met and played with legends Meadowlark Lemon and Wilt “The Stilt” Chamberlain, fresh out of college and before his professionals days in the NBA. Rupp even got a firsthand look at some of the issues tearing at the nation when their bus would pull into a town in the deep south and the African-American players were forced to keep to their own locker rooms and water fountains.

“It was sad when I think of it now,” Rupp said. “They were gentlemen.”

Playing with the Cowgirls even took Rupp around the world as part of a USO tour, playing for the troops all over Europe and back again.

“We got to go overseas,” she said., “Spain, Turkey Greece.”

Alaska was a special thrill for the ladies.

“They had dogsleds for us to take us to our barracks!” she said with a laugh.

During her time traveling, Rupp said there were only a few instances where they had any trouble. The team never got lots of flat tires and Rupp said their coach was notoriously cheap and the team often ran out of gas.

Once, in Chicago, the girls luggage was stolen off the top of the car and they had to rely on the kindness of strangers to get back on their feet.

The Cowgirls season ran from October to April and the girls often played up to 160 games a year. And According to the detailed notebooks Rupp keeps in three large boxes with the rest of her playing memories, the Cowgirls won about 60 percent of their games while she was on the team.

Rupp said the girls made about $80 a week and in the offseason, she continued to work as a file clerk to make ends meet.

Finally, after six years on the road, Rupp had had enough.

“I retired in ’61,” she said. “I was so tired.”

After retiring, Rupp moved out Oregon where her siblings lived and got a job working at a chainsaw factory for 10 years until she hurt her back and had to leave. She moved to Seattle and began working at Boeing with her brother.

In 1994, Rupp retired from Boeing and bought a small place in Bonney Lake, where she still lives alone today, still “ornery and determined” as ever.

Rupp has battled and defeated breast cancer and had a slight stroke earlier this year that has slowed her pace a little, but not her excitement for her career.

She loves to watch the Seattle Storm, the local WNBA team, but admits they play an “entirely different type of basketball” then back in her day and despite her height said in today’s league she would only be a guard, instead of center.

A private woman, Rupp said most of her friends don’t even know she was part of a pioneering group of women in sports who paved the way for many of today’s superstar athletes like Sue Bird and Lauren Jackson.

Rupp said she has no regrets from her playing days, with a single exception.

“I think back Joan, you should have stayed longer,” she said. “It’s the best six years of my life.”