Granny Basketball National Championship

A gentle game for women of a certain age.

National Tournament – July 30-31

The 2022 National Granny Basketball Tournament will take place July 29-31 at the Hy-Vee Arena in Kansas City, MO.  This event is being co-hosted with the Kansas Meadowlarks team.  We anticipate this event will be the largest tournament yet for the League, with 20-24 teams expected.
For information about any of the tournaments, contact director@grannybasketball.com

History Of Granny Basketball
Granny Basketball® started rather accidentally.  Several
years ago, my father who was a girls’ basketball coach in Iowa in the ’40s and ’50s, was writing his memoirs, and I was helping.  He described the first girls game he saw in Bondurant, Iowa, in 1920, including the costumes the girls wore, the three courts and the other rather prissy rules they had to follow back then.

In addition to league play, organizations invite us to play against their town teams to help raise money for various projects.  We play men, women, young, old — whatever — but they have to play by our rules So far, we have raised upwards of $200,000 for charities, schools, booster clubs, leukemia victims, etc.

We’ve held an Iowa State Tournament annually since 2005 — first in Lansing and then in West Des Moines, which is sponsored by the Iowa Senior Games.  In 2017, Granny Basketball became a new event in the Kansas Senior Games.  Our first National Tournament was held in Minneapolis in 2008; several years in Branson, Missouri; Norman, Oklahoma in 2014, 2017 and 2018; and Nashville, Tennessee in 2015 and 2016.  In 2019, nationals was co-hosted by the Kansas Gray Tornadoes in Lawrence, Kansas.  The tournament was set to return to Lawrence in 2020, but was cancelled to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2021 national tournament is currently set for Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, co-hosted by the Harpers Ferry Fireflies.  The 2022 national tournament is set for Kansas City, Missouri, co-hosted by the Kansas Meadowlarks.

If you are interested in playing, please join the fun! In addition to players, we also need referees, coaches and scorekeepers.  Granny Basketball, Inc., is a 501(c)3 non-profit corporation.