A moment in history: June 26, 1924

On this day in 1924, the captain of the world-famous Edmonton Grads basketball team shared the news of her engagement.

The fact that word of Winnie Martin's engagement hit the newspapers shortly after she announced it to her teammates shows just how enraptured the city was with their star women's basketball team. (The article goes so far as to publicly speculate about her fiancé's identity.)

Martin was born in 1899 in Ontario, though her family would soon move to Edmonton, where she was raised along with her two siblings. She attended McDougall Commercial High School, where teacher and coach J. Percy Page started a basketball program in 1914. When Martin graduated the next year, she and several other players wanted to continue playing the game. So, they formed the Edmonton Grads basketball team in 1915, with Page staying on as head coach and Martin serving as the team's first captain.

The Grads were a very strong team as a whole, but even then, the Edmonton Journal identified Martin as a "star performer" in 1915. As the team's captain, she led the Grads to win the provincial championship in their first year of play. At the time, any team could challenge the championship holders for the title at any point in the year. The Grads were challenged two dozen times, only losing to the University of Alberta's Varsity team in 1917, regaining the title, and then losing it to them again in 1920.

The Grads won the national championship in 1922 (a title they would hold for 18 years, only giving it up when the team disbanded). Martin also led the Grads to their first international championship, when they beat the Cleveland Favorite-Knits to win the Underwood Trophy, prevailing over other teams from the U.S. and Canada.

Women's basketball wasn't an Olympic sport at the time. But the Grads were invited to Paris in 1924 to play exhibition matches organized by the Fédération sportive féminine internationale to coincide with the Summer Games. Martin would be the only original member of the Grads to play in the Paris games, where the team dominated. They won every one of their games, often outscoring their opponents by dozens of points, and they were named World Champions in women's basketball.

Martin retired from the team that year, marrying a medical student and fellow athlete. (Her married name was Winnie Martin Tait, so it appears the rumored identity of her fiancé was accurate.) After her basketball career, Martin and her husband would get involved in a mining business in northern B.C. She also spent some time teaching at the Royal Canadian Air Force Women's Division in Edmonton during the Second World War. She passed away in Vancouver in 1974.

The Grads would continue to rack up more championships and trophies after Martin's retirement. The team has been credited with more than 430 games and just 20 losses over its history. Martin was inducted into both the Canadian and Alberta Sports Halls of Fame and remains one of Edmonton's most successful sports stars.

It's hard to beat the attention showered on the Grads, but the FIFA World Cup has turned a spotlight on another star from Edmonton: Alphonso Davies. The captain of the Canadian men's soccer team has not yet played in the tournament due to an injury, but there is a chance he will appear in Canada's knockout game against South Africa on June 28.

This clipping was found on Vintage Edmonton, a daily look at Edmonton's history from armchair archivist Rev Recluse of Vintage Edmonton.