The Edmonton Grads
1915 to 1940. A high school team that won 96% of its games for 25 years
In 1914, Percy Page, a teacher at McDougall Commercial High School in Edmonton, Canada, started coaching the school's girls' basketball team. In 1915 they won the provincial championship. After graduating, the players kept playing together as the Commercial Graduates, soon known as the Edmonton Grads.
For the next 25 years the Grads were almost unbeatable. Their official record is 502 wins and 20 losses, about 96%. They won the Underwood Trophy, the North American championship, at its first edition in 1923 and kept winning it until 1940. They also beat seven of the nine men's teams they played.
Women's basketball was not yet an Olympic sport, but the Grads played exhibition games in Europe alongside four Olympic Games and won all 24. James Naismith himself praised them as the finest team ever to step on a court. The Grads broke up in 1940, partly because the air force needed their gym, but mostly because there was nobody left to beat.
What changed
Page built the Grads on fundamentals and discipline, and almost every player came from the same high school, so the system stayed the same as players came and went. About 50 women played for the team over 25 years, and the winning never stopped.