Bay View’s Maggie Rakovic guards Cranston East’s Erin Reilly during a game at CCRI. Many Rhode Island high school girls are trying to sharpen their skills year-round now.

The Providence Journal / Ruben W. Perez

WARWICK — There were four basketball games going on at CCRI at the same time on this Thursday night.

A typical summer league, right?

Well, not exactly.

Unless you think the sight of eight high school girls’ teams playing on an August night is typical.

But if you need any more evidence that women’s basketball is in a big-time growth spurt, it’s all here, two nights a week. There are 24 teams here in this league run by the women’s basketball program at CCRI, this league that’s become the summer showcase for girls basketball in Rhode Island, this league that’s visible testimony that this is no longer a high school sports world where boys play and girls cheer.

Would have anyone believed a decade ago that 24 girls teams would be playing two nights a week in a summer league, with another eight to 10 of them playing in league in Providence, more playing in a league in Narragansett, and some teams from northern Rhode Island that play in a league in Foxboro?

Not on your life.

Then again, a decade ago, you would have to have been a visionary to forecast the explosion of girls’ basketball.

“Fourteen years ago, I ran a girls camp in North Smithfield,” said Sean Reddy, the La Salle coach, “and I had one girl from North Smithfield and eight from Lincoln, and that was because my wife taught in Lincoln. This summer, I had 90 girls at the La Salle camp.”

In fact, state champion La Salle has three teams playing this summer, two in Warwick, and one in Providence. Bay View, the other Rhode Island powerhouse, has two teams in Warwick.

“It used to be that girls’ basketball was played from November to March,” Reddy says. “That’s no longer the case.”

Sports are always evolving, changing. And who really knows what has propelled the amazing growth of women’s basketball around here? Was it the Connecticut Sun and the WNBA? Was it the more and more women’s college basketball on television? Was it just the natural evolution of things, one more example of the specialization of all sports now, the fact they’ve all become year-round sports now? All of the above?

There’s no question we’re in a brave new world.

And one who has been on the ground floor of this, both as a player and a coach, is Christina Batastini, a talented enough player at Classical High School in 1996 to be given a scholarship to Stanford University, one of the elite women’s programs in the country.

When she was in high school, Batastini had to go to Connecticut to play on a high-level AAU team, and remembers summer basketball for girls around here as little more than recreation.

Now she runs her own basketball school at Lincoln School in Providence, where she is the coach, and sees a different culture than the one she remembers when she was in high school.

“There are more good players and more interest and you almost have to play year-round now,” she said. “And when La Salle plays Bay View now in the summer, it’s an event. When I was in high school we might get three or four people watching a summer league game.”

That’s the thing that jumps out at you in this league, the fact that it feels like an event, with all the teams, and all the kids, and all the parents who watch. The sense that it’s a real league with real coaches and real referees, a real league in which they keep score and it’s important how you play.

It was Marcus Reilly’s idea. Now the new coach of the Rhode Island College women, he was the women’s coach at CCRI a year ago and he came up with the idea last summer of a high school girls league that would not only introduce kids to CCRI, but also grow the game around here.

“It’s become a monster,” said Nick D’Orio, the assistant women’s basketball coach at CCRI. “From the teams that want to play, to the hits on the Web site, there’s more interest than we ever thought there would be. The knock was women wouldn’t play year-round, wouldn’t play pickup. This just disproves that theory.”

Some of this, certainly, is that success breeds success.

Reddy remembers when the first AAU team started for Rhode Island girls, and it seemed that every time they went to a regional tournament they’d get killed. Now, there are many AAU teams around here, and the R.I. Breakers regularly play in national tournaments. And now every year, Rhode Island girls are going off to play in college somewhere in ways that few ever did before.

More important, there is a basketball culture around here now that simply didn’t exist, not to this extent anyway.

Listen to Jenna Lemoi.

She is a junior at Lincoln School, who says that outside of her family, basketball is the most important thing in the world to her. In addition to playing twice a week in the summer week, her team also practices once a week, and she’s already been to two camps at Lincoln School and a overnight “point-guard camp” at Bryant.

She’s been going to basketball camps since the eighth grade, and now when she plays in this summer league she knows a lot of girls from camps and clinics. This sense that she is a part of something that is big and getting bigger, this sense that she’s a part of the growing culture of girls basketball in Rhode Island.

“I think it’s great,” she said.

But she really doesn’t even have to say that.

The 24 teams here in this summer league at CCRI tell you that.

breynold@projo.com