In my last blog post, we met 10-year-old Margie Wright, a girl who was excited about playing in her first Little League game. She’d made the team, the only girl to make the cut.
But as the game got underway, a group of angry women bullied the coach into dropping her from the team, because she was a girl. The year was 1962 — ten years pre-Title IX.
A young girl’s dream
On that spring night in 1962, when the women’s club of Warrensburg, Illinois, told Margie Wright she couldn’t play with the boys on a Little League team, it didn’t make any sense to her.
Margie lived for baseball. Her family were avid St. Louis Cardinals fans, no one more so than Margie. She wore a Cardinals baseball hat every single day. She had big plans to be on the team one day.
“I used to think that I could be a pitcher for the Cardinals,” she says. “I didn’t realize then that you had to be a guy to play baseball.”*
When Margie tried out for the Little League team, she wasn’t nervous. She knew she’d make the cut. The kids in her town played baseball at the local parks almost every day.
“All of my friends were boys,” she recalls. “And I was better at baseball than any of them were.”
Yet instead of joining her friends in the dugout that spring night, Margie ended up alone in her room, crying and cut off from everything she’d dreamed of. She didn’t know why she had been singled out and humiliated in front of her friends. She didn’t understand why she wasn’t allowed to play.
A pivot to softball
Fortunately, Margie’s mother understood her daughter’s heartbreak. Margie had a brother and two sisters, and her parents fostered and adopted other children, both boys and girls. She gave Margie’s father an order.
“You’d better start a softball league, so our girls can play,” she told him.
Her father agreed. Although he worked two jobs to support the family, he took on the role of founder, director and coach of a girls softball league.
And so, Margie’s athletic career began with softball. She played softball all four years of high school, and for two years she was on the cheerleading squad. But she always assumed that her athletic pursuits would end at graduation.
“I just thought I’d be getting married, like everyone did back then,” she says. “I’d never thought of a life outside of our little town.”
But during the summer before her senior year, Margie played in a summer softball league, where she met a few older girls who were playing basketball and softball for their college, Illinois State University.
Margie came home from practice that day and announced to her parents, “I have to go to college!”
“I couldn’t believe it!” she says. “I didn’t know you could play sports in college.”
Her parents looked at each other, puzzled, and told her gently that they didn’t have the money for that. And, of course, back then, there was no such thing as an athletic scholarship for girls.
What was Margie going to do? Would her athletic ambitions end here? We’ll pick up her story in the next post.
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* Margie Wright’s story and all quotes in the post are from my interview with her on February 19, 2021.
Mom was surprised that I wanted to go to college. We had enough funds for one year at Houghton. Then I had to earn my own way. Just the way it was back then. When my daughter came along I told her she didn’t have a choice — she was going to college.
Yes, it was different then. College was more affordable. I worked summers and on campus during the school year and covered probably half the cost of the four-year degree. My parents would never have considered a loan. But it’s almost impossible for kids to earn enough to pay their own way now.