In college, Debbie Millbern Powers was a teammate of Tara VanDerveer, today the winningest coach in women’s college basketball. In tournaments, she faced Margie Wright, who went on to a sparkling career as a college and Olympic softball coach. Fellow Indiana University student Jane Pauley interviewed Debbie for a journalism class. Legendary men’s basketball coaches Branch McCracken and Bobbie Knight cheered her on from the sidelines.

            But this isn’t what Debbie wants to talk about. She’s not a name dropper by nature.

            What Debbie wants to talk about is the heartbreak of being a female athlete before females were allowed to be athletes.     

            “In my soul, I knew I was an athlete, and yet they told me I couldn’t be,” she recalls. “I knew it, and yet I worried, ‘Is something wrong with me’?”*

Girls need not apply

            You see, Debbie’s life spans Title IX. Her childhood was spent in the before-times, and she graduated college in 1973, just one year after Title IX was enacted and years before it made any real difference to women’s athletics.

            When you read her memoir, Meeting Her Match: The Story of a Female Athlete-Coach, Before and After Title IX, you’re overwhelmed by her feelings of utter dejection each time her aspirations are thwarted. Hers is not a saccharine story of bucking up and carrying on.

            Take, for example, the moment in fourth grade when the school was holding tryouts for a basketball team. “Boys only,” the teacher told her.

            “Tears began to flood my eyes. I sat down on the gym floor and sobbed as the feelings of injustice and desperation engulfed me,” she said.

            Or the time a teacher took her aside at recess and told her to stop playing with boys and act more like a girl, that it wasn’t normal for a girl to be as competitive as a boy. This time, she blinked back the tears, but the teacher’s words stung.

             Act more like a girl? What does she mean by that? I am a girl. I’m a girl who happens to like playing sports.  

            Each time her ambition to play basketball was thwarted, those blocking her way had the same advice for her: Why don’t you go out for cheerleading?**

            “I don’t want to be a cheerleader, I don’t want to play hopscotch, I want to play basketball!” she says she remembers thinking.

Is that all there is?

            Even in her own home, her mother had different rules for her, the daughter. Shooting hoops on the driveway with her brother and his friends after school, Debbie was called in to set the table for dinner. Not her brother, just her.

            “These were the days of Miss America pageants, of expectations that girls grow up, get married and learn how to make a good meatloaf,” she says. “I thought, Is this what my life is going to be? I’m going to be horrible at it. I want to play on a team. I want to play basketball.”

            On the night of her brother’s first basketball game, Debbie watched from the sidelines, consumed with jealousy. In the dark of her bedroom that night, she ached with the sorrow of her broken dreams. She prayed a girlish but sincere prayer of desperation.

            “Dear God,” she prayed. “I have a huge favor to ask… could you please turn me into a boy during the night so I can play on a real team?”

Dad to the rescue

            Fortunately, she had someone on her team, not someone who could turn her into a boy, but someone who could see her despair — her father. One day he came home with a box under his arm, a present for his sports-loving daughter. Her first pair of basketball sneakers!

            “I felt like Cinderella in her magic slippers!” she said.

            Still, she had doubts about herself.

            “You just didn’t feel normal back then if you wanted to play sports,” she says. Yet, in truth, the character building that sports provide don’t confine themselves to one gender.

            “The camaraderie of working together as a team, making friends, setting goals, learning to lose gracefully and win humbly. In sports, you develop the attributes that make us good human beings,” she says.

            Well, we all know that now. But a few people, like Debbie, knew it long before everyone else. I’ll continue her story in the next blog post.

                                    _________________________

* Quotes in the present tense (says) are from my telephone interview with Debbie on April 19, 2022. Quotes in the past tense (said) are from her book, Meeting Her Match: The Story of a Female Athlete-Coach, Before and After Title IX (Leeper Publishing, 2014). https://amzn.to/37GDadG

** Nothing against cheerleaders! I was one once.