In the early years of Title IX, one 11-year-old girl and her family took a gender equality case all the way to the Supreme Court.
From an early age, Karen O’Connor Self was an outstanding athlete. Basketball was her main sport, but she also played soccer and baseball. She was skilled enough that she often played on boys teams. And if a coach objected, Karen’s mother set him straight.
“If a coach told my mother I couldn’t play on his team, she told him about Title IX and made him put me on the roster,” Karen says.*
Karen started playing basketball as a toddler. She learned the game from an uncle who was an assistant coach at Harvard and later head coach at Connecticut’s Fairfield University.
We’ve got a problem
All was going along swimmingly until Karen entered sixth grade at MacArthur Junior High School in Prospect Heights, Illinois. The school had a girls basketball team, but the level of play wasn’t challenging enough for her. She wanted to play on the boys team.
In August 1980, Karen’s father asked the school board to allow her to try out for the boys team.
“My feeling was, ‘Let me try, Coach,’” Karen says. “If I’m not good enough, you can cut me.”
The coach refused.
Karen and her family considered the refusal a form of discrimination that ran afoul of both her constitutional rights — of the kind guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment — and of Title IX. And so they sued.
Separate and unequal?
The school’s position was that single-sex teams didn’t discriminate. The girls had a separate but equal chance to participate in sports, so the school wasn’t in violation of either the Fourteenth Amendment or Title IX, it said.
Karen’s family won in a lower court, but the decision was overturned on appeal. Surprisingly, the case went all the way to the Supreme Court.
In the end, the Supreme Court left the verdict of the appeals court intact, and the school was victorious. The school had a right to offer “separate but equal” teams segregated by sex, the Court said.
“In essence, the Supreme Court was saying that I — that girls — had a right to participate, but not a right to grow as an individual,” Karen says.
Many people saw this ruling as the right one for girls sports. If the most skilled girls played on boys teams, girls teams wouldn’t thrive. And, conversely, if boys played on girls teams, girls would be shut out.
“Letting in one girl here or there doesn’t really help the overall picture of women in sports,” said Jennifer Nupp, then of the Women’s Equity Action League. “Equal opportunity for the individual can even retard equal opportunity for the group.”**
It turned out okay
Karen never played for MacArthur’s sixth grade girls team. The next year, her father’s job took the family to California, where she was welcomed onto the junior high boys team. But by eighth grade, the boys were gaining in height and weight, making it harder for her to compete.
“That was the first year I wasn’t the leading scorer,” she recalls.
After another move, this time to New York State, Karen had a stellar high school career at Hyde Park’s Franklin D. Roosevelt High School. She made the girls varsity team as a 14-year-old freshman. Playing with 17- and 18-year old girls provided all the competition she needed to up her game. And as a senior, she helped coach the freshman boys basketball team.
Karen went on to play basketball at Arizona State University, but a back injury ended her playing days. At age 23, she became head coach at Seton Catholic Preparatory in Chandler, Arizona. In her 30 years at the school, she has taken the team to the championships 17 times, winning 12 state titles.
“I’ve built a life around coaching girls sports,” she says. “Title IX came around at just the right time for me. We were just adjusting to the right to play, and it opened up so many doors for us.”
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* All of Karen O’Connor Self’s quotes come from my interview with her on May 13, 2022. Her lawsuit came almost immediately after the final Title IX guidelines for sex equity in sports were approved at the end of 1979.
** Ellen Goodman, “Her Aim Was Fine, Her Timing Off,” The Boston Globe (December 8, 1981), p.1. The Women’s Equity Action League was founded in 1968 to address discrimination against women in employment and education. It operated until 1989.