We met Debbie Millbern Powers last time, a girl who desperately wanted to play basketball. But at every turn, she was told it wasn’t possible. Couldn’t she just try out for cheerleading and be grateful for it?

            For a ninth grade essay, Debbie wrote about her dream of being a professional basketball player and play on the U.S. Olympic women’s basketball team. Although she got an A- on the essay, her teacher added a note.

            “There are no such teams for girls,” she wrote. “With your athletic talents, you might want to switch to cheerleading.”

            Not again!

            “It’s hard to explain to girls today that we couldn’t play sports back then,” Debbie says. “It’s just the way it was. We sat in the bleachers and cheered for the boys, and then we played at recess.”*

One shining moment

            In fact, Debbie never got the chance to play for her schools. That is, with one exception. One day when she was in ninth grade, some of her teachers watched her shooting baskets in the gym.

            A school assembly was coming up, the teachers said, and the male teachers were playing an exhibition game against the boys’ ninth-grade basketball team. Would she play for the teachers’ team?

            “That would be cool!” she said. And it was. For the first time, at the age of 14, Debbie heard cheering and knew it was for her. It was a taste of heaven, she remembers.

            Although Debbie knew now that she had no path to professional sports, she wasn’t deterred.

            “If there’s no tomorrow,” she remembers thinking, “I want to take this at least as far as I can.”

            While still in high school,Debbie finally found an outlet playing for a women’s league on a team sponsored by a local business. And when she went off to Indiana University, she finally had her basketball tryout and easily made the team.

The ungrateful wretches

            Even there, it was an old, old story. The girls didn’t have official uniforms. They pressed numbers onto white shirts and added their own red shorts. Their gym had no bleachers, so spectators had to stand along the sidelines. 

            The “didn’t have” list went on: No locker rooms, no weight rooms. No food budgets at tournaments — the players made sandwiches and ate them in restrooms. At one tournament, they slept on the floor of a classroom, bringing their own sleeping bags and pillows. While they eventually got uniforms, their away uniforms were the wrong color — random closeouts that the school got on clearance. No trainers or medical facilities. When Debbie injured her knee senior year, she iced and nursed it on her own. (Fifteen years later, she learned that she’d torn her ACL and needed surgery.).

            Meanwhile, the men had the new gym, luxury buses, hotel rooms, food budgets, basketball shoes and uniforms that were laundered for them. The women were told to be grateful for what they had. Apparently, sports were still a man’s right but only a concession for women.

            In her senior year, Debbie’s team won their regional final, with hopes for a national title. She and teammate Tara VanDerveer – today the winningest coach in women’s basketball history! – roomed together in a small bunk bed dorm room. After a wrenching defeat, their basketball dreams died.

The upside to missing out

            But that’s not the end of Debbie’s story.

            Fortunately for Debbie, she discovered a love of teaching and coaching. She graduated with a physical education degree and took a teaching and coaching job with Muncie (IN) Northside High School.

            “What other choice did I, or others like me, have?” she says. “There was still no professional women’s basketball. We didn’t see women sportswriters or women sportscasters on TV. Being a PE teacher and a coach was the only way forward.”

            And here’s the unexpected twist about Debbie’s dilemma. The women who straddled Title IX, missing out on its impact, forged an entirely new path. If women were eventually going to play professional sports, they needed professional coaching. Women like Debbie — coaches like Debbie (and Tara) — created a world of opportunity for those following in their wake.

            We’ll finish up Debbie’s story next time. In dramatic fashion, her high school coaching career culminated in a tournament with a surprisingly relevant question: Is it fair for boys to play on girls’ teams?

                                                                ____________________________

* 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