The women whose lives straddled Title IX lost out on opportunities, but created them for the women who came after them.

We’ve been following the life of Debbie Millbern Powers, a basketball player who had no path to professional play after college. She chose the closest thing possible — teaching physical education  and coaching.

Although she mourned her the end of her playing days, Debbie was passionate about teaching and coaching. As we saw in the last post, she coached a high school woman’s volleyball team to a state championship — beating a girls team that had two boys on it!

But despite her value to the high school (Northside in Muncie, Indiana), Debbie got a rude awakening. She’d gotten engaged to Jim Powers, another teacher at the school. Happy news! But the principal burst her bubble: Married couples can’t teach at the same school, he said.

““It’s the 1970s! But it’s like ‘Little House on the Prairie!’” she exclaims.*

Fortunately, two colleges recognized Debbie’s worth. Indiana University asked her to coach volleyball, and Ball State wanted her to coach basketball. She chose Ball State.

But lest you think all was fair and equitable from then on, let’s look at the reality.

Title IX didn’t change everything

On her first day at Ball State, Debbie walked into the equipment room to see what she had. Not much, it turned out!

“I had a bag of balls and two boxes with uniforms. That was it,” she says. “The home uniforms were Ball State’s red and white, but the away uniforms were blue. They were closeouts from a sporting goods store.”

The first time her team played an away game, the opposing coach asked about the uniforms. When Debbie explained, the coach patted her on the back and said, “I understand.” Because all the women’s teams were up against it!

Debbie’s team played in the old gym, the one with the leaky roof. She swept the floors and set up the locker room for the opposing teams.

Each year, Debbie had an assistant coach, but there was no consistency, as they were different grad students every year. And their basketball experience?

“One year, I asked the grad student whether she’d played basketball,” Debbie recalls. “She said ‘No, I’m a swimmer.’ I just had to find jobs for the assistants that didn’t involve play.”

But the most egregious form of discrimination involved her pay. Ball State had hired her as a tenure-track assistant professor, with a stipend to coach. She wrote and published a textbook, conducted classroom evaluations, did research, coached. Everything she was expected to do and more.

But when her tenure evaluation came up, she got a cruel smack down.

“They told me, ‘You’re doing a great job, Debbie,’” she says. “‘But you’re a dual-income family and the male coaches are heads of household, so the extra merit pay is going to them.’”

And, despite her love of coaching, of course she never did get to play professional basketball.**

Debbie’s definition of success

Still, Debbie counts her success in different ways. The rule about married couples being unable to teach at the same school was rescinded at Northside because of her, as was the rule about boys being able to play on girls teams in Indiana. Seven players on her Northside volleyball teams earned  athletic scholarships to play at Division I colleges. She coached for five years at Ball State and earned tenure, retiring in 2006 with emeritus status after 30 years.

When she wrote her memoir, Meeting Her Match: The Story of a Female Athlete-Coach, Before and After Title IX, Debbie reflected with appreciation on her career as a player, teacher and coach.

“Reliving these memories and writing this memoir has helped me appreciate the historic time in which I grew up in regards to women and sports,” she said. “Thankfully, [in coaching] I had found my mission in life.”

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* 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

** In fact, Debbie was recruited to play in the Women’s Basketball League, a professional league that predated the WNBA. She was tempted, but the pay was $9,000 a year — a paltry sum that she would have to supplement with outside jobs. “We can get you a factory job,” the organizers told her. She turned down the offer, and the WBL folded after three tumultuous seasons plagued by lack of funding.