Trans women playing women’s sports is a controversial topic today. But who gets to play on what team is not a new dilemma.

            In the 1970s, Debbie Millbern Powers took a position as a PE teacher and a coach at Muncie Northside (IN) High School. As a female coach, she was required to coach three sports — both junior varsity and varsity teams — and sponsor a sports club. Seven commitments!

            (Male coaches at her school coached one sport, and some were assistant coaches for another sport. Debbie had no assistants.)

            Debbie chose basketball, tennis and volleyball. For her club, she chose cheerleading. What irony! All her life, Debbie had been told she should channel her athletic ambition into cheerleading, and not the basketball she longed to play.

            “It is more acceptable. It is more feminine,” she’d heard all her life.*

            Debbie took on all her coaching roles with enthusiasm, but it was with the volleyball team that she eventually made headlines.

We have to do what?

            By 1975, in her third year of coaching, Debbie’s team had gelled. Going into tournament season, they were 18-1. They attracted enough attention that they even got their own uniforms. (If you follow this blog, you’ll know that women mostly had to cobble together their own uniforms, were given close-out uniforms in random colors, or wore men’s cast-off uniforms.)

            The team won their tournament games, until finally they got to the championship match. They were elated!

            But the girls’ excitement turned to disbelief when they found they’d be going up against South Bend Clay High School, a team that had two boys on it. One of the boys, Brian Goralski, wanted a scholarship to play volleyball in college, but Clay had no boys team. So he and a friend were placed on the girls team.**

            Debbie was livid.

            “We had to play a team with freakin’ boys on it!” she says in disbelief.

            She couldn’t believe that after fighting so hard for women’s sports, and finally getting onto the field via Title IX, women were being replaced by men.

            “How dare two high school boys deny two females spots on their school’s team! How dare they invade our new arena of opportunity!” she fumed.

            But Title IX worked both ways, the powers-that-be decided.

            “The coach of that team took a lot of grief,” Debbie says. “The other coaches and their players were angry. Parents were screaming and yelling at her. But she had no choice — the athletic director forced her to play the boys.”

It’s a nail-biter

            The match began, and it looked like the 6-foot-3-inch tall Brian and his male teammate might overpower Debbie’s team. They won the first game 15-6, but lost the second, 14-10.

            It all came down to the third game. With 20 seconds left on the clock, Clay had the lead 13-12.

            “Now is when we make history!” Debbie urged her girls in a time-out.

            Debbie’s strategy was to keep Brian stranded in the back row so he couldn’t spike the ball. And her team did indeed make history. When the buzzer sounded, Northside had won 15-13.

            You can just imagine the celebration! Debbie gives all the credit to her players.

            “They were little bulldogs!” she says. “They were more motivated. They were bound and determined to beat that team.”

How about it, Brian?

            But decades passed, and Debbie still hadn’t come to terms with the injustice. She tracked Brian down and called him. How did it feel, she asked him, to take a spot that should have gone to a girl? Not only that, but what about the dozens of girls on other teams that lost to his team, losing their chance at a championship?

            “’I was 17 years old,’” he replied. Debbie could hear the shrug of his shoulders in his voice.

            So, when Debbie hears about trans women playing on women’s teams today, she has strong opinions.

            “I am very much opposed,” she says. “Whether or not they’ve taken hormones, men’s bodies are bigger. They have athletic advantages over women that can’t be erased.”

            She doesn’t know what the answer is, only that it can’t be for athletes who are biologically male — whatever their gender identity — to take spots that women are entitled to.

            “It’s not fair that again men are getting into our space,” she says. “It’s a space we fought so hard for.”

            Some high-level athletes are working on this very issue: How can we make sports fair for everyone? We’ll talk about it on another day in another 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

** Brian did indeed get his athletic scholarship. None of the girls had that opportunity.