Last week, Karen O’Connor Self shared her experience as an 11-year-old girl who wanted to play on her middle school boys basketball team. That made me curious — did any other girls sue for the right to play a sport?

            Yes, indeed! Thirteen years after the passage of Title IX, one young girl challenged her state’s ban against girls playing on boys teams that were considered contact sports. Contact sports were defined as those sports whose “main activity” involved bodily contact. In most states, football, wrestling, boxing, rugby, ice hockey and basketball were all closed to mixed-sex sports teams.

            But Jacqueline Lantz wanted to play football.

            In 1985, Jacqueline sued for the right to try out for the junior varsity football team at Lincoln High School in Yonkers, New York.

            “I love football,”’ she said. “And I wanted to play. I wanted to know what it was like to be on the field rather than to be a spectator.”*

            For both her junior and senior years, Jacqueline attempted to try out for the all-male squad. Both times, the coach turned her away because of New York’s ban on mixed-gender teams in contact sports.

Coach v. Court

            Jacqueline’s mother filed a complaint in U.S. District Court in Manhattan seeking to have the ban stricken on the grounds that it violated both Title IX and the 14th Amendment’s right to equal protection under the law — the same argument made five years earlier by Karen O’Connor Self.

            The Lantzes also sought an order that would allow Jacqueline to join the team before the suit was decided. Lincoln had a no-cut policy, so Jacqueline would automatically be placed on the squad, although that didn’t mean she would play in any games.

            Jacqueline’s desire to play a rough contact sport like football was puzzling to some people. Why would a girl want to play a sport like that? Good question!

            “It’s so much excitement. It seems so great, they figure, ‘Why not do this?’” said Tom Tutko, a sports psychology professor at San Jose State. “They’re willing to risk it. They don’t care about social embarrassment.”**

Who needs protection?

            On October 30, 1985, the decision came down. The court said that Title IX did not apply in Jacqueline’s case, because Title IX covered only programs that receive federal funding. Even if Title IX had applied, the law specifically excluded contact sports.

            The court conceded that the state had proved its point that the ban was intended to protect the safety of girls. The state’s data showing that “as a general rule,” boys were stronger and more physically developed than girls at that age was persuasive.

            But the court didn’t stop there.

            “These data, however refined, inevitably reflect averages and generalities,” the court concluded. “No girl, and simply because she is a girl, has the chance to show that she is as fit, or more, to be on the squad as the weakest of its male members.”

            That being the case, the court concluded, New York State has no right to exclude an athlete from competition simply because of her gender. The 14th Amendment prevailed!

Teaming up for the future

            Jacqueline never did get to suit up with the team. The season ended just two weeks after the ruling. Yet she wasn’t upset.  

            “I still won because other girls will now be allowed to play,” she said after she heard the outcome.

            And, in fact, other girls have shown that they do want to play this sport. For the 2018-19 school year, 2,404 girls played tackle football on boys teams at the high school level.*** Admittedly, that’s a tiny percentage of the 1,006,013 high school boys who played football that year, but, then again, sports isn’t always a numbers game. It just takes one to win.

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* Gary Kriss, “Yonkers Student to Sue in Effort to Join Male Football Team,” New York Times (September 29, 1985), Section 11, p. 1.

** Roger Campbell, “Girls in Football: It Isn’t Working Out,” Los Angeles Times (October 30, 1986).

*** Source: National Federation of State High Schools Association. The data is from the latest year for which statistics are available. It’s interesting that boys’ participation is dropping year to year, perhaps in part because of current-day safety concerns.