Tag Archives: educational equality

Goal!

This week, after a lengthy battle that stretched out over years, the U.S. women’s soccer team finally won its fight for equal pay.

            Under the terms of a collective bargaining agreement, World Cup prize money will be pooled between the men’s and women’s teams and split equally among all players. In addition, the teams will also share equally the money U.S. Soccer makes commercially and at events. The agreement is in force until 2028.*

            “There were days that I didn’t think we were going to get it across the line. But we are here, and I’m just so incredibly proud of what we have accomplished and what it is going to mean, not only for the game here in the U.S. but globally,” said U.S. Soccer Federation (USSF) president Cindy Parlow Cone.**

How it all started

            So, here’s the history behind the victory. In 2019, 28 members of the U.S. Women’s National Team sued their boss, the USSF. In taking legal action, the women were following in the footsteps of female employees everywhere who have to fight for equal treatment in the workplace.

            The players chose March 8 — International Women’s Day — to file a lawsuit claiming gender discrimination. Their suit included examples of unequal pay, inferior working conditions and inadequate investment in their game.

            According to the lawsuit, if the men’s and women’s teams won all of the 20 non-tournament games they played, female players would earn $99,000, or $4,950 per game, while male players would earn $263,320, or $13,166 per game. (And yet, the men’s national team hasn’t placed in the World Cup since 1930, when they finished third).

            Another way to visualize the inequity: The men’s 2018 World Cup winner, France, took home $38 million, while the next year, the U.S. women’s team took home only $4 million for its win. In fact, the women’s team has dominated the soccer world, winning four FIFA Women’s World Cup titles since the competition’s founding in 1991.

            After their FIFA win in 2015, the women’s team became the first women’s sports team to be honored with a ticker tape parade in New York City. That team included Megan Rapinoe, Carli Lloyd, Abby Wambach, Alex Morgan, Shannon Boxx and Hope Solo, among other players who are household names today.

            Yet that team filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In the filing, the women pointed out (among other things) that for making the World Cup roster, women received a bonus of $30,000, while the men got $68,750.

The play’s the thing

            Of course, the players would rather just focus on their game, but they felt they had no choice but to force USSF’s hand. Historically, the issue of pay inequity is an added burden women have had to carry.

            “From age 14 or 15, these guys are not thinking about, nor do they have to think about, anything other than being an amazing soccer player. That’s their job; that’s their sole focus,” said Rapinoe. “I have to do everything I have to do on the field. Then I have to do everything else to prove to you that that’s enough.”***

            Inequities have existed from the very beginning of women’s soccer, but everything came to a head in the run-up to the 1996 Olympics. That year, the USSF planned to award female players bonuses only if they won gold medals, while male players would get bonuses for every gold, silver or bronze finish.

            “We cannot reward mediocrity,” huffed USSF Executive Director Hank Steinbrecher.****

Lockout (read: boycott)

            In protest, nine members of the 1996 women’s team — led by Julie Foudy, Michelle Akers and Carla Overbeck — boycotted the Olympic training camp and were subsequently locked out. In the end, they forced the organization to offer equal bonuses. And the women took gold at the 1996 Atlanta Games.

             “The stance is a constant: ‘Look, you guys are lucky to play. You guys should be grateful to play,’” said Akers, who retired in 2000.*****

            So, there we are, the old, old story. Men have a right to play, women need to fight for it. And as you can see, fight they do!

                                                ________________________________

* I’m in the middle of telling journalist, sportscaster and Medill professor Melissa Isaacson’s story, but just had to break in with this news! We’ll pick up Melissa’s story next week on #TitleIXTuesday.

** Jeff Carlisle, “USWNT, USMNT get equal split of World Cup bonuses in new CBAs,” ESPN (May 18, 2022).

*** Liz Clark, “Double-earners: The U.S. women’s soccer team is fighting for greater equity while playing for a fourth World Cup title,” The Washington Post (June 11, 2019).

**** Lindsay Parks Pieper and Tate Royer, “The biggest fight facing the U.S. women’s soccer team isn’t on the field,” The Washington Post (June 14, 2019).

***** Anne M. Peterson, “History repeats: US women’s soccer team still in wage fight,” AP New (April 17, 2016).

Aquasprites anyone?

Recently, I talked with veteran journalist, Medill lecturer and former ESPN sportscaster Melissa Isaacson about her athletic experiences on and off the field.

Melissa’s life is interesting because it straddled Title IX. She began to see changes while she was still young.

“By junior high school, we suddenly saw girls teams starting up,” she says. “We were peripherally aware of Title IX. We followed Billie Jean King’s career and knew she was part of a national dialog. We realized we were the first generation of girls to get to compete.”*

But old ideas die hard. In 1907, the state of Illinois (where Melissa grew up) had banned girls’ interscholastic competition. Overall, the only approved sports for girls at the time were those considered ladylike.

“Girls could play the genteel sports like tennis, badminton and golf,” she says. “Anything that wasn’t bumping boys out of the gym.”

Melissa and her friends hung out at the Little League fields, peering through the chain link fences, wanting desperately to be on those fields, but knowing that they couldn’t be.

Even after Title IX passed, team sports like basketball — Melissa’s favorite sport — were still considered unladylike. For girls just a few grades ahead of Melissa, only one sport available to them, a synchronized swimming sport called Aquasprites. The team had no trouble attracting members.

“Girls were desperate for the opportunity to play any sport at all,” Melissa says.

Competition, that dirty word

Melissa remembers “play days,” organized one-off events in which girls from different schools were brought together and randomly assigned to teams. The emphasis wasn’t competition — the girls were just supposed to play for fun. By not being allowed to play consistently with the same team members, the element of competition was muted.**

She also remembers after-school “postal tournaments.” In these events, sponsored by the U.S. Postal Service, schools gave girls an occasional chance after school to compete in sports like swimming, bowling and “basket-shooting.”

But still, competition wasn’t really the point. After the event concluded, girls’ individual times were written on postcards and mailed to the Illinois High School Association (IHSA), the governing body for state sports.

“If the participants were lucky, they’d find out the results, or who ‘won,’ a month or two later,” Melissa says. “It really cut down on the drama of competition.”

Still, Melissa persevered. She had an inner drive to compete that was all consuming.

“I would endure anything, any pain, to play. I was always thinking, ‘What more can I do? Where can I find more opportunity?’” she says. “I could have played all day, all night. I would have gone to the gym in my pajamas at midnight to practice if I had to.”

Finally… basketball!

By the time she got to high school in 1975, change was in the air. Despite Title IX, her high school, Niles West in suburban Chicago, had been resisting adding girls sports. The principal had repeatedly petitioned the state to allow girls sports like swimming, volleyball and softball. Basketball was out of the question — there was no way girls would be allowed to take up boys’ valuable gym space.

“I can’t reason with those crew cuts,” he complained about the IHSA.

But in the winter of 1974, his efforts paid off. Melissa’s school was allowed to add a girls basketball team, and a PE teacher, Arlene Mulder, stepped up to coach girls sports.

Once basketball became the focus of her world, Melissa found ways to take advantage of any opening. She and some of her teammates, along with members of the boys team, would head for the gym at 4 a.m. to practice together, but she had to keep that to herself.

“It was all a big secret. I was considered weird, too much like a boy. I felt like I was walking a tightrope all the time,” she recalls. “My mother wasn’t against it, and the boys kept the secret, but society was still against it.”

To Melissa, Arlene Mulder became more than a coach; she was a mentor. She and the girls on Melissa’s basketball team became the subject of her book, State: A Team, A Triumph, A Transformation. It’s the story of the team’s 1979 state championship title. We’ll pick up Melissa’s story next time.

                                         ________________________________

* Quotes in the present tense (says) are from my telephone interview with Melissa Isaacson on April 19, 2022. Quotes in the past tense (said) are from her book, State: A Team, A Triumph, A Transformation (Chicago: Agate Midway, 2019). https://amzn.to/3yBR0cf

** In my March 26 blog post, Debbie Millbern Powers also talks about play days. She chafed against the regulated play that kept girls from developing their skills and teamwork in the way boys could. https://www.nancybkennedy.com/cookies-and-punch-with-the-enemy/

Gold medal lessons

Today, we’re talking track and field. And you can’t talk about that sport without talking about Willye White.

            White was born in 1939 and raised by her grandparents in Money, Mississippi. The  town of Money became infamous 16 years later as the place where Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American boy, was brutally tortured and murdered. So you can imagine the environment in which White grew up.

            To add to her family’s income, White picked cotton, but she made time for sports.

            “I started chopping cotton when I was 10,” she said. “I got paid $2.50 a day for 12 hours. The only way I could get any recognition was through sports. Sports gave me an escape. It kept me off the street.”*

            At the same age, White began training in her segregated schools as a sprinter and in the long jump. In 1956, as a high school sophomore, she qualified for the Olympics, where she took home silver in the long jump at the Melbourne Games. She also participated in the 1960 Rome Olympics, although she didn’t medal.

            But in White’s world, medals aren’t what the Olympics are about.

            “The Olympic movement taught me not to judge a person by the color of their skin but by the contents of their hearts,” White said.**

Olympic-sized racism

            In contrast to White’s worldview, Olympic officials of the time held an odious view of Black female athletes. In the 1940s, Olympic official Norman Cox suggested they should compete separately.

            “The International Olympic Committee should create a special category of competition for them,” he proposed. “The unfairly advantaged hermaphrodites, those less-skilled, child-bearing types with largish breasts, wide hips and knocked knees who regularly defeated normal [meaning white] women.”***

            Norman Cox could have learned a few things from Willye White.

            When it came time for college, White started at Tennessee State University, where future Olympian Wilma Rudolph was a teammate. But White chaffed under the controlling thumb of her coach, Ed Temple, and she left after six months. In 1960, she moved to Chicago, where she became a nurse.   

Racing toward freedom

            Two years later, in 1962, the iconic Penn Relays opened competition to women. The renowned track-and-field event began in 1895 and is hosted annually by the University of Pennsylvania at Franklin Field in Philadelphia. It’s the oldest and largest track and field competition in North America. Upwards of 15,000 high school athletes compete before crowds topping 100,000 spectators. For 67 years, it was a male-only affair.

            In its inaugural year, the only women’s event was an invitational 100-yard dash. Willye White was invited to compete.

            Nine women raced, and White won with a time of 10.9 seconds. Along with the other eight women, White broke open the Relays. The next year, an Olympic development relay was added and in 1964, the 440-yard relay. By 1976, the Relays had expanded women’s competition to include a full schedule of events.

            White went on to become the first five-time Olympian in the history of American track and field. After her Olympic days were over, she concentrated on her education, earning a bachelor’s degree in public health administration at Chicago State in 1976.       

            She won 13 national indoor and outdoor titles and set seven U.S. records in the long jump. She was a member of more than 30 international track and field teams and won a dozen Amateur Athletic Union long jump titles, and was elected to 11 halls of fame. She coached Team USA to the 1981 World Cup and the 1994 U.S. Olympic Festival. She founded a business as a fitness and sports consultant and started a foundation that provided after-school programs, health care and summer camps for children.

            But, despite all the acclaim, White considered her greatest accomplishment was simply to find her place in life. A place where her color and her background didn’t constrain her.

            “Athletics was my flight to freedom: freedom from prejudice, freedom from illiteracy, freedom from bias,” she said. “It was my acceptance in the world.”****

                                                _________________________

* Frank Litsky, “Willye B. White, the First 5-Time U.S. Track Olympian, Dies at 67.” New York Times (February 7, 2007).

** United States Olympic and Paralympic Museum, Hall of Fame. https://usopm.org/willye-white/

*** Susan K. Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sports (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 111.  

**** Litsky, “Willye B. White.”

Dropping the ball at Ball State

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.”

                                  ____________________________

* 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.

An epic Battle of the Sexes

A Mother’s Day tennis match played 50 years ago set the stage for Billie Jean King, an athlete who made people sit up and pay attention to women’s sports.

            In 1972, the year Title IX became law, tennis player Billie Jean King ruled the world. That year, she was Sports Illustrated’s Athlete of the Year — not female athlete, just athlete, period. (Ironically, in her youth, she had been a star softball player, but her parents urged her to take up tennis, because it was considered more ladylike.)

            That Sports Illustrated title must have rankled Bobby Riggs, a tennis star of the 1930s and ‘40s. He had been ranked first as an amateur in 1939 and first as a professional player in 1946 and 1947, and in his career had won six major titles. But, as 1973 dawned, he was 55 years old and the limelight had faded.

            Certain in the superiority of male athletes and dismissive of the women’s game — and always eager for publicity — he challenged King to a match. She was 29 years old and in the prime of her career, yet she turned him down.

            He turned next to Billie Jean’s greatest rival on the court, Margaret Court. On May 13, 1973, the two faced off in a contest dubbed the “Mother’s Day Match.” Riggs gallantly handed Court a bouquet of roses and then proceeded to trounce her in just 57 minutes.

            Riggs went on to taunt the entire women’s tennis world, challenging any player who dared to a match. “Male Chauvinist Riggs” was itching for a fight.

            That was just the goad King needed to accept the challenge.

It’s Cleopatra v. Caesar

            On September 20, 1973, King took on Riggs in a wildly publicized match that ABC dubbed the  “Battle of the Sexes.” Leading up to the match, Riggs proclaimed that women belonged in the kitchen and the bedroom. King called Riggs a creep. (Riggs definitely won the mud-slinging contest.)

            The match was a huge media event, with more than 30,000 spectators at the Houston Astrodome and another 90 million people watching on television. Legendary sports broadcaster Howard Cosell called the match.

            King was more than aware that everyone was watching. She was afraid of what would happen if she lost.

            “‘See, they don’t deserve a chance. They don’t have it,’” she worried society would say. “‘They can’t walk and chew gum at the same time, and this Title IX thing, let’s keep it in the classroom and not in sports.’”*

            King made a Cleopatra-style entrance on a gold litter carried by shirtless men dressed in togas. Riggs arrived in a rickshaw wheeled in by attractive female models — Bobby’s Bosom Buddies — wearing tight tee shirts that said “Sugar Daddy.” King gave Riggs a baby pig and he gave her a Sugar Daddy lollipop.

            King beat Riggs handily — 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 — and took home the $100,000 prize money. Hers was a performance that forced people to pay attention to women’s athletic pursuits.

All the world is her stage

            But King’s influence wasn’t confined to the Astrodome. In 1971, she was the first female athlete to earn more than $100,000 in a single season. But male tennis players earned infinitely more, and King lobbied hard for parity. In 1973, due to her efforts, the U.S. Open became the first major tennis tournament to award the same amount of prize money to both sexes.

            King retired from tennis with 39 Grand Slam career titles, 20 at Wimbledon. She went on to coach Olympic tennis and co-founded the World Team Tennis League, becoming the first woman commissioner in professional sports. In 2006, the home of the U.S. Open was named in King’s honor. In 2009, President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the first female athlete to be so recognized.

            “ She is the single most important person in the history of women’s sports,” said tennis star John McEnroe.**

                And let’s not confine her achievements to women’s sports. Earlier this year, King tossed out the coin at Super Bowl LVI to mark the 50th anniversary of Title IX.

            “It is an honor to stand with these outstanding student athletes and celebrate the 50th anniversary of Title IX on one of the world’s biggest stages,” she said.***

            I’d say that honor was fitting.

                                                ______________________

*  Jennifer Frey, “’King-Riggs ‘Battle of the Sexes’ of 25 Years Ago Helped Level the Playing Field,” The Washington Post (September 20, 1998), p. D-6.

** Speech at the ceremony of the renaming of the United States Tennis Association’s National Tennis Center the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center (August 28, 2006).

*** “Billie Jean King performs coin toss at Super Bowl LVI,” U.S. Open website (February 13, 2022).

Facing the freakin’ boys

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.

Comes the reckoning

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

In the bleak before-times

In college, Debbie Millbern Powers was a teammate of Tara VanDerveer, today the winningest coach in women’s college basketball. In tournaments, she faced Margie Wright, who went on to a sparkling career as a college and Olympic softball coach. Fellow Indiana University student Jane Pauley interviewed Debbie for a journalism class. Legendary men’s basketball coaches Branch McCracken and Bobbie Knight cheered her on from the sidelines.

            But this isn’t what Debbie wants to talk about. She’s not a name dropper by nature.

            What Debbie wants to talk about is the heartbreak of being a female athlete before females were allowed to be athletes.     

            “In my soul, I knew I was an athlete, and yet they told me I couldn’t be,” she recalls. “I knew it, and yet I worried, ‘Is something wrong with me’?”*

Girls need not apply

            You see, Debbie’s life spans Title IX. Her childhood was spent in the before-times, and she graduated college in 1973, just one year after Title IX was enacted and years before it made any real difference to women’s athletics.

            When you read her memoir, Meeting Her Match: The Story of a Female Athlete-Coach, Before and After Title IX, you’re overwhelmed by her feelings of utter dejection each time her aspirations are thwarted. Hers is not a saccharine story of bucking up and carrying on.

            Take, for example, the moment in fourth grade when the school was holding tryouts for a basketball team. “Boys only,” the teacher told her.

            “Tears began to flood my eyes. I sat down on the gym floor and sobbed as the feelings of injustice and desperation engulfed me,” she said.

            Or the time a teacher took her aside at recess and told her to stop playing with boys and act more like a girl, that it wasn’t normal for a girl to be as competitive as a boy. This time, she blinked back the tears, but the teacher’s words stung.

             Act more like a girl? What does she mean by that? I am a girl. I’m a girl who happens to like playing sports.  

            Each time her ambition to play basketball was thwarted, those blocking her way had the same advice for her: Why don’t you go out for cheerleading?**

            “I don’t want to be a cheerleader, I don’t want to play hopscotch, I want to play basketball!” she says she remembers thinking.

Is that all there is?

            Even in her own home, her mother had different rules for her, the daughter. Shooting hoops on the driveway with her brother and his friends after school, Debbie was called in to set the table for dinner. Not her brother, just her.

            “These were the days of Miss America pageants, of expectations that girls grow up, get married and learn how to make a good meatloaf,” she says. “I thought, Is this what my life is going to be? I’m going to be horrible at it. I want to play on a team. I want to play basketball.”

            On the night of her brother’s first basketball game, Debbie watched from the sidelines, consumed with jealousy. In the dark of her bedroom that night, she ached with the sorrow of her broken dreams. She prayed a girlish but sincere prayer of desperation.

            “Dear God,” she prayed. “I have a huge favor to ask… could you please turn me into a boy during the night so I can play on a real team?”

Dad to the rescue

            Fortunately, she had someone on her team, not someone who could turn her into a boy, but someone who could see her despair — her father. One day he came home with a box under his arm, a present for his sports-loving daughter. Her first pair of basketball sneakers!

            “I felt like Cinderella in her magic slippers!” she said.

            Still, she had doubts about herself.

            “You just didn’t feel normal back then if you wanted to play sports,” she says. Yet, in truth, the character building that sports provide don’t confine themselves to one gender.

            “The camaraderie of working together as a team, making friends, setting goals, learning to lose gracefully and win humbly. In sports, you develop the attributes that make us good human beings,” she says.

            Well, we all know that now. But a few people, like Debbie, knew it long before everyone else. I’ll continue her story in the next blog 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

** Nothing against cheerleaders! I was one once.

A forgotten force

Last week, I listened in on a conversation with author Sherry Boschert about her new Title IX book, 37 Words: 50 Years of Fighting Sex Discrimination. She threw out a name I hadn’t yet heard: Margaret Dunkle.

            Too often, we simplify great movements by choosing one name to ascribe success to and ignore all the others whose hard work brought results. I think this has happened to Dunkle.

            From 1972 to 1979, Dunkle worked with Bernice Sandler on research for Title IX for the Association of American Colleges and then in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the government agency that became responsible for enforcing Title IX.

            Dunkle and Sandler, “The Godmother of Title IX,” worked to identify areas of sex discrimination in educational settings. At first, the focus was on women being barred from graduate and professional schools — medical, law, business schools. It was perfectly legal for schools to use quotas, limits, even marital status, to block women from education and careers.

Unearthing the athletic identity

            Very quickly, though, Dunkle found that discrimination was most visible in the realm of athletics. There, discrimination was easy to identify — women’s sports were almost nonexistent. And athletics had a strong, emotional pull on the national psyche.

            “Athletics was becoming a metaphor for strong, able women on the playing field and in life,” Dunkle said.*

            In those days, there wasn’t any data to unearth and analyze. To make the case for Title IX, researchers had to compile their information one anecdote, one campus news clipping, one phone call at a time. “We had to rely on a story or an example that rang true,” Dunkle said.**

            The discrimination Dunkle’s team unearthed is well known today. Paltry to nonexistent budgets for women’s athletics meant that female athletes had to hold bake sales and sell candy or Christmas trees to fund their teams. They rode on rickety buses, while men’s teams rode cushy chartered buses. They practiced in the early morning or late at night, when men weren’t using facilities. They had no scholarships, no training facilities, no medical attention, no uniforms, no nothing.

            Some of the cases of discrimination are jaw dropping today. In one case, Boschert said, researchers found that women had to use athletic tape that the men had used and discarded. In another, Dunkle found that a college didn’t allow a woman to use their handball courts unless a man signed her in. Universities routinely barred women from taking coaching courses, so that on graduation, they were considered not qualified to coach, and therefore, had no path for professional advancement.

Killing off those myths

            Before addressing these blatant issues, Dunkle and her research team had to first battle centuries-old myths about women participating in sports.

            “Women have not been encouraged to participate in athletics at least partly because the traits associated with athletic excellence — achievement, self-confidence, aggressiveness, leadership, strength, swiftness — are often seen as being in contradiction with the role of women,” she wrote in a seminal report. “Myths die slowly.”***

            It was hard to convince even women themselves that they deserved the same opportunities as men.

            “The inequities have been so great, women have gotten so little in the past, that many women will fear a backlash from the men if they push too hard,” Dunkle said. “Once they [women] get crumbs, they’ll feel like they’re gorging themselves. It takes a while to get rid of double standards.”****

            The injustice seems so blatant, doesn’t it? But this was all new thinking at the time. Dunkle was a Title IX trailblazer, just as Bernice Sandler was. Just as Reps. Edith Green and Patsy Mink were. Just as Sen. Birch Bayh was.

            Thank you, Sherry, for introducing me to this remarkable woman! My copy of your book is on its way now. I can’t wait to read it!

                                                ____________________

* “Margaret Dunkle: Writing Title  IX’s Playbook on Sports.” Sherry Boschert’s 2016 interview with Margaret Dunkle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyBGZ3oPyr8

** Kristine Cornils’s 2012 “Top of the Morning” interview. A local show highlighting the achievements of remarkable Maryland natives. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pYWq9m3mUs&t=382s

*** Sandler and Dunkle, “What Constitutes Equality for Women in Sports: Federal Law Puts Women in the Running” (Association of American Colleges, Project on the Status and Education of Women, 1974). Prepared for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

**** Jay Searcy, “Foe of Men’s Myth Braces for Battle,” New York Times (July 14, 1974), p. 25.

NOTE: Sherry Boschert’s website and blog can be found at http://www.sherryboschert.com/

Undercover marathon women

Yesterday, runners competed in the Boston Marathon, a race that has been run since 1897. Race organizers were inspired by the Olympic marathon of 1896, when the Games were reintroduced into modern times.

            But, of course, at its inception, women were excluded from the Boston Marathon. It wasn’t until decades later, in 1972, that a women’s race was finally introduced.

            But two women didn’t wait around for that to happen.

Bobbi, not Bobbie

            In 1966, Roberta “Bobbi” Gibb ran the Boston Marathon, but she had to do it undercover. The Boston Athletic Association’s rule book didn’t say anything about runners’ gender, so she didn’t hesitate to train for the event.

            “I didn’t know the marathon was closed to women,” she said. “I set about training in nurses’ shoes with no instructions, no coach and no books.”*

            In February 1966, she mailed a request for an application form. Her answer came back from the race director — under international athletic rules, Will Cloney said, women can’t compete in the marathon, and besides, women aren’t physically capable of running that far.

            “I could run 40 miles at stretch,” she scoffed. “I’d see the top of a distant mountain, small and pale blue in the distance, and I’d spend all day running there, just to stand at the top.”

            That April, Gibb took a bus from her home in California to her parents’ house just a few miles outside Boston. On the day of the race, she donned a swimsuit and a pair of men’s shorts, and her mother dropped her off at the starting line. There, she hid in the bushes until the starting gun went off. At that, she jumped out and started running.

            She ran a conservative race, determined to finish, no matter what. To her delight, fellow runners and spectators cheered her on. Despite her restraint, she finished the race in 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds, ahead of two-thirds of the male runners. The governor of Massachusetts was at the finish line to shake her hand.

Dame K.V. registers

            The next year, a second woman ran the marathon. Kathrine Switzer managed to register for the race using her initials, K.V. Switzer. A student at Syracuse University, she had been training with Arnold Briggs, a 50-year-old former marathon runner who had entered the Boston Marathon 15 times. But even he was angry about Switzer’s intent.

            “No dame ever ran the Boston Marathon!” he shouted at her.**

            But Switzer reminded him about Gibb and insisted she could go the distance. Finally, Briggs relented and agreed to help her train.

            “Hot damn, I thought, I have a coach, a training partner, a plan, and a goal: the biggest race in the world—Boston!” Switzer told herself.

            She did indeed prove her endurance, and off she went to Boston with Briggs, her boyfriend and another runner. The day was cold and raw, so she was covered up in sweats, her gender obscured at the starting line.

            Even so, word quickly got around that a girl was running. At Mile 4, Switzer heard a truck coming up and the sound of leather shoes slamming on the pavement behind her. It was race organizer Jock Semple, enraged that a woman was running. He grabbed her shoulder and tried to yank off her bib.

            “Get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers!” he shouted.

            Switzer squeezed out of his grasp, and her fellow runners shoved Semple out of the way.

            “There was a thud—whoomph!—and Jock was airborne,” she recalled. “He landed on the roadside like a pile of wrinkled clothes.”

            Switzer was scared, humiliated and angry all at once. But she kept running.

            “If I quit, Jock Semple and all those like him would win,” she said.

            Switzer finished the race in 4 hours and 20 minutes. And, by the way, Bobbi Gibb ran the race (again without registering), finishing an hour ahead of Switzer. Over the next few years, women ran the marathon unofficially until finally, in 1972, the race was opened to women. 

            Both Gibb and Switzer were aware they weren’t just running a simple race. Their feat meant so much more than that.***

            “It was a pivotal point in the evolution of social consciousness. It changed the way men thought about women, and it changed the way women thought about themselves,” Gibb said. “It replaced an old false belief with a new reality.”

                                                _____________________________

* Gibb’s quotes are from her article, “A Run of One’s Own,” Women’s Sports Foundation. She also wrote about her life in To Boston With Love (CreateSpace, 2016). http://runningpast.com/gibb_story.htm

** The quotes from Switzer’s story are from “The Girl Who Started It All,” Runner’s World (Emmaus, PA: Rodale, April 2007). She later expanded on the article in her book, Marathon Woman: Running the Race to Revolutionize Women’s Sports (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007). https://kathrineswitzer.com/1967-boston-marathon-the-real-story/

*** Switzer went on to help organize more than 400 international women’s races, using data from the competitions to lobby the International Olympic Committee to add a woman’s marathon to the Games — which they did in 1984. In 2017, Boston Marathon officials retired Bib #261.