Tag Archives: TitleIX50

And yer OUT!

The World Series is on deck and that reminds me of a baseball player I’ve been meaning to write about. Jackie Mitchell — the girl who struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.

            Virne Beatrice “Jackie” Mitchell was only the second female to play professional baseball.* Born in 1913, she learned the game from her father, which as you can imagine was unusual for the time.

            But a neighbor, Charles “Dazzy” Vance, also coached the budding player. He was a Major League pitcher who had lead the league in strikeouts for seven seasons.

            When Jackie was 16, she joined the Englettes, a woman’s team in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The lefty-throwing Jackie’s skill as a pitcher — and her sinking curveball — caught the eye of Joe Engel, also owner of the Chattanooga Lookouts, a AA minor-league team. On March 25, 1931, Engle signed Jackie to the team.

It’s game day

            On April 2, 1931, the Lookouts played an exhibition game against the New York Yankees, who were traveling north from spring training. The stands were filled with 4,000 spectators. 

            Seventeen-year-old Jackie took the mound in the first inning as a relief pitcher. The starting pitcher had given up a single and a double. Ruth and Gehrig were next in the lineup. 

            Mitchell was throwing her trademark sinker. Her first pitch to Ruth was called a ball, and Ruth swung at and missed the next two pitches. Dramatically, he asked the umpire to inspect the ball, and the umpire threw out a new one. The fourth pitch was called a strike — Ruth had struck out.

            At that, The Bambino charged the ump, while teammates hiked onto the field to lead him back to the bench. He stomped off the field and threw his bat against the dugout.

            Next up was Gehrig. Jackie threw three pitches; Gehrig swung at and missed all three. The crowd was on its feet with a standing ovation. She walked the next batter and was pulled from the game. The final score was 14-4 Yankees. But who really cared about the score!

            “Girl Pitcher Fans Ruth and Gehrig” blared the headline in the next day’s New York Times.

What’s the score?

            To this day, people debate the question: Did Jackie really did strike out Ruth and Gehrig? Engel was widely known as a stunt promoter. In the middle of the Great Depression, his team managed to attract large crowds despite the hard times.

            It was absolutely not a stunt, counters one sports historian. Being a lefty against the two left-handed sluggers gave Jackie an advantage.

            “Think about a pitcher coming in they’ve never seen before,” said Leslie Heaphy, an associate professor of sports history at Kent State. “She’s a lefty with a very deceptive pitch.”**

            About Gehrig, many people say he just wasn’t as skilled a hitter as Ruth. And people doubt the King of Swat would have agreed to a stunt that made him look bad. But Ruth tipped his hat to Jackie when he stepped up to bat. And the runner on first didn’t try to steal a base against her.

            Whatever the case, male sportswriters had a field day.

            “The very fact that such a thing should come to pass, even in burlesque, is cause for every male in the land to quake in his boots!” cried Alabama writer Ralph W. Callahan.***

You’re benched

            Baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis intervened and voided Jackie’s contract. She joined the barnstorming circuit — traveling teams that were equal parts sports and vaudeville — but in 1937, Jackie retired from the game.

            Jackie was angry that she was scorned as a sideshow act. (“She swings a mean lipstick!” smirked the New York Times). Even when she had the chance to play again — when the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League started up in 1943 during World War II — she refused. And in 1952, Major League Baseball banned women from the game. Jackie threw out the ceremonial first pitch at a Chattanooga Lookouts game in 1982, but that was it. She died in 1987.

            These stories of female firsts can be inspiring, but all too often they end like Jackie’s, a sad story of thwarted ambition. She was truly a woman scorned. That’s why Title IX is so important for female athletes. They just want the chance to play.

                                                _________________________

* Lizzie Arlington was the first woman to play on a men’s team. She pitched for the Reading (PA) Coal Heavers fifteen years earlier in 1898.

** Leslie Heaphy, “Overlooked No More: Jackie Mitchell, Who Fanned Two of Baseball’s Greats,” The New York Times (Nov. 7, 2017). Healey is also co-author of The Encyclopedia of Women and Baseball (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2016)

*** “Morning Musings,” The Anniston (Alabama) Star (March 29, 1931), p. 12. 

Collegiate fencer parries

Sometimes when your alma mater is in the news, it’s not something to be proud of. This week, I learned of a Title IX lawsuit brought against Penn State by Zara Moss, a student athlete who fenced for the university.

            In her suit, Zara accuses head fencing coach Wes Glon of abusing her and other female fencers and the university of failing to address these complaints.

            Now a graduate, the All-American fencer alleged that the team was a “hotbed for sexual assault and gender discrimination.” She accuses Glon of subjecting female fencers, including Moss, to physical, verbal and psychological abuse.

            “No one pursuing educational or athletic excellence should ever experience abuse for any reason,” said Zara’s lawyer, Chelsea Weaver.*

            The lawsuit falls under the banner of Title IX because abuse based on gender disrupts a student’s college years, making it impossible to have an equal educational experience. In many cases, abuse leads its victims to drop out of college or fail to pursue their educational or athletic goals.  

A litany of complaints

            As an example of the abuse, Zara, once an Olympic hopeful, said that Glon, who has coached at Penn State since 1985, injured her by forcing her to spar against him without protective equipment. Glon struck her as she “sobbed and pleaded with him to stop,” the lawsuit says.

            In her sophomore year, Zara suffered an ankle injury, and she says Glon forced her to return to fencing before her injury had healed. In addition, Zara says Glon bullied the female fencers about their weight, but didn’t level the same abuse at male fencers.

            “Wes’s conduct towards women fencers was no secret,” her attorney said. “Penn State athletic directors and administrators knew about or had observed Wes’s egregious behavior towards female fencers. But Wes’s prestige, influence, and connections were more important to Penn State than protecting its athletes.”**

            Zara says she suffers from an eating disorder, body dysmorphia (a mental health condition), panic attacks and anxiety as a result of the alleged abuse. She’s being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder and is under the care of a psychiatrist. She hasn’t fenced for more than a year.

They didn’t learn

            After the suit was filed, Penn State put Glon on paid leave. USA Fencing forced him to resign as president of the Central Division of USA Fencing and the U.S. Center for SafeSport, a nonprofit that monitors abuse in Olympic sports, began an investigation.  

            This is the second time that Glon has been suspended. In August 2021, USA Fencing and SafeSport placed him on a three-year suspension after Jennifer Oldham, a North Carolina fencing club owner and instructor, accused him of failing to act on a sexual misconduct complaint she brought against an assistant fencing coach. She accused George Abashidze of groping and sexually assaulting her on a flight after a national fencing competition in 1917.

            Glon was reinstated before the three years were up, after a favorable ruling from an arbitration panel. Oldham’s suit ultimately failed, the judge determining that it didn’t apply because Oldham had no ties to the university. But in 2019, USA Fencing suspended Abashidze, leading Penn State to fire him. 

            At first, Zara resisted filing a lawsuit, afraid of making life hard for women currently on the team. But she ultimately decided it was worth coming forward.

            “Things need to change,” she said.*** “I don’t want what happened to me to happen to anybody else, and the way to do that and to make sure that happens is to tell my story.”

                                                _________________________

**  Susan Snyder, “Penn State places head fencing coach Wes Glon on paid leave after allegations surface,” The Philadelphia Inquirer (September 12, 2022).

** Matt DiSanto, “Former Penn State Fencer Sues University, Coach Wes Glon for Alleged Abuse,”  StateCollege.com (April 12, 2022).

*** Bret Pallotto, “Zara Moss explains why she came forward with allegations of abuse on Penn State’s fencing team,” Centre Daily Times (April 13, 2022).

Rebel in the 1950s

In the 1970s, several dozen determined girls brought lawsuits to play in Little League baseball. But none of them was actually the first to breach the gender barrier there. That honor goes to Kathryn “Kay” Johnston Massar.

            For her story, we have to go all the way back to 1950.

            Kay lived in Corning, New York, a hot spot for Little League baseball. A Corning team had gone to the Little League World Series quarter-finals in 1948 and the semifinals in 1949. Kids could really play ball in Corning.

            But no matter how much she loved baseball, Kay realized that her gender would shut her out of the game.

            “My mother was braiding my hair one day when I was 13 years old and my brother left the house with his bat to go practice, and I started crying,” she recalled. “I knew I could play. I was just as good as him and better than some of the other boys.”*

The braids gotta go

            Kay and her mother hatched a plot. They cut off her waist-length braids, and on the day of the Little League tryouts, she borrowed a pair of her brother’s baseball pants, grabbed a baseball cap and her glove and took off out the door.

            Only one thing remained to pull off the deception. How could she sign up as Kay? She wouldn’t even be allowed to try out. So Kay borrowed one more thing — the name of a character in “Little Lulu,” her favorite comic strip. Tubby. She tried out for the King’s Dairy team across town, where no one knew her or would recognize her.

            Kay — I mean, Tubby — made the team, as she knew she would. Her father bought her a first baseman’s glove. She slept with the mitt under her pillow, breathing in the smell of the leather.         

            “I was so happy,” Kay said. “I wasn’t thinking, I’m breaking a barrier; I was just playing the sport I loved.”**

Better ‘fess up

            She played for a few weeks before her nerves got the best of her. Afraid of being discovered and kicked off the team, she confessed to her coach what she’d done. He waved off her concern. “You’re my first baseman,” he said.***

            Kay had the time of her life on that team. “I played the whole season,” she said. “So much fun, a thrill!”

            Despite Kay’s new look and name, word soon got around that a girl was playing with the boys. While her teammates didn’t seem to mind, other people did.

            “It was the other [opposing] players that would push me down or call me names, and the parents initially booed when I went out to play,” Kay said. “They could see that I was a better player than some of their sons.”****

And that’s that… until…

            Eventually, word reached Little League headquarters that a girl was playing on a team in Corning. The higher-ups put a stop to the insurrection, adding wording into the Little League rules that excluded girls. Unofficially, the rule became known as the Tubby Johnston Rule.

            That rule stood for the next 24 years, until 1974, when Maria Pepe, a 12-year-old girl in Hoboken, New Jersey, sued Little League for the right to play, and she won.

            Kay’s story was eclipsed by Maria’s for a long time, but on September 27, 2006, she threw out the first pitch at a Yankees game; she’s also thrown out a first pitch for the Oakland A’s. She is honored as a trailblazer at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. But in the end, her status as a first has always been eclipsed by her love of the game.

            “You know, I have to tell you, when I went out pretending to be a boy, I had no idea I was setting some sort of a record,” she said.† “That was the furthest thing from my mind. I just wanted to play the game.”

                                                _________________

* Joe Davidson, “Yolo County’s Nakken inspires as first base coach for Giants,” The Sacramento Bee (July 24, 2020), p. B4. About her age — years later, Kay confessed that she was actually 14 years old when she tried out for the team. In reality, she’d aged out of Little League, which was open to boys ages 9-12.

** Selena Roberts, “She had a secret,” Sports Illustrated (June 20, 2011).

*** This quote and the next one comes from the Sacramento Bee article.

**** “A Little League Of Her Own: The First Girl In Little League Baseball,”NPR Morning Edition (March 30, 2018).

† NPR

Little League firestorm

The story of how Maria Pepe, a 12-year-old girl from Hoboken, New Jersey, forced Little League to accept female players is pretty well known. I’ve written about it myself.

            But in reality, the Little League story is not one of a single girl up against a behemoth. It’s more a case of nationwide spontaneous combustion.

            In 1974, about twenty girls across the country brought lawsuits against the all-boy Little League baseball organization. The lawsuits stretched from the East Coast to the West Coast. Maria Pepe’s lawsuit was simply the first one to go to court — and the lawsuit that won the day.

            By the time that court case was settled, Maria was too old to qualify for Little League. In 1972, she had made a team, but she only played in three games before she was forced off the field.

Fighting small minds

            Meanwhile, a girl in Peabody, Massachusetts, had a similar story. When 10-year-old Janine Cinseruli showed up for tryouts in her town, she was barred from the field.

             “When I went to sign up, a guy said, ‘You can’t play,’ and I said, ‘Why?’ and he said, ‘Because you’re a girl,’” she recalled. “I was not that smart or worldly, but I knew right then it was the most ridiculous thing I ever heard of. … I said, ‘But I can play, I’m really good.’”*

            Janine’s mother, Marion, went to bat for her. She hired a lawyer and filed a complaint with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. Their argument was the same as Maria Pepe’s — that Little League uses public fields and therefore can’t exclude girls from participating.

            When the case went to court, the Suffolk County Superior Court agreed.

            “The boys used to play with the boys, and the girls with the girls, but times have changed,” said Judge Samuel Adams.**

            The ruling came down in favor not only of Janine, but also of 10-year-old Susan Wegryn of Wellesley, Massachusetts, who had filed her own suit. “Baseball is my sport, and I want to play it,” she said in court.***

            The ruling also covered Janet Bowe of Allston, Mass., and Debbie MacColl of Wellesley. Janet had been barred from tryouts, while Debbie had been accepted one year when she signed up using her initials only, but barred the next year, when she wrote out her full name. 

Storming the field

            Trailblazers like these girls don’t forge a path easily. Janine’s family was bombarded with hate mail, which they tried to ignore, but it wasn’t easy.

            “Most of the letters I couldn’t even repeat because they were obscene, that’s just what they were,” Janine’s mother, Marion, said. “But I feel they come from small-minded people and I just burn them, throw them away.”****

            Little League didn’t really see the light. They caved because the cost of the mounting lawsuits would have bankrupted the organization. They continued to insist that Little League was the “prerogative” of males only.

            Meanwhile, after the ruling, in Peabody alone, 25 girls showed up for tryouts.

            Janine celebrated her win in court by dedicating her first game to her attorney, Ruth Budd. She pitched in that game and struck out 16 batters.

            “Roger Clemens did that for the Red Sox [in 1997] and I thought, ‘Cool, I did that, too, when I was 11,’” she said later as an adult.

            Janine went on to play not only regular season Little League, but in all-star teams for the next two summers. She was even elected team captain. I guess she showed them! As did all the other ball-playing girls who started a firestorm on the baseball field.  

                                                __________________________

* Melissa Isaacson, “The girls who toppled Little League,” ESPN.com (June 24, 2014).

** Joseph M. Harvey, “Peabody girl wins Little League trial,” The Boston Globe (April 25, 1974), p. 3.

*** Paul Langner, “2 Mass. girls win Little League case,” The Boston Globe (May 19, 1974), p. 29.

**** This quote and the following one come from Isaacson, “The girls.”

Inaugural Ballers pub day!

It’s pub day for Andrew Maraniss! His book, Inaugural Ballers: The True Story of the First U.S. Women’s Olympic Basketball Team released today. Congrats to Andrew!

            The team played in the 1976 Olympics, only four years after the passage of Title IX. That surprised me, because for most women’s sports, it took years, and even decades, for teams to really get going. Women needed programs at all levels, college scholarships and high-level coaching, all of which didn’t exist at the time. In most cases, achievement did take a lot of time. This team was clearly an outlier.

Sports and social justice

            My first question for Andrew was: How is it that a guy gets to write about a women’s team? Isn’t that a job for a female author? He didn’t back away from the question.

            “Sports give me a way to write about social justice,” he says. “I write stories that expose racism, sexism and hypocrisy of all kinds. And, even today, it’s not true to say that sports have achieved a level playing field.”*

            Andrew’s earlier books established his credentials in social justice issues. His first book, Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South (Vanderbilt University Press, 2016) told the story of the first African American basketball player in the Southeastern Conference (SEC). He broke the color barrier when he began playing for the Vanderbilt Commodores in 1966.

            “My book stemmed from a paper I did in college about Perry,” he said. “His story had such an impact on me that it’s one of the few things I remember doing in college!”

            Perry Wallace’s story of persevering in the segregated South never left Andrew’s mind, and he decided to expand it into a book. A biographer doesn’t need the approval of his subject, but he contacted Perry anyway. His response? “Go for it!”

            Andrew spent the next eight years working on the book. His respect for Wallace only grew. “It was an incredible education for me,” he says. In 2017, a new version of the book released for young readers.

            Andrew’s next book, Games of Deception: The True Story of the First Olympic Basketball Team at the 1936 Olympics in Hitler’s Germany (Viking Books for Young Readers, 2021) addresses the big question of that Olympics: Should the U.S. have boycotted those Games given the dictator’s growing racial discrimination against Jewish people?

            His third book concerned bias of another kind. Singled Out: The True Story of Glenn Burke (Viking Books for Young Readers, 2021) tells the story of the first openly gay player in Major League Baseball.

            So there’s a theme here, right? Andrew Maraniss tells True Stories!

Inquiring minds want to know

            While Andrew was giving talks about the 1936 Olympic men’s basketball team, he faced some tough student audiences. 

            “I went to schools in North Carolina and Kansas, and the students there asked me the same question: ‘What’s the story of the first women’s Olympic basketball team?’” Andrew says.

            Well — that set the wheels turning. Andrew saw the 50th anniversary of Title IX coming up and thought, What better time?

            There are some lofty names on that Olympic team, many of whom he interviewed: Nancy Dunkle, Nancy Lieberman, Ann Meyers, Lusia Harris, coach Billie Moore and coach Pat Head (Summitt), who went on to become the winningest coach in women’s college basketball (only recently surpassed by Tara VanDerveer). Last week, he met another player from the team — Juliene Simpson — and she draped her silver medal around his neck!

            Yes, that underfunded, unappreciated upstart team that no one thought had a chance of succeeding went on to take a silver medal at the Montreal Olympics. The U.S. boycotted the Olympics in 1980 but the team won gold in 1984 and again in 1988. At the 1992 Games, the U.S. took home a bronze, but since that year has won gold at every Olympics, not even dropping a single game — a gold-medal winning streak of seven straight Olympics.

            Andrew hopes that by sharing the story of these pioneering women, he’ll not only inspire new generations, but also focus attention on the work yet to be done.

            “Title IX needs to be protected and expanded,” he says. “It’s important for both men and women to take an interest in women’s sports. We need to offer equal scholarships and pay equal attention. We’re not done, but this generation of women paved the way.”

                                                ________________________
* All of Andrew Maraniss’s quotes come from our interview on September 6, 2022. One last bit of information: Andrew was a baseball player in high school and was offered a scholarship to play at a D3 school (Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn.). But he was also offered a sports writing scholarship at Vanderbilt, which he accepted. He continues to work for his alma mater as special projects director for the athletic department. Visit Andrew’s website at http://andrewmaraniss.com/

He said what?!?

“Athletic competition builds character in our boys. We do not need that kind of character in our girls, the women of tomorrow.”

            Whoa! A judge deciding a pre-Title IX case actually said that. We’ll get to him in a little bit.

            In August 1970, Susan Hollander, a sophomore at Hamden High School in Connecticut, started running a mile a day, in preparation for trying out for her school’s track team. The problem? There was no girls track team at her school, so she planned to try out for the boys team.

            When school started, she began training with the boys team. The cross country coach was willing to let her compete, and the boys didn’t seem to mind. But the football coach saw her running with the boys and reported her to the athletic director.

            “The rules are against that. You have to tell her she can’t work out with you,” the athletic director told her coach, Carl Westberg.*

Going the distance

            The Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference (CIAC) got involved and ruled that Susan couldn’t run with the boys. The CIAC had banned co-ed teams, so if a girl wanted to participate in a particular sport and her school didn’t have a girls team, she couldn’t play.

            Fortunately, Susan’s father was a lawyer, and a runner himself. They brought a lawsuit against the Hamden school board. They were joined in the lawsuit by a swimmer at another Connecticut school, Jane Frederickson of Willimantic High School. Their suit was on behalf of all female athletes in the state of Connecticut who wanted to participate in non-contact sports on boys teams.

            The next year, in the spring of 1971, a judge dismissed the suit.

            “The challenge to win and the glory of achievement, at least for many boys, would lose incentive and become nullified,” wrote Judge John Clark Fitzgerald of allowing girls’ participation.**

            Not satisfied with that pronouncement, Judge Fitzgerald continued with the statement that I started my post with, one that has become infamous post-Title IX. 

            “Athletic competition builds character in our boys. We do not need that kind of character in our girls, the women of tomorrow.***

            Eye roll!

No support here

            The lawsuit went on to U.S. District Court in New Haven, this time backed by the American Civil Liberties Union. There, in January 1973, the young athletes won the right to compete.

            Judge Jan O. Newman limited the victory, however. The girls could compete on a boys team only if there wasn’t a comparable team for girls at the school. The ruling was also considered an experiment that was to last just one year. And — get this! — compliance was up to the administration at each school.

            Reaction to the ruling was as breathtakingly tone-deaf as Judge Fitzgerald’s comments.

            “If they want to play on my team, they can shower with my team,” huffed one Connecticut basketball coach.****

            And, instead of supporting the girls, the head of the CIAC’s Girls Athletic Committee trashed them.

            “It’s doubtful that either could be competitive on the same level with the boys,” Arden Curtis sniffed.

            Susan Hollander never benefited from the lawsuit she brought. At the time of the court victory, she was a senior, and her school had added a girls spring track team, which she joined. Even before the victory, she was willing to let the hubbub die down.

            “I don’t particularly enjoy all the attention,” she told the media.† “I just want to be on a team.” 

                                                ___________________________

* Lori Riley, “Changing A Mind-Set That Kept Girls Out Of Track, Cross Country,” The Hartford Courant (June 26, 2012).

** Judge’s Ruling Keeps Girl Off Cross Country Team” The Hartford Courant (April 1, 1971), p. 27.

*** Shelley Smith. “Not Quite the Game Intended,” Nike is a Goddess: The History of Women in Sports. Ed. Lissa Smith (New York: Grove Atlantic, 1998), p. 300.

**** Bob Baird, “CIAC Girls’ Activities Head Opposes Coed Competition,” The Bridgeport Post (January 26, 1973), p. 32. Arden Curtis’s quote comes from this article as well.

† Hartford Courant, p. 27.

Schlafly v. Title IX

When you hear the name Phyllis Schlafly, what comes to mind? Her battle against the Equal Rights Amendment, of course. But when her name came up in my last blog post, I got to wondering whether she’d also campaigned against Title IX.

            First, the facts of her life. I had no idea she was a lawyer. Phyllis Stewart Schlafly earned her BA and JD at Washington University and a masters at Radcliffe. She was a Republican activist who founded the Eagle Forum, a conservative political interest group that she helmed until her death in 2016 at the age of 92. She was the author and co-author of many books, including an anti-feminist book titled,  “The Flipside of Feminism: What Conservative Women Know — and Men Can’t Say.”

            Schlafly worked tirelessly to defeat the ERA, arguing that it would erase traditional gender roles and force women out of the home. She — a working woman. How ironic! She stoked fears that single-gender bathrooms would disappear (well, she saw the future), force courts to approve same-sex marriage (again, ahead of the curve), that women would be forced to serve in military combat roles and that older women would lose their Social Security benefits.

            Her campaigns were made for TV. She dropped off homemade pies to legislators with the slogan, “I am for mom and apple pie.” Ironically, Schlafly and her sister had been raised by a working mother. Odile Stewart was a librarian and teacher. She supported the family through long stretches of her husband’s unemployment during the Great Depression.

Fly, Eagle, fly

            Schlafly used the Eagle Forum as a platform for her views on Title IX. In 2003, she ridiculed Bernice Sandler, the “Godmother of Title IX,” for believing that women should have — or that they even want — equal opportunity to participate in sports.*

            “But now enter from stage left a feminist named Bernice Sandler,” she wrote, “who took over the Office of Civil Rights in Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education.

            “She picked the innocuous word ‘proportionality’ out of the dictionary (not out of the law), and turned it into a feminist code word for one of three tests by which college athletic departments would be judged as to their compliance with Title IX. She created a new definition for this word: if 56 percent of a student body is female, then 56 percent of the students playing on athletic teams must be female.”

            It’s this “proportionality” test that Schlafly objected to. This test examines whether the number of male and female students enrolled in the school’s athletics programs matches the male/female student body ratio.

            “This rule is not only unfair but ridiculous because men like to play sports far more than women do,” she said. “It’s a fact of human nature that female college students do not seek to play on athletic teams in anywhere near the percentage that male students do.”**

            Overall, Schlafly believed that enforcing Title IX is detrimental to men.

            “The evidence is overwhelming that Title IX has been turned into a tool to punish men,” she said. “The feminists’ intention is to eliminate everything that is masculine or macho, and to pretend that women are equal to men in physical prowess and desire.”

Back to the future

             It’s ironic then that the Eagle Forum has pivoted to the issue of the biological differences between women and men. This year, it introduced “The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act,” which it says aims to protect the original intent of Title IX — to provide equitable athletic opportunity for males and females.

            The act opposes President Biden’s recent attempts to allow gender identity, and not biological sex, to define who is a woman and who can compete on women’s sports teams. Allowing trans men to compete on women’s athletic teams, the Forum says, strips athletic opportunities from women and violates their privacy.

            The Eagle Forum is in good company on this issue. A wide array of feminist activists oppose allowing gender identity to drive the Title IX bus. Phyllis Schlafly a feminist? Maybe!

                                                _____________________________

* Phyllis Schlafly, “Wrestling with Title IX,” The Eagle Forum (February 12, 2003). Schlafly hoped the newly formed Commission on Opportunity in Athletics would eliminate the proportionality test. In its report, the commission made 23 recommendations. The final recommendation was what Schlafly wanted: identifying more ways to comply with Title IX. Didn’t happen.

** She was ignoring the fact that the proportionality test is only one of three ways a college can comply with Title IX. The third test says that colleges can be in compliance if they can show that female students are not interested in participating in an expanded athletic program.

Let’s hear it for the dads

In June this year, the New York Times ran a piece on “Title IX parents”— parents who through the years have filed lawsuits on behalf of their daughters in order to enforce gender parity. The article focused on several mothers who sought redress through the courts.*

            But it’s not always mothers who are their daughters’ advocates. There are Title IX dads, too.

            In 1996, Ron Randolph took an early Title IX stand. Ron lived in Owasso, Oklahoma, and was a firefighter in nearby Tulsa. He was a single dad, with a son and a daughter. Fifteen-year-old Mimi played softball for Owasso High School.

            Mimi’s team played on an old dirt field a few miles from the school, while the boys’ baseball team had a state-of-the-art stadium complete with viewing stands and an electronic scoreboard.

            “Our guys’ team has three sets of uniforms, while all of our uniforms — total — are less than they have in one set,” Mimi told a reporter at the time.** The uniforms for her team didn’t even match.

            Her dad chimed in: “They played night games on a softball field where 23 of the 37 light bulbs were burned out.”***

            When the team went to the state championships for the first time in the school’s history, the school wouldn’t pay for motel stays. The girls had to drive back and forth every day.

A father’s awakening

            Ron heard about Title IX at a community seminar offered by Ray Yasser, a law professor at the University of Tulsa and an expert in sports law. That was the light-bulb moment for this dad.

            “I’m not a libber by any means,’’ he said. “But if it’s right, it’s right, and if it’s wrong, it’s wrong.”****

            Not only was Ron the parent of an athlete, he was taxpayer as well.

            “I’ve got a boy and a girl. And if I pay $100 every year to this school in taxes, and $10 of it goes to athletics, I think $5 ought to go to my boy, and $5 ought to go to my girl,” he said. “To me, it’s simple math.”†

            At the time, schools in Oklahoma as a whole had about equal numbers of enrolled boys and girls. Yet boys were offered 67 percent of the athletic opportunities, while girls had only 33 percent. And you’re talking about Title IX having been in place for 24 years! 

            Ron and the other parents asked the Owasso Independent School District to remodel the girls’ softball field. The district declined.

            Boy, was that ever a costly decision!

Oops!

            The parent group filed their lawsuit, and in May 1997, the district settled. They agreed to be in full compliance with Title IX by 1999. And, as part of the settlement, they had to construct a $275,000 softball facility. Ron laughed at that figure — if they had just remodeled the original field, he believed they could have spent about $35,000.

            “Anybody who gets sued now is an idiot,” he said. “Title IX is a fact of life. Parents will work with schools if the schools will work.”††

            If only Ron had been right! Here we are 50 years out from the passage of Title IX, and we’re still inching forward one lawsuit at a time. But things might move faster from now on, simply because of the generation of girls who are now grown up.

             “We’re now at the point where women who were high school athletes are raising families, and they definitely know their daughters are supposed to have what the men have had all along,” said Sam Schiller (a lawyer in Tennessee who has filed Title IX lawsuits in 30 states and has never lost).†††

            “It’s Title IX 2.0.”

                                                _________________________

* Bill Pennington, “The Real Enforcers of Gender Equity in Sports: Angry Parents” (June 22, 2022).

** Meg Sommerfield, “Title IX has become a more prominent tool for expanding athletic opportunities for girls,” American Association of School Administrators (undated).

*** Randy Ellis, “Struggles put girls on serve,” The Daily Oklahoman (October 3, 1999), p. 538.

**** David Hill, “A Pitch for Equality,” Education Week (August 1, 1996), p. 8.

† “A Pitch for Equality,” p. 8. (The asterisks were getting out of hand!)

††“Struggles,” p. 546.

†††“The Real Enforcers.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Paul Hellstern, The Daily Oklahoman

Serving up a lawsuit

When you look into the history of Title IX, you go down a lot of rabbit holes! My last post, about a lawsuit filed by the San Diego State University women’s rowing team led me to a 42-year-old lawsuit that broke new ground for Title IX.

            In the fall of 1977, Long Island teenager Rollin Haffer arrived on the campus of Temple University in Philadelphia, the first in her family to go to college. She was a badminton player who had gotten a tuition scholarship to play for Temple.

            “I thought I had been handed the world,” Rollin said. “Then when I arrived at Temple, I heard what the guys were getting.”*

            In the 1977-78 academic year, 42 percent of Temple’s athletes were women, but they received just 13 percent of the athletic budget. Even excluding the money spent on the football program, the men’s budget trumped the women’s by a ratio of 3.6 to 1.

Steak and hotel rooms

            For Rollin’s team, there was often no place to practice and the nets and shuttlecocks were worn out. The team had to share its uniforms with the women’s tennis team.

            The women were more than aware of the disparity. It came up at every opportunity.

            “It seemed that no matter what the topic of the meeting was, it always ended up talking about why we’re only getting $6 for three meals when we go out, and the footballers get a steak dinner and a hotel stay overnight before home games,” Rollin said.**

            Checking in with other female athletes, Rollin found the same disparities. The swimmers didn’t have enough sweatsuits to go around. The bowlers had to buy their own uniforms. Two years went by and in Rollin’s junior year (1979-80), the athletic budget gave $700,000 to the men and $188,000 to the women — $1 per female athlete for every $3.80 per male athlete.

The jig is up

            By 1980, Rollin had had enough. She rallied the troops and filed a class action lawsuit. By doing so, she became the first college athlete to take her school to task for violating Title IX. She hadn’t gone off to college thinking she’d sue her school, but in the end, she felt she had no choice.

            “To make a difference, you have to make a lot of noise,” Haffer said. “It’s in my genes. Once you see a mistake and want to correct it, go to all lengths. It’s part of my genetic makeup.”

            The lawsuit asked for $1.8 million in restitution for lost scholarships, and the allocation of half the school’s athletic resources and opportunities to the women’s program.

            The battle dragged on for eight years. Rollin graduated and became a physical education teacher, but still she persisted. Finally, in 1988, after three weeks in court, and before a judge could rule, Temple agreed to settle.

A landmark settlement

            No damages were awarded in the settlement, but the college was required to beef up its women’s athletic program and expenditures. It agreed to add women’s teams, grant proportional scholarships, improve equipment, provide trainers and training facilities for women and equalize travel and meal expenses.

            Not only that, but more importantly, the ruling held that Title IX applied to intercollegiate athletics programs regardless of whether they received direct financial aid. If the college itself received federal funds, it had to comply with Title IX. Temple stood to lose $19 million in federal funds if it didn’t meet Title IX standards.

            Rollin saw the victory as more than about money and resources. It was more than about Temple. It was about providing equal opportunity for women across the board.

            “The lawsuit really helped define Title IX,” Rollin said. “It wasn’t just scholarships. It wasn’t just uniforms.”

                                                ______________________

* Marcia Chambers, “For Women, 25 Years of Title IX Has Not Leveled the Playing Field,” The Philadelphia Inquirer (June 16, 1997).

** “How a Title IX lawsuit against Temple changed the game,” The Square Food (June 18, 2022). This quote and the following two quotes come from this article.

Follow the money

A Title IX battle is brewing at San Diego State University. But the university and the students don’t agree on what the issue is.

            Last year, the university cut the women’s rowing team. It’s rationale? The university has more female athletes than male athletes, so it can’t stay in compliance with Title IX without evening the score.  

            But seventeen female athletes sued the university, saying the issue isn’t about the number of female athletes. It’s about scholarship numbers. They countered that the university isn’t providing an equitable amount of scholarships for women.

            The women’s suit claims that for more than a decade, SDSU has awarded scholarships unequally. Over the past two years, it says, the shortfall has totaled $1.2 million.

            “It is a sad day for the entire SDSU community that we have to sue the university to make it comply with Title IX and provide athletic financial aid equally to women and men,” said Madison Fisk, a former rower.*

What are the rules here?

            The university disagrees that scholarships are the issue.

            “The truth is that SDSU awards approximately 95 percent of all possible scholarships permitted under NCAA rules for both its men’s and women’s teams, with the remaining fraction explained by legitimate reasons within SDSU coaches’ discretion,” the athletic director said.**

            A university can comply with Title IX by providing “substantially proportionate” athletic opportunities that match the gender enrollment. For example, if 50 percent of the student body is female, then roughly 50 percent of athletes should be women.

            But what happens when the numbers don’t match when it comes to men? At SDSU, male enrollment increased from 41.3 percent in 2005 to 44 percent in 2022. Yet in 2019-20, only 37 percent of SDSU’s athletes were men.

            SDSU’s solution was to cut a women’s sport. The rowing team had about 65 participants and offered up to 20 scholarships.

Warning: more numbers ahead

            The women who filed suit include eleven former rowing members and six women from the track and field team who joined the suit in solidarity. Fourteen of the women currently are students, while three have graduated.

            The women aren’t contesting the team’s elimination, only the scholarship awards. From  2010-20, female athletes at SDSU were granted about $2 million more in athletic scholarships than men. But, overall, scholarships have been less per female athlete because of the higher number of female athletes.

            In school year 2019-20, for example, 58.1 percent of athletes (315 women) received just 50.6 percent of the $9.2 million scholarship pool, a deficit of almost $700,000, the lawsuit states.

Is this a first?

            When the women filed suit in February, they claimed that their action represents the first time a woman’s sports team has sought monetary damages from a school for violating Title IX.

            That could be true, but I’m looking into it. The more I learn about Title IX, the more gems I discover from the past. I know, for example, that the first lawsuit seeking compensation in a case of sexual harassment was in 1986. Christine Franklin sought $6 million in damages from the North Gwinnett High School in Suwanee, Georgia, after suffering a teacher’s sexual harassment. The case was settled out of court.

            Whether the San Diego women’s lawsuit is the first, it probably won’t be the last. According to data published by the Department of Education, 31.4 percent of NCAA Division I  athletic departments (109 of 348 schools) failed to meet the “substantially proportionate” standard in 2021.

            Even so, it’s the rare — and courageous — woman who dares to bring a lawsuit against her school.

            “No one goes to college planning to sue their school,” said Arthur Bryant, the women’s attorney. “The lesson of Title IX’s enforcement in 50 years, sadly, is if women want equality, they have to sue. No one else is going to do it.”***

                                                __________________________

* Daniel Libit, “Female rowers sue San Diego State in First Title IX damages claim,” Sportico (February 7, 2022).

** Mark Zeigler, “Female athletes sue San Diego State for alleged Title IX violation,” San Diego Union Tribune (February 7, 2022). The NCAA caps the number of total scholarships a school can award per sport.

*** Dan Murphy, “San Diego State athletes band together in Title IX fight: ‘If women want equality, they have to sue’,” ESPN (June 14, 2022).

PHOTO: 2018 San Diego State University women’s rowing team