Tag Archives: Women in sports

That’ll leave a mark

Recently, I’ve heard several elite female athletes say they want to be more than athletes. They want to use their success — and their position in the media spotlight — to achieve other personal goals.

            This seems to me like a sign that Title IX is doing its job. For a woman to have the opportunity — and the luxury — of choosing how to leave her mark on the world is not a case of abandoning hard-won opportunity, but of embracing a life that has been made possible by the gender equality law.

            This certainly has been the case for Maya Moore.

            Maya ruled the basketball court, no doubt about it. She played forward for the University of Connecticut, winning national championships in 2009 and 2010. She was the first overall pick in the 2011 Women’s National Basketball League (WNBA) draft, joining the Minnesota Lynx. 

            From 2011 to 2017, Maya led the Minnesota Lynx to four WNBA championships and in 2014 was named league MVP. Her team made the playoffs in all eight of the seasons she played, and she was named to the All-WNBA squad seven times. She won two Olympic gold medals.

            So why did she walk away from it all?

Life off the court

            Off the court, Maya and her family were part of a Christian prison ministry at Jefferson City Correctional Center in St. Louis, Missouri. There, in 2007, as an 18-year-old, she met Jonathan Irons, a Black prisoner who had been convicted in 1998 of breaking into a suburban St. Louis home and shooting the homeowner in the course of a burglary. He was serving a 50-year sentence.

            Maya became convinced of Irons’s innocence. His lawyers said he was convicted on the basis of false identification, a false confession and the omission of crucial evidence at trial. Maya backed the legal team with her own money, convinced that Irons was the victim of a racist justice system. In 2019, she stepped away from her basketball career to focus on social justice issues.

            In March 2020, a judge ruled that the case against Irons was weak, with a lack of evidence linking him to the crime, and further efforts to keep him imprisoned failed. On July 1, Irons walked out of prison after 22 years behind bars. As Maya watched, she dropped to her knees, cradling her head in her hands.

            “It was kind of a worshipful moment, just dropping to my knees and being so thankful that we made it,” she said. “When I stepped away two springs ago, I wanted to shift my priorities to be more available and present for things that mattered more than being a professional athlete. This is one of the biggest and most direct results of that.”*

A new freedom

            In September that year, Maya and Jonathan married, and the couple began working together to help others who they believe have been treated unfairly by the justice system. In 2021, Maya won the Excellence in Sports Performance Yearly (ESPY)’s Arthur Ashe Award, an honor given to individuals whose contributions transcend sports, joining the ranks of Muhammad Ali, Pat Summitt and Billie Jean King. ESPN produced a “30 for 30” feature on Maya titled “Breakaway,” and through their nonprofit, Win With Justice, the couple is using their own story as an agent of change.

            “There is a life we want to live, things we want to do, things we feel called to do together to help make our world a better place,” she says. “This sense of freedom is huge for both of us now.”

            And that’s the kind of freedom made possible by Title IX.

                                                ______________________________

* ABC’s Good Morning America program. Robin Roberts’s interview with Maya Moore and Jonathan Irons (June 25, 2020).

** Kurt Streeter, “After Helping Her Husband Gain Freedom, Maya Moore Savors Her Own,” New York Times (May 17, 2021). Irons has filed a federal lawsuit, naming those he says caused his wrongful imprisonment.

PHOTO CREDIT: Maya Moore

Tackling the football ban

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

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

            But Jacqueline Lantz wanted to play football.

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

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

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

Coach v. Court

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

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

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

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

Who needs protection?

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

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

            But the court didn’t stop there.

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

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

Teaming up for the future

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

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

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

                                             ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­___________________________

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

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

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

A lil’ history for you

Did Title IX spring up out of nowhere?

            Of course not! It was part of a growing awareness of the inequities women faced in society. Today, I’ll share a smattering of the events, laws, books and movements that fueled changing societal attitudes about women.

            Here we go!

The Equal Rights Amendment. Alice Paul and Crystal Eastman introduced the ERA as the Lucretia Mott Amendment in 1923. They worked for the gender equality law for the rest of their lives, although as of today, the amendment has not passed.

Equal pay laws. In 1945, Congress introduced the Women’s Equal Pay Act. It didn’t pass, but in 1955, Rep. Edith Green (D-OR) introduced the Equal Pay Act. The law passed in 1963, and Rep. Green went on to help write Title IX.

Civil rights movement. Women played a crucial role in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s, especially at the grass roots level. For example, Septima Clark designed programs to teach African American citizens how to read and write. Her idea for “citizen education” became the cornerstone of the movement. From women like Clark and suffragists like Mary Church Terrell, who lived into the mid-1950s, women learned how to mobilize for a cause.

The President’s Commission on the Status of Women. President John F. Kennedy established this commission in 1961 to address discrimination against women in education, the work force, and federal benefits programs like Social Security. Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt headed the organization.

The Feminine Mystique. Betty Friedan’s book, published by W.W. Norton in 1963, examined the lives of her Smith College classmates, finding that women weren’t totally fulfilled as wives, mothers and household managers. “There was no activism in that cause when I wrote it,” she said. “But I realized that it was not enough just to write a book. There had to be social change.”*

NOW. The National Organization of Women was founded in 1966 by 28 women, including Friedan and Shirley Chisholm, who became the first Black congresswoman two years later. NOW addresses both gender and racial inequality. Today it has about 500,000 members around the country.

The bra burners. In 1968, a group of women staged a protest at the Miss America beauty pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey. They threw bras, lipsticks, pots, pans, mops and high heels into a “Freedom Trash Can.” (The can wasn’t actually burning, as police put the kibosh on fires.) The protest drew in women who had been on the fence about feminism. “We were young radicals, just discovering feminism because we were tired of making coffee but not policy,” said organizer Robin Morgan.**

The Women’s Equity Action League. Elizabeth Boyer and members of NOW founded WEAL in 1968 to raise women’s status through legal action and legislative change. WEAL officer Bernice “Bunny” Sandler, the “Godmother of Title IX,” discovered the loophole in Executive Order 11246, signed by President Johnson in 1965, that barred discrimination by federal contractors based on sex. Because almost all colleges and universities had federal contracts, she thought the order could apply to them.  It was the foundation for Title IX.

Our Bodies, Ourselves. This 1970 book, self published by a group of women in Boston, celebrated women’s bodies, health and sexuality. It encouraged women to view themselves as independent, whole persons rather than as passive partners for men. By 1972, publisher Simon & Schuster came calling, and today the book has sold more than 4 million copies.

Ms. magazine. Journalist and activist Gloria Steinem started Ms. magazine in 1971 as an insert in New York magazine. It quickly eclipsed the day’s women’s magazines, which focused on fashion, food, husband hunting and child raising. By 1972, it was a stand-alone magazine. BTW, civil rights activist Sheila Michaels invented the “Ms” title in 1961, when she wanted to complete forms without including a marital status. “There was no place for me [as a single woman]. I didn’t belong to my father and I didn’t want to belong to a husband,” she said.***

            So there you have it… a brief course in the birth of the women’s movement!

                                              _______________________________

* Ben Wattenberg. Interview of Betty Friedan for The First Measured Century. (weekly PBS program).   https://www.pbs.org/fmc/interviews/friedan.htm

** “100 Women: The truth behind the ‘bra-burning’ feminists,” BBC News (September 7, 2018). https://www.bbc.com/news/world-45303069 Morgan later said she regretted targeting the contestants. “After all, they were mostly working-class women trying to get a free scholarship.” 

*** Eve Kay,“Call Me Ms.” The Guardian (June 29, 2007).

NOTE: Image shows Septima Clark (left) and a Miss America protester (right).

What a difference a decade makes

Kaitlin Calogera traipses around Washington, DC, for a living. Her company, A Tour of Her Own, offers tours of historical sites and events that highlight women and their achievements.

So how does Title IX figure into Kaitlin’s story? The law was well in the rearview mirror when she was born in the late 1980s.

“We were the first generation of women to benefit from Title IX,” she says. “As an athlete, I was always in female spaces and I thrived on female energy.”*

I connected with Kaitlin after she saw my post about Olympic softball player Dot Richardson. “Dr. Dot” was an early inspiration for Kaitlin.**

“Her book was the first autobiography I’d ever read by a woman,” she says. “Not only is she an athlete, but she’s a doctor. She’s such an inspiration!”

Heads up!

Growing up in Old Bridge, New Jersey, Kaitlin was an athlete through and through. She faced off against two older brothers and played on Little League, basketball and hockey teams, often with the boys. One of the only girls in her neighborhood, she had to keep up.

“It was either hit the ball or get hit with it!” she recalls.

She admits she wasn’t much of a student,  although she kept up. “I needed good grades in order to play sports. That was my incentive,” she says.

For two years, she played softball at Iona College in New Rochelle, New York, but she took a gap year and coached softball in Germany, traveling to other countries for tournaments. Back in the States, she coached softball at the Jenny Finch Academy at Diamond Nation in New Jersey and then at Fairleigh Dickinson University, where she got a history degree.

Despite Title IX, discrimination didn’t magically disappear. While at Diamond Nation, she learned that a male coach was making twice her salary, despite their identical qualifications.

 “Even then, we were still subconsciously being taught just to be grateful for what we had. We weren’t sure when to make a fuss,” she says.

Is that all there is?

Kaitlin didn’t make a fuss. She left for Washington, DC, where she volunteered as an assistant coach at Georgetown University. But she realized it would take years to make a life as a college coach — years that she didn’t want slipping by.

She took a corporate job arranging travel, hotels and restaurants for visiting groups. But she envied the guides who took people around the city.

“I wanted to know — Who were these people who got to go to the Lincoln Memorial every day?” she says.

Kaitlin’s envy led to certification as a tour guide and her own rounds of the city. It was eye-opening.

“It was all about presidents and wars,” she says. “I started to wonder, Is that all there is? Is this really me?”

It wasn’t her. She was curious about women’s lives and appreciated the female role models in her life. But start a tour company centered around women? She wasn’t sure.

“Is it a thing?” she asked a friend. “I think this needs to be a thing.”

On the road again

So was born A Tour of Her Own. Kaitlin and her guides love sharing the hidden lives of women. And she sees a natural connection between Kaitlin the athlete and Kaitlin the entrepreneur.

“The skills I learned as an athlete serve me well now,” she says. “I was used to always being on the road. My mother would be driving and I’d be navigating with the map. I know how to be loud and take up space. I gained discipline, commitment and a tough skin.”

All good skills for her, but she also loves what she’s created for others.

 “I love having a team of women who are as close knit as my sports teams were,” she says. “As an athlete, I always wanted to be with my teammates, and that’s how my business is. It’s like going to the World Series every day!”

If you aren’t lucky enough to catch a TOHO tour, you can read Kaitlin’s book. In 2021, she co-authored with Rebecca Grawl 111 Places in Women’s History in Washington, DC, That You Must Not Miss.*** But I’m close to DC, so I think I’ll book a tour soon!  

                                                _______________________

* Kaitlin’s quotes come from my interview with her on May 31, 2022.

** Find Dot Richardson’s story at https://www.nancybkennedy.com/cut-my-hair-and-call-me-bob/ . She is an orthopedic surgeon and currently is head coach of Liberty University’s softball program. Her book is Living the Dream (Kensington, 1998). https://amzn.to/3NKlEEA

*** 111 Places in Women’s History in Washington, DC, That You Must Not Miss (Emons Publishers, 2021). https://amzn.to/3x61bU2

Put me in, coach

In the early years of Title IX, one 11-year-old girl and her family took a gender equality case all the way to the Supreme Court.

From an early age, Karen O’Connor Self was an outstanding athlete. Basketball was her main sport, but she also played soccer and baseball. She was skilled enough that she often played on boys teams. And if a coach objected, Karen’s mother set him straight.

“If a coach told my mother I couldn’t play on his team, she told him about Title IX and made him put me on the roster,” Karen says.*

Karen started playing basketball as a toddler. She learned the game from an uncle who was an assistant coach at Harvard and later head coach at Connecticut’s Fairfield University.

We’ve got a problem

All was going along swimmingly until Karen entered sixth grade at MacArthur Junior High School in Prospect Heights, Illinois. The school had a girls basketball team, but the level of play wasn’t challenging enough for her. She wanted to play on the boys team.

In August 1980, Karen’s father asked the school board to allow her to try out for the boys team.

 “My feeling was, ‘Let me try, Coach,’” Karen says. “If I’m not good enough, you can cut me.”

The coach refused.

Karen and her family considered the refusal a form of discrimination that ran afoul of both her constitutional rights — of the kind guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment — and of Title IX. And so they sued.

Separate and unequal?

The school’s position was that single-sex teams didn’t discriminate. The girls had a separate but equal chance to participate in sports, so the school wasn’t in violation of either the Fourteenth Amendment or Title IX, it said. 

Karen’s family won in a lower court, but the decision was overturned on appeal. Surprisingly, the case went all the way to the Supreme Court.

In the end, the Supreme Court left the verdict of the appeals court intact, and the school was victorious. The school had a right to offer “separate but equal” teams segregated by sex, the Court said.

“In essence, the Supreme Court was saying that I — that girls — had a right to participate, but not a right to grow as an individual,” Karen says.

Many people saw this ruling as the right one for girls sports. If the most skilled girls played on boys teams, girls teams wouldn’t thrive. And, conversely, if boys played on girls teams, girls would be shut out.

“Letting in one girl here or there doesn’t really help the overall picture of women in sports,” said Jennifer Nupp, then of the Women’s Equity Action League. “Equal opportunity for the individual can even retard equal opportunity for the group.”**

It turned out okay

Karen never played for MacArthur’s sixth grade girls team. The next year, her father’s job took the family to California, where she was welcomed onto the junior high boys team. But by eighth grade, the boys were gaining in height and weight, making it harder for her to compete.

“That was the first year I wasn’t the leading scorer,” she recalls.

After another move, this time to New York State, Karen had a stellar high school career at Hyde Park’s Franklin D. Roosevelt High School. She made the girls varsity team as a 14-year-old freshman. Playing with 17- and 18-year old girls provided all the competition she needed to up her game. And as a senior, she helped coach the freshman boys basketball team.

Karen went on to play basketball at Arizona State University, but a back injury ended her playing days. At age 23, she became head coach at Seton Catholic Preparatory in Chandler, Arizona. In her 30 years at the school, she has taken the team to the championships 17 times, winning 12 state titles.

“I’ve built a life around coaching girls sports,” she says. “Title IX came around at just the right time for me. We were just adjusting to the right to play, and it opened up so many doors for us.”

                                                _________________________

* All of Karen O’Connor Self’s quotes come from my interview with her on May 13, 2022. Her lawsuit came almost immediately after the final Title IX guidelines for sex equity in sports were approved at the end of 1979.

** Ellen Goodman, “Her Aim Was Fine, Her Timing Off,”  The Boston Globe (December 8, 1981), p.1. The Women’s Equity Action League was founded in 1968 to address discrimination against women in employment and education. It operated until 1989.

Saved by the game

High school is a memorable time for many of us, but for Melissa Isaacson, it was more than nostalgia that made her write about the girls basketball team that won the 1979 Illinois state championship.

Melissa’s book, State: A Team, a Triumph, a Transformation, is about a team of girls who beat not only their opponent, but a society that only recently had let them be athletes.

“This story is about one group of girls sitting innocently at a monumental place in our nation’s history,” Melissa wrote. “It’s about the sheer joy of getting our first uniforms, packing the same school gym where we were once not allowed to practice, and gaining access to life lessons previously only available to boys.”*

The girls of the Niles West team of Skokie, Illinois, made their way onto the court in the early years of Title IX. They came from varied, and sometimes neglectful and even violent, families. They believe to this day that playing basketball not only changed them, but saved them.

They had strong backers and role models. Nicholas Mannos, the principal who fought for girls to have the same opportunities as boys. Their first coach, Arlene Mulder, who’d never coached basketball but who mastered the game and pushed the girls to be their best selves. Billy Schnurr, the boys basketball coach who secretly mentored Mulder and helped mold the girls into fierce competitors. Gene Earl, their second coach, who delighted in the girls’ spirit and took them to the championships.

Who’s that I see?

When the team arrived at the championship game in 1979, they found they’d be facing East St. Louis, a powerhouse of a team with a secret weapon — Jackie Joyner, the extraordinary athlete who went on to win six Olympic gold medals. That didn’t faze Melissa or her teammates.

“After 25 games, and for most of us, two or more years of running stairs and scrimmaging at five in the morning behind us, we could say with confidence that no team in Illinois was better conditioned or more in sync,” she said.**

It was a hard fought battle, but when the final buzzer sounded, they had won the game 63-47. Melissa, who had suffered an injury that year, only came in for the final minute. Holding the ball at the buzzer, she flung it skyward as the stands rocked to the chant, “We are! State champs!”

Years later, at a team reunion, Holly Andersen Blanchette shared what sports meant to her.

“People accuse me of being competitive sometimes,” she said. “But it doesn’t mean I’m a sore loser; it means that sports has empowered me. It gives you self-confidence and makes you more determined.”

A scandal spurs a career

Melissa played club basketball at the University of Iowa, where she earned her B.A. in journalism. Her interest in the profession arose from the seminal political event of the 1970s, the Watergate scandal.***

“Journalism was suddenly a glamorous profession. Reporters were celebrities,” she says. “And it was a natural interest for me, as I loved writing and lived in Chicago, a town that had three daily papers.”

For 30 years, Melissa was a sportswriter, working for the Chicago Tribune and USA Today among other newspapers. In the ‘90s, she covered the Michael-Jordan-led Chicago Bulls and the Chicago Bears, the first woman in those reporting roles. She worked for ESPN, covering everything up to and including the Olympics.

A woman sportswriter — in choosing her career path, Melissa opened up an avenue previously unavailable to women. Today she is a lecturer at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.  

Melissa once had the opportunity to interview Birch Bayh, the Indiana senator who co-wrote Title IX with Reps. Edith Green and Patsy Mink. She ended the call on a personal note.

“Thank you,” I told him. “What you did changed our lives…. it gave me and my teammates an identity and self-esteem that girls just a few years older didn’t have the same chance of having.”

                                    _____________________________

* 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

** When the team suffered a rare loss that season, Coach Earl comforted the girls with this memorable thought: “Trust me,” he said. “You are not going to remember this when you’re giving birth to your first child.”

*** So I wasn’t the only one! I went into journalism because of Watergate, too.

Hear them roar

For girls, Title IX brought about more than just the opportunity to play. It disrupted many ways of thinking that had harmed girls for centuries.

For my blog last week, journalist and sportscaster Melissa Isaacson talked about her childhood, one that straddled Title IX. Girls sports teams began to sprout up while she was in junior high school. The change was not only on the field, but in people’s minds.

“Before Title IX, people wrote off athletic girls as tomboys, even as lesbians, because of their interest,” Melissa says. “Girls who were interested in sports were considered manly. Society said, ‘Oh, you must be gay,’ and it wasn’t a compliment.”*

I’ve heard this idea about girls and sports from everyone I’ve interviewed. Girls dropped out of athletics in droves — or never even gave sports a try — for fear of being called gay.

And the fear of being stigmatized only grew stronger the older a girl got.

“Girls wouldn’t play in college because they were afraid they wouldn’t get a boyfriend,” Melissa says. “And if a girl was gay, she wasn’t talking about it. She was confused and wondering whether she just had girl crushes that would pass.”

Finally! Legit uniforms

But by the time Melissa began playing basketball, the idea of athletic females was evolving.

“We were not just okay, we were pretty good. We didn’t get picked on, although we were still kind of self conscious about our image,” Melissa says. “And, today, it’s not just okay,  it’s cool for a girl to be an athlete. Athletes are the popular kids.”

Of course, part of anyone’s image is what we choose to wear. And girls wanted uniforms!

At first, as girls stepped onto the field, the court and the diamond, they had to cobble together what they could for uniforms.

“There were no shoes for girls; we had to wear boys shoes. There were no sports bras, no pinnies, no school uniforms,” Melissa says.

Girls stuffed extra socks into boys basketball shoes and baseball cleats. They wore boys tennis shorts. They ironed numbers onto t-shirts. If girls had school uniforms, they had to share them from one seasonal sport to the next — soccer to basketball to softball. In some cases, they were given cast-off boys uniforms.

And, of course, there was the added complication of a woman’s menses.

“There were no such things as ultra-thin maxi pads or super-plus tampons,” Melissa recalled. “There were tampons and there were sanitary pads, which were roughly the width and thickness of your average hand towel and which did not fit inconspicuously in our teeny-tiny uniform shorts.”

Even so, Melissa was overjoyed when at Niles West High School in suburban Chicago, her basketball team finally got uniforms. The shirts weren’t cut for a girl’s shape, and she and her teammates struggled to pull on and move in the stiff, badly cut polyester shorts. But none of that mattered to Melissa.

“To be important enough to represent our school was staggering to me,” Melissa says. “It was as exciting as if I had Team USA written across my shirt.”

Words to play by

As Melissa entered high school, an invigorating and growing women’s movement was rocking the nation. Women were finding their voice and reveling in it. Melissa’s basketball team adopted a hit song from 1972 for their walk-up music, Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman.”**

I am woman, hear me roar

In numbers too big to ignore….

I am strong

I am invincible

I am woman!

Those lyrics came back instantly to me when I read about the song in Melissa’s book, State. Even though I wasn’t athletic, I’m a product of that time, too!

Those words took Melissa’s team to the state championships in 1979. In that memorable championship, Melissa’s team faced East St. Louis, a team with a 32-1 record and a big-name player — Jackie Joyner. You know, Jackie Joyner (Kersee), who went on to win six Olympic track and field medals.  

They had their work cut out for them! More anon.

                                                _____________________________

* 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

** Helen Reddy wrote the lyrics to “I Am Woman,” with composer Ray Burton, who actually had the idea for the song. He said to Reddy:  “After watching and listening to you and your lady friends’ views on equality for all women, I believe this issue is a going to be huge, don’t you agree? Helen said, ‘Of course it is, because it’s bloody well right!’” Robert McKnight, “’Insulted’: Co-writer of  I AM WOMAN angry at rewriting of history in new film.” TV Blackbox (August 9, 2020). https://bit.ly/3PNNdPs

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/

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.