In my last post, I continued the story of Margie Wright, a girl who had been kicked off a Little League team because of her gender. But her father stepped in and started a softball team, so the girls of Warrensburg, Illinois, had a chance to compete at a sport.
Margie went on to play softball in high school and was excited to find that girls could play a sport in college. But that dream seemed out of reach, as her parents didn’t have the money for college, and there was no such thing back then as an athletic scholarship for women.
Girls gotta make it happen
But that didn’t stop Margie. She and her father went to their credit union and took out a bank loan. With the loan and a scholarship she’d earned for her good grades, she went off to Illinois State University.
In college, Margie continued with softball. She had become a pitcher by necessity. Her sister had pitched for their father’s softball team, but eventually she dropped out of the game.
“When my sister stopped playing, my dad drew four circles on our garage door and told me to hit the marks,” Margie says. “By watching other pitchers, I figured it out on my own.”*
In college, Margie also branched out into basketball and field hockey, making her a three-sport athlete. She started almost every game for all three sports.
After college, Margie played in a women’s professional league. Her merit scholarship required her to teach in-state for three years, so she took a teaching job at a local high school, where she also coached five sports. The school didn’t have any women’s interscholastic sports, so Margie started a program. But she was given zero help. She had to make it happen on her own.
“I even had to drive the school bus to and from the away games!” she says.
A target for death threats
Margie continued her coaching career at two colleges and in 1986 landed at Fresno State, where her teams were successful year after year. In her 27 seasons as head coach, Coach Wright directed the Bulldogs to a national title in 1998, while coaching the team to the NCAA Women’s College World Series 12 times. In 2000, she became the NCAA’s all-time winningest softball coach. In 2010, she took Fresno to a record 29th straight NCAA softball tournament.
But in 1986, colleges still weren’t paying Title IX much attention. In 1992, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, which oversees Title IX compliance, randomly chose five colleges in California to investigate. They found that Fresno State failed 11 of the 13 compliance tests.**
Fresno State had to immediately begin addressing its failures. As an outspoken critic, Margie came in for a lot of grief. She agitated for equal facilities for the women’s teams and equal pay for the women’s coaches. She spoke out publicly against sexual harassment of female athletes — she once ripped the male coach of the baseball team for calling the softball players “dykes on spikes.”
One day, a local radio station devoted a two-hour talk show to bashing Title IX in general, and Margie in particular.
“I had to take a different route home every night, because I was getting death threats,” she says.
After the Title IX investigation, the college was forced to build a stadium for the women’s softball team. At the inaugural game in 1995 against the University of Southern California, 6,000 fans packed the stadium. Even so, the university told Margie she had to raise $2 million to pay them back for the stadium — which she did.
That season, Margie was named assistant coach of the women’s Olympic softball team. She’d realized her Olympic dream! She took a year off her college coaching duties to tour with the 1996 team.
But was it all smooth sailing from then on? Hardly! Coach Wright’s story to be continued.
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* Margie Wright’s story and all quotes in the post are from my interview with her on February 19, 2021.
** We’ll talk about the compliance tests in another post. It’s definitely the kind of fine print you ignore on those prescription drug ads, but, believe me, you won’t want to skip this nitty gritty!