She Shoots, She Scores

Thirty-five years ago, a law was passed that said nothing at all about athletics, but it changed American sports — and UCLA sports history — forever. These are the stories of the pioneers of Title IX.

One Saturday on a dusty Little League field in the San Fernando Valley many years ago, Michele Kort showed the boys how to play baseball.

Not that she was in the game, mind you. Little Michele, not yet 13, played ball with the guys all week on the street, after school, anywhere they could get a game going. But on this warm spring morning, she watched her pals play while relegated to the stands.

Suddenly, a batter connected hard with a pitch and sent the ball sailing out over the fence. On instinct, Michele raced out and retrieved the ball, then threw it back all the way from behind the fence to the infield.

"Hey," the P.A. announcer laughed, "put that girl in Little League."

But of course that was impossible. Michele was a girl, after all.

It didn't matter, though. Kort doesn't remember if people laughed or were amazed; she doesn't remember any of that. What she remembers, she says, is "how it made me feel." And how that moment was one of the inspirations that led her to build a life centered on sports.

With Little League closed to her, Michele Kort '71, M.B.A. '75 tried everything from archery to tennis in search of "a sport where girls consistently got a chance to play and could face some real competition." In the end, she chose basketball, not because of scholarships or money — because there weren't any — but "because I couldn't imagine my life without sports."

Even more unimaginable was what happened barely a year after Kort finished her undergraduate career at UCLA, on a June day in 1972 that changed American sports forever.

Title IX Takes the Field

What changed was the passage of a law called Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. Here's what it said: "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance."

Here's what it did: Title IX opened the floodgates of opportunity to female athletes, especially at the high school and collegiate levels. Suddenly, women had leagues of their own, and those pioneering female competitors left a lasting legacy for their own daughters.

It's hardly been a slam dunk, though. Title IX has generated controversy, sometimes heated, as institutions across the country struggled with compliance and reduced spending on or cut less profitable men's sports, such as wrestling, swimming and gymnastics. And those first women athletes after the law was passed often had to make do with woefully limited facilities, equipment and access to playing fields.

Despite it all, Title IX gave women the right to sweat, and for UCLA, the result has been glorious.

"Title IX has had a very positive effect on the success of the UCLA athletics program," says Dan Guerrero '74, UCLA director of athletics. "It ensured that we remained able to recruit and retain the best and brightest female athletes in the country. In turn, this has allowed us to develop the finest set of collegiate coaches."

Thirty of the university's record 100 NCAA titles came from women's teams, all in just the past 25 years, "a testament to the success of Title IX," notes Guerrero. That list includes the history-making 100th championship itself, won by the women's water polo team in May.

In 1978, as a member of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, UCLA won its first softball championship, appearing in the title game the following year as well, and then winning the collegiate crown again in 1982, the first year that the NCAA awarded women's softball titles. UCLA also won an NCAA championship in women's track that year.

People who'd been watching and participating in UCLA sports since the advent of Title IX were not surprised.

"Even before the NCAA took over women's sports, UCLA had made a major commitment to them," says Gail Holmes '80, who received one of the first female softball scholarships in the country in 1977. "When I got to play at UCLA, and then when I got the scholarship, it was amazing. I'd been watching my brother play Little League and high school ball my whole life, but suddenly opportunities started opening up for me, too."

Today, Holmes' daughter, Hannah, 12, competes at "club level" in softball, soccer and volleyball. "She's a living legacy of Title IX," says her mom.

"The great thing about coaching in 2007 is that you don't have to take these girls to a museum or give them a book to read to teach them about how far we've come," says Sue Enquist '80, former softball star and now coach of the women's team at UCLA. "I'm like a piece of living history, which is good because they don't want to hear that ‘I remember when bread was a nickel' stuff anyway."

But the pioneers themselves are happy — and justifiably proud — to tell their tales.

Same Games, Different Rules

Most universities had a lot of regulations to rethink if they were going to meet the letter as well as the intent of Title IX after it first passed. Kort remembers the inanity of pre-Title IX "girls' rules" for basketball that stipulated that only two players (called "rovers") were allowed to cross half-court. "There was this concern about girls exerting themselves too much, so running had to be kept to a minimum. There was also a rule that said you could only dribble three times and then you had to pass."

Women's basketball is a perfect example of how Title IX revolutionized women's athletics, agrees Anita DeFrantz, Olympic bronze medalist, first American woman on the International Olympic Committee, president of LA84 (formerly the Amateur Athletic Foundation) and one of Sports Illustrated for Women's 100 Greatest Female Athletes. "There was no running and no real competition. There was this whole school of thought that women are not naturally aggressive and that, in fact, competition and aggression were bad for women … Title IX affirms that sports belong to all of us and it's a part of our very nature as human beings."

Although those beliefs about inherent fairness and opportunity were codified in 1972, many Bruin pioneers excelled in sports before that time because they had the support of their families. Ann Meyers Drysdale '79, widow of Dodger Hall of Famer Don Drysdale and the first female athlete in the country to get a full-ride athletic scholarship, had parents who never differentiated between "my sister and me and my brother [Dave, who played on John Wooden's men's team in the '70s]. As far as they were concerned, we all deserved the same chance, the same opportunities when it came to all aspects of our lives, including sports."

She's raising her two sons and one daughter the same way. One big difference between then and now: Daughter Drew, 14, has "unlimited options when it comes to sports," Meyers says. Drew takes full advantage of that, playing soccer, volleyball, basketball and competing in the high jump. And Meyers, general manager of the WNBA's Phoenix Mercury, carries the torch at work as well: "As is often the case, young people don't always know that the opportunities they have now were not always available. It's up to us to keep telling the story, so these opportunities won't ever be taken away."

Another mom who's telling the story to both her kids and the "kids" she coaches is Jeanette Bolden '85, track coach for the U.S. Olympic Women's Track Team and UCLA's squad, as well as mother to 7-year-old twins Kimberly and Anthony. "For my own kids and the athletes that I coach, I tell them they can go as far as their interests, talents and dedication will take them," she says. "Their race, their age, their gender, none of that matters. That's how my mom raised me, even in the days before Title IX. She always said the only limits are the ones you put on yourself."

The Green Trailer Revolution

Even after Title IX, it took a while for the notion of equal competition under the law to take hold, even in pioneering schools such as UCLA. Softball skipper Enquist well remembers the struggles for decent facilities. Along with the famed "green trailer" that sat on the grass outside the Women's Gym and for years served as the home of the Women's Athletic Department, "our uniforms were the men's track team's practice T-shirts. I kid you not," she says. "At the time, however, the men's track team was phenomenal, and written on the inside of the shirt I got were the initials, ‘WB.' That was Willie Banks '78, J.D. '83 [the triple-jump phenom who would go on to become a three-time Olympian], so I just considered it good karma."

Coach Bolden also faced limitations when she first arrived at UCLA in 1981, almost a decade after Title IX was passed. She was attending Cal State Northridge and visiting famed Bruin track and field Coach Bob Kersee. "I remember being recruited and sitting with Bobby outside the green trailer and him telling me how great it would be and how far I could go if I transferred to UCLA," Bolden says. "It was kind of funny, because he was making this big pitch that there would be all this great opportunity at UCLA, and we were sitting on some bench at the bottom of Janss Steps because there was nowhere else to talk. It was too crowded inside the trailer."

After Bolden (and her equally famous teammate Florence Griffith) left CSUN for UCLA, she noticed another discrepancy. "I remember that we had to wait to practice until the men were finished on the track. No one was intentionally trying to treat us unfairly; it was just that no one had complained before or made an issue of it. Well, Bobby did. He got them to paint start lines and hurdle markers on both sides of the track so that the men and women could practice at the same time. It was a pretty simple solution."

The Knock on Opportunity

Unfortunately, little else about Title IX enforcement has been simple. After more than three decades, the nation's premier institutions still struggle with how to remain in compliance with the law and be fair, while athletes still struggle with how they feel about the trade-offs that have to be made when resources are tight and years of inequality beg to be redressed.

At UCLA, a chancellor-convened panel to address a multimillion-dollar deficit in the Athletics Department recommended that men's swimming and gymnastics be cut "so the rest could remain whole and competitive," according to Marc Dellins '76, UCLA's director of sports information. Swimmer Scott Hubbard '95, who swam three years of his four-year scholarship before the men's swim program was eliminated in 1994, said that even though he obviously didn't like the decision at the time, he's gained some perspective on it. "To ask universities to cut into [football and basketball] would be like asking Apple to stop selling the iPod," he says. But he wonders if Title IX could not have been crafted "more carefully so we could still promote women's sports, but not at the expense of men's."

Gymnastics gold medalist Peter Vidmar '83, a father of three boys and two girls, is grateful that his daughters have a range of athletic options open to them and is "incredibly proud" that UCLA was the first to 100 NCAA championships. Title IX, he says, "was definitely part of achieving that milestone." But he regrets that his sport was cut and is "sad that another way couldn't have been found to achieve these same goals."

And yet, there are all those medals won and titles taken that might never have happened without that era-spawning day in June 1972, when the nation's playing fields were leveled for women. "In the last few years, the main challenge has been finances," says Joni Comstock, NCAA senior vice president for championships. "Very few sports have a net profit at the end of the academic year. Another challenge is that state budgets are much tighter, so there's just less money to go around in general. But tight finances do not excuse us from following the law. The law is fair. The law is clear. And when money is tight, we have to stick to our values."

"I remember, in 1975, we were the talk of the tournament," says former Bruin volleyball star Sheila King '79, M.S. '82, who now travels across the country to watch her daughter Kathleen, also an elite-level volleyball player, compete. "UCLA had started putting money on the table for women's volleyball in terms of scholarships, and we were winning it all. It got people thinking and gave other schools the impetus to get serious about volleyball, about women's sports, and about what female athletes could be and do."

Published Oct 1, 2007 8:00 AM