Title IX at 40: the Road to Championships Has Been Paved with Adversity
Friday, June 22, 2012 | Chris Harry
GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- After checking in and settling down, the girls took their seats Monday on the glistening wooden floor with the giant Gator head logo at the University of Florida's $10 million basketball complex.
About four-dozen young ladies, ages eight to 13, were on campus for UF women's basketball camp. But before any hoops lessons, Gators coach Amanda Butler, started things off with a history lesson.
The subject was Title IX.
When asked, two or three raised their hands to acknowledge some knowledge of the piece of legislation that altered forever the landscape of women's athletics. Maybe two or three more will remember it, Butler figures.
But when the campers roll in next week, she'll do it all over again.
Florida now offers 12 women's sports – basketball, cross country, golf, gymnastics, lacrosse, soccer, softball, swimming & diving, tennis, track & field (indoor and outdoor) and volleyball.
A total of 14 national team titles (12 NCAA, 2 AIAW) belong the Florida's women's program:
| Sport | National Titles |
| Women's Golf | 2 |
| Gymnastics | 1 (1982 AIAW) |
| Soccer | 1 |
| Women's Swimming & Diving | 3 (including 1979 AIAW) |
| Women's Indoor Track | 1 |
| Women's Tennis | 6 |
| Total | 12 NCAA, 2 AIAW |
Florida women have won 156 national event titles
The Southeastern Conference leader for women's team titles is Florida at 109. The next highest total among league schools is 58.
Florida's SEC Titles by the Women's Program
| Cross Country | 5 |
| Golf | 8 |
| Gymnastics | 8 |
| Indoor Track & Field | 7 |
| Outdoor Track & Field | 5 |
| Soccer | 11 |
| Softball | 3 |
| Swimming & Diving | 17 |
| Tennis | 26 |
| Volleyball | 19 |
In addition, Florida has claimed two American Lacrosse Conference titles
“The modern era of athletes have no idea what it's like not to have your own locker room or your own coach or a place to practice, so I really feel it's my generation's responsibility to communicate and explain it so that they're appreciative of these amazing opportunities they have -- and will always have,” Butler said. “The fact you can have a career as a women's basketball coach -- and a career as a women's assistant basketball coach -- is remarkable. Yes, I'm proud to proclaim myself a Title IX baby.”
Literally.
Butler was born in 1972, the same year as Title IX, which will celebrate its 40th birthday Saturday. Butler is a poster child for the landmark bill, having benefitted from it on the youth basketball courts that helped her become a high school star in Tennessee, which helped her get a scholarship to Florida, which paved the way for jobs as an assistant coach, which prepared her to be head women's coach at her alma mater.
Hers is a position that did not exist when Butler was born.
“The type of thinking girls have today -- 'Hey, boys have it, so we get it!' -- it's so automatic with kids of this age,” Butler said. “Well, that's true now, of course, but I think there's a comfort and familiarity of fairness and equality as if it's always been there. It hasn't. It took people -- it took pioneers -- to make this happen. People like Dr. Alexander.”
That would be Dr. Ruth Alexander, who was chairman of UF's Department of Physical Education at the time of the bill's passing.
“We had a plan,” Alexander, now 74, said earlier this week. “It was gradual. It was accepted, it was built on and expanded. I think we were ahead of our time.”
Title IX was signed by President Richard Nixon on June 23, 1972. It actually made no mention of athletics, but ordered the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to prevent discrimination in federally funded education programs.
Though many did not see it -- or want to see it -- the bill was an opening for women and opportunity in sports. Sen. Birch Bayh (D-Indiana), who has been called the “Father of Title IX,” was at the forefront of the bill's passing.
“While the impact of this amendment would be far-reaching, it is not a panacea,” Bayh said on the Senate floor when the bill came to vote. “It is, however, an important first step in the effort to provide for the women of America something that is rightfully theirs: an equal chance to attend the schools of their choice, to develop the skills they want, and to apply those skills with the knowledge that they will have a fair chance to secure the jobs of their choice with equal pay.”
Equal play, too.
That certainly was Alexander's interpretation. She formed a coalition, along with three phys ed faculty members -- Donna Deutsch, Mimi Ryan and Linda Hall Thornton -- and presented a proposal to Athletic Director Ray Graves for the start of five sanctioned women's sports. Together, they took the plan to UF president Stephen C. O'Connell, who along with the Faculty Committee on Intercollegiate Athletics signed off on the plan, effective for the 1972-73 academic year.
Next-day headline in The Florida Times-Union:
Women's Lib, you have another friend
“The role of women on our campus is a vital one,” Graves said at the time. “I believe the contributions they make in the area of collegiate athletics will be significant.”
The Lady Gators were hatched.
They would participate in the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) with a budget of $16,000 for golf, gymnastics, swimming and diving, tennis and track. Three team sports -- basketball, volleyball and slow-pitch softball -- were added over the next three years.
It was a triumphant time for women, though the landmark moment sentiment wasn't shared by all.
“Some of the men's coaches in the physical education department flat-out said to me, 'I hope you fail!' ” recalled Ryan, named first coach of the UF women's golf team. “But once we got going, and people saw how serious we were, there was no stopping us.”
The milestone victories, though, came with baby steps. Not just at Florida, either.
“There were a lot of nasty comments and articles written, most of them about women coming along and taking money away from football,” said Ann Marie Rogers, who was women's athletic director at Alabama before taking a similar post with UF in the 1980s. “I can't even repeat some of the things I heard.”
You can probably imagine, though, considering Rogers had to fight for things such as drilling holes in the basketball court to insert volleyball net posts (kind of important for volleyball) or requesting proper (and safer) mats for her gymnasts, rather than sharing mats with the wrestling team.
“You had to continue to fight for more money,” Rogers said.
Fairness, too.
Sue Halfacre was both a coach and a swimmer for the UF women's team while going to nursing school. She remembers how her athletes were not permitted on the pool deck until the men had pulled up the good lane lines -- the ones that could be tightened and actually floated -- and gone into the locker room. The women's swim suits doubled as meet uniforms for the gymnastics team.
“We were starting it all from scratch,” Halfacre said. “Nobody really knew what to do or what to expect.”
When Halfacre left in 1976, Randy Reese, who built prep swimming powers in Jacksonville at the Bolles School and Episcopal High, took over both the men's and women's programs and began an ascension to greatness that in many ways illustrates the growth of the Lady Gators in microcosm.
In 1979, Reese guided Florida to the AIAW national championship, the first women's title in school history. UF's gymnastics team followed in 1982 with the national crown in the final year of AIAW.
The Lady Gators, led by Tracy Caulkins, won the NCAA team swim title in 1982. Ryan and UF's golf team won back-to-back NCAA golf championships in '85 and '86.
“Florida got good before a lot of other places did,” Ryan said.
Not just on game days, either. The institution's commitment to the overall program soon became evident as construction sites were cleared and new facilities began to rise.
Halfacre, who had moved to St. Louis after her time with the Gators, returned to Gainesville for a visit in 1985. That was when she got a first look at the O'Connell Center, its Olympic-sized pool, the 10-meter diving well and the NCAA championship banners on the wall.
Her first thoughts.
“Holy [expletive]!”
That was a quarter-century ago.
And now?
“They have coaches all over the deck, the best equipment and gear, trainers and masseuses, nutritionists and doctors ... ,” said Halfacre, now 60 and living back in town. “I mean, we got an orange 'F' letter for all our hard work and we were damn happy to get it. But you know what? I'm proud of what we did. And I'm proud of the level it is now.”
The present-day pool deck scene is not unlike what the athletes are treated to the new lacrosse facility or the Lemerand Center that houses volleyball, soccer and track, or the Ring Complex that is home to the two-time reigning NCAA women's tennis champions, or the vision that is the $4.5 million gymnastics studio renovation that is currently underway at the O'Dome.
Light years from sharing swimsuits.
“You don't want our current female student-athletes to feel like there's some sacrifice being made currently on their behalf, but you would love for them to understand the sacrifices that already happened on their behalf,” said senior associate athletic director Lynda Tealer, UF's senior woman administrator. “And those young women who played on these teams back in the day? What a great experience they must have had. They bonded together. They made it work.”
Someone had to do the ground-clearing and heavy-lifting. Call them “innovators” or “trailblazers” or the “Founding Mothers,” but they were the ones who laid the foundation for an overall UF women's program budgeted at $10.4 million for the 2012-13 academic year.
“Florida provided the blueprint,” Ryan said. “Other schools followed that blueprint.”
That schematic was the building block for 12 NCAA women's championships, state-of-the-art facilities for 11 teams and a track record for excellence that is something to be lauded; not just for what it's become, but from where it all began.
And because of whom.
“People like Dr. Paula Welch,” Butler said.
Welch was the first UF women's basketball coach. She had to beg to use the gym so her players could practice; and not just the old Alligator Alley, but the high school gym at nearby P.K. Yonge, while daring to complain about shooting at wooden backboards with no nets.
Perspective check:
* In 1975, Welch piled her 11 players and manager into a van and drove to a tournament in St. Augustine. She and the manager washed the uniforms at a nearby laundromat to get ready for games the next day while her players slept four to a room at a flea-bag team hotel.
* Two months ago, when Butler and the Gators went to Bowling Green, Ohio, for the NCAA Tournament, the team's chartered jet carried a traveling party of close to 100. Besides 14 players and four full-time coaches, also on board were the video coordinator and staff, strength and conditioning directors, trainers, managers, academic advisor, communication director, in-house internet writer, cheerleaders, pep band and ... well ... you get the idea.
Things have come a long way, baby, since Butler was that Title IX baby.
The young female generation, and the many to follow, need to know just how far.
“We're coaches, but we're also teachers,” Butler said. “I am absolutely and beyond keenly aware of the impact Title IX has had on my life. And for these girls, it's impacted theirs in ways they need to know.”
