Title IX At 35 – Equal Access Matures

Senior women’s basketball player Katy Cobb is unfamiliar with the details of Title IX, but she is a prime example of its results. Growing up in Rio Vista, Texas, she played girls’ soccer, volleyball, softball and basketball, ran cross-country, competed in rodeos and in fourth grade played on a boys’ football team.

"The idea of being denied their sport is absolutely inconceivable to female athletes today," says Nancy Kruh (’76), who as an SMU senior was instrumental in advancing Title IX at SMU. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 is a federal law that prohibits sexual discrimination against students and employees of educational institutions. The law requires that males and females receive fair and equal treatment in all arenas – academics, financial aid and extracurricular activities.

In 1972, athletic scholarships were not offered to women at SMU. Women basketball players bought their uniforms and carried their own basketballs to practices led by an Olympic volleyball player. The women’s swim team had to create a practice time by enrolling in a swimming class, and 12 members of the women’s tennis team practiced on three old courts while the six-member men’s team practiced on four new courts. Women athletes at other schools and universities faced similar challenges.

As the landmark legislation marks its 35th anniversary this year, women athletes have come a long way at SMU; 191 women now compete in 11 sports, 114 as scholarship athletes. To commemorate the legislation, the Women’s Sports Foundation issued a report card grading women’s athletics participation in 738 colleges and universities. The report compared the gender composition of an institution’s athletes to the gender composition of its student body. SMU earned a B-, meaning its gap is between 8 and 10 percent.

Five out of nine Division I Texas schools earned B’s, but two universities – Baylor and TCU – earned D’s for their level of participation by women. In Conference USA, five of 12 schools earned A’s or B’s.

"SMU is at 50-50 in terms of number of male and female student participation," says Koni Daws, SMU assistant athletics director and senior woman administrator. "But the undergraduate student population is 55 percent women, 45 percent men. That’s where we want to be in athletics, too."

Few universities would have received passing grades in 1975 when Kruh filed a Title IX complaint with SMU’s Affirmative Action Council on behalf of women athletes. She requested equitable access to existing facilities for the two women’s sports – swimming and tennis – and that the recently disbanded women’s basketball team be reinstated.

Though Kruh herself was not an athlete, her passion for the issue was stoked after she served in summer 1975 as an intern to Kansas Representative Martha Keys in Washington, D.C. Kruh attended congressional hearings on proposed Title IX regulations.

Congress approved the regulations that summer. When Kruh returned to school in the fall, she talked to some SMU women athletes and learned about their problems. Her standing as a student gave her the right to file the complaint.

Six weeks later, Kruh appeared at the SMU Affirmative Action Council hearing. After five hours, the council forwarded its recommendations to SMU President James Zumberge. His decision arrived as a letter in Kruh’s campus mailbox: The women’s basketball team was reinstated and funded with $2,500, swimmers were given better practice times and the tennis team received priority practice time on five new courts originally designated for intramurals.

"What I did wasn’t easy or pleasant, but as I look at today’s college athletes, I can see it was important to do," says Kruh, now a free-lance writer and Dallas Morning News columnist. "I’m really proud to have been part of something bigger."

By 1979, 32 women attended SMU on athletics scholarships, and SMU women won their first NCAA National Championship in the newly added sport of golf. Kyle O’Brien (’80) was named the nation’s outstanding woman golfer.

Nearly 20 years later, SMU athletics has added a number of other sports for women who have competed successfully at the national level and won numerous conference titles (see insert, this page).

"We are committed to gender equity as an athletics department," says SMU Athletics Director Steve Orsini. "In the past 11 years we have added three women’s sports and increased our funding of women’s athletics in the past two years. We continue to make strides in this area as we fully support all of our student athletes."

Nationally, women’s participation in college sports has increased dramatically, from 16,000 in 1970 to 260,000 in 2006. But Title IX continues to face challenges. The College Sports Council, a national coalition of coaches, athletes and parents, describes its mission as "working to eliminate Title IX quotas." According to the council, 17 percent of men’s collegiate teams have been eliminated since 1981. In a 2007 study, the council found that the average number of men’s teams per school has dropped to 7.8, while the number of women’s teams per school has risen to 8.7. U.S. Census figures, however, state that 58 percent of college students are women, while 42 percent are men.

Women’s athletics administrators also face challenges. "I can analyze the cost and competition of a new women’s sport, but determining how many women are interested in a sport is really difficult," Daws says.

As SMU’s Title IX coordinator, Daws plans a yearlong analysis of Title IX, including considering a recommendation for a new women’s sport. "To be part of a collegiate sport is the opportunity of a lifetime," she says. "Women want the opportunity. We know we need to get an A, and we will."

SMU basketball player Katy Cobb says she was reared to work hard, "but playing sports instilled in me that hard work brings results. As an upperclassman and leader of the team, I’m developing skills that will come in handy later when I hope to become a coach."

In 1995, while working as a feature writer for The Dallas Morning News, Kruh was assigned to profile a high school girls’ basketball team, the Duncanville Pantherettes, which has won six state titles and produced two professional basketball players – Tiffany Jackson with the New York Liberty and Tamika Catchings, an Olympic gold medalist who plays for the Indiana Fever.

"Looking at that team, I could tell how much sports was changing these girls’ lives," says Kruh, who plans to give her Title IX records to the SMU Archives. "Title IX really is so much more than just gaining equal practice facilities. It’s given girls and young women access to all the leadership experience, team skills and physical fitness that gave men such an advantage in school and at work for so long."

– Nancy Lowell George (’79)

Scorecard For SMU Women’s Sports

To support its commitment to gender equity in athletics, SMU added women’s soccer in 1986, cross country and indoor and outdoor track in 1987, volleyball in 1996, indoor track and field in 1998, rowing in 1999 and equestrian in 2004.

The national scene:

• Women’s swimming and diving finished in the top four at the NCAA championship from 1992-99 and again in 2003;
• The soccer team competed in the final four in 1995;
• Track and field placed in the top four at the NCAA outdoor championship from 1996-98 and at the indoor championship in 1999.

Some individual athletes who excelled:

• Katie Swords (’98), who in 1995 became the first SMU woman to win an NCAA track and field championship;
• Windy Dean (’98), the first woman athlete in history to win three consecutive NCAA javelin championships – 1996, ’97, ’98;
• Jennifer Santrock (’91), Southwest Conference Women’s Tennis Player-of-the Decade for the 1980s; and
• Martina Moravcova (’98, ’00), who won 14 NCAA swimming titles in 1999 along with two silver medals for Slovakia at the 2000 Olympics.