Monica Myrtle’s late grandmother was the most competitive person she had ever known.
When Cardinal Newman’s head girls basketball coach Myrtle began coaching, her grandmother came to all of Myrtle’s games and held statistics, as she did for Myrtle’s dad years ago. I did.
When Myrtle first started playing basketball in elementary school, she asked her grandmother what sport she played in high school in Santa Rosa in the 1940s.
“She looked at me and said,’I didn’t play sports when I was in high school,'” Myrtle recalled. “It was probably my first exposure to really understand that my opportunity was different from previous generations.”
These new opportunities, given to Myrtle and millions of other women, were brought about by the passage of Title IX in 1972. Thursday marks the 50th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s signing of the Educational Gap Act. But what is written in the law is Title IX, the 37 words that have changed women’s sports forever.
Although it will take years for Title IX to come into force properly (in some respects, the struggle that continues today), it is difficult to exaggerate the impact it has had on athletics over the last few decades. Specifically, the law prohibited gender discrimination in federal-funded schools. After the law was signed, the school had to provide equal opportunities for both male and female athletes.
In the year before Title IX passed, less than 300,000 girls participated in high school sports, National Federation of State High Schools. In 2019, the NFHS reported that 3.4 million girls and 4.5 million boys played high school sports.
Sonoma County’s athletics is also feeling the change, and as Title IX turns 50, local female coaches of the past and present will see how it affects their lives and look forward to future progress. I’m looking back on what I’m doing.
“It was a slow slogan, but we’re there,” said Karen Franci, coach of women’s basketball at Santa Rosa Junior College from 1970 to 2002.
Before and after
Growing up in Southern California, Karen Stanley just wanted to play soccer. She was 10 years old when Title IX passed, but when she was a teenager, she had little chance yet.
Despite attending high school with about 2,000 students, Stanley, who had an inducted coaching career at Santa Rosa Junior College with an 11-year mission, needed to play with a boy because he didn’t have a school. There was a team of girls. And she wasn’t originally allowed to work out with her male teammates in the weight room, even while she was on the men’s team.
“It was my first impetus that this wasn’t OK, I think it wasn’t right,” Stanley recalled. “We should all have the same opportunity.”
It was then that Stanley first heard about Title IX, and she was the first to sharply notice the inequality surrounding women’s sports.
After a few years as the head coach of USC, where she served from 1993 to 1996, the problem remained unresolved. She said the school created a women’s football program not because it wanted it, but because it had to. Compared to the men’s program, her team was a minimalist operation with very limited resources devoted to uniforms, facilities, and travel expenses.
Franci told a similar story after Title IX passed. I had to bake sale to raise money for new uniforms and equipment, and I often mistaken a male assistant for a head coach. Softball at Casa Grande High School from 1974 to 1988.
Smith Billing took advantage of some of the opportunities she had to play lifelong sports and eventually compete with the University of California, Davis club team. When she started at Casa Grande, she was 22 years old, but soon realized that it would be difficult to get paid for her job as her coach.
“I met the principal and said,’Sorry, where do you sign your coaching scholarship documents?’ And he looked at me completely incredibly and she remembered, “We don’t pay to coach women. We only pay men.” “I didn’t know what to do. I mean, you’re a woman, so what do you do when you’re completely told that you don’t deserve a scholarship?”
There have been many changes over the last 50 years. Women’s participation in sports is growing exponentially at all levels.Today women 44% of NCAA athletes, Increased from 15% before Title IX. At the Tokyo Olympics last summer 49% of all participants were women, Is touted as the most gender-equal game ever.When About a month agoThe US Women’s National Football Team has reached an agreement with the US Football Federation to secure equal pay for equal work with the men’s team.
