Title IX at 50: A Coming of Age Story

As the third born with two older brothers to keep up with, I was the baby of the family and the answer to my mom’s prayers. My arrival was heralded as “A baby girl to dress in frills and spangles” per my grandfather’s letter of congratulations. Aunt Joanna’s letter to my parents welcomed them to a new team called the “petticoat brigade.” My dad even called me “Little Miss Fluffbottom,” his term of endearment was based on the frilly bottom garment featured under my dresses. Yes, I was born in the last stereotyped generation before Title IX existed.

In the 1960s and early ’70s, I grew up outdoors on the playgrounds and parks of St. Anthony Village, Minnesota, a near suburb of Minneapolis. “Go play outside” was my mom’s mantra, whether it was ice skating on the nearby flooded field, playing SPUD, or kicking the can in our front yard with neighborhood friends. Back in elementary school, I was labeled a “Tom Boy,” preferring Jack Purcell tennis shoes over ballet slippers. Active play was instrumental in my childhood development and in reflection, that may have been because there were limited opportunities, especially for girls, to play organized sports.

Yes, there were the stereotypical offerings for girls: ballet, tap, and figure skating, but few team sports just for girls. Even though I tolerated figure skating lessons, I preferred speed skating and would cross the frozen park to the hockey rink and race the boys in my figure skates (and win). Driven by the thrill of competition, I wanted to join athletic teams that didn’t yet exist. I distinctly remember challenging boys during my early school years to race me across the Wilshire Park Elementary playground (running) and didn’t lose a challenge until 6th grade when I was finally dethroned.

My father, Dr. Roger Wilk, worked at the University of Minnesota in the College of Education where we frequently spent time at the Cooke Hall gym or paddled about the pool during my childhood. Dad captained the game of “motorboat” with me in the Cooke Hall practice pool, where I was first introduced to the water sport in the mid-1960s. Motorboat led to Red Cross swimming lessons, where I failed advanced beginners (twice) because of my breaststroke kick. Failure seemed to motivate me to figure out how to pass and move up to the next level.

On dry land, a sport I couldn’t participate in was Little League Baseball as girls were strictly “not allowed.” I so desperately wanted to join my brother’s team that the boys bestowed the honorary job and title of “water girl” on me. I loved being part of a team, even if I was the kid sister, and really only tolerated in the shadows. Title IX didn’t yet exist, but little did I know that there were moms and dads of girls like me wondering how to gain equal rights for their talented athletic girls.

A couple of years later, my older brother, Philip joined the local swimming team after a knee condition forced him off the baseball field and hockey rink and into the pool as a consolation sport. Philip soon found aquatic success, which led to ribbons and medals pinned to his bulletin board. This display of accomplishment taunted me; I knew I could do that too. It’s amazing what a fierce motivator jealousy and sibling competition can be! At age eight, I joined the local AAU (Amateur Athletic Union) swim team in St. Anthony and soon accumulated ribbons and medals of my own. Water girl was soon eclipsed by swimmer girl.

Throughout elementary school, mom enrolled me in ballet, tap, and piano lessons. For me, the fit was awkward and unfulfilling, but I didn’t know why. Once I joined the AAU (Amateur Athletic Union) community track team, took a volleyball class, and started breaking age-group swimming records, I knew athletics was not only a gift but my passion. I especially loved being on a team. The individual accomplishment was satisfying, but I found that team victories were even more powerful fuel for this athletic junkie. By the age of 11, I was addicted to competitive sports, so mom packed up my ballet shoes and started sewing on swimming patches.

Around this same time in 1972, parents of athletic girls everywhere were becoming a force advocating for the 310,000 American women playing high school and college sports.* To put that in perspective, fifty years after the passage of Title IX, there are now 3.4 million women in high school and college athletics*. It was about this time that my swimming talent progressed to the national stage; my extracurricular activities moved away from dance and piano lessons so I could be more focused on swimming and school. Oh yes, and clarinet, as my father believed each of his three children must play an instrument for a well-rounded development (he was an educational psychologist after all).

It was early in 1972 when Representative Patsy Takemoto Mink authored and sponsored the passage of the “Equal Opportunity in Education Act” in the House while Senator Birch co-authored passage in the Senate. President Nixon signed the bill into law on June 23, 1972, paving the way for the expansion and legitimacy of women’s athletics. President Gerald Ford signed the final version, called “Title IX” on May 27, 1975, that stated, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefit of, or be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Following Mink’s death in 2002, the Act was fittingly renamed the “Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act.” At the time of Title IX passage, our family had relocated to Florida and I had broken three national age-group swimming records. Back at the “U” (University of Minnesota), the groundwork for a women’s swimming team was underway, preparing for my eventual return.

It was during this same timeframe that my swim coaches at the “U,” Jean Freeman and Terry Ganley, formed a swim club and practiced at Norris Gymnasium in a 20-yard pool. Jean was paid $50 a year to coach the club back in 1973, where lockers were not even provided to the girls. Meanwhile, the men had a varsity swimming team and practiced in the regulation size 25-yard Cooke Hall Pool. It was the determined work of Freeman, Ganley and the hiring of Minnesota’s first full-time coach for women’s athletics, Linda Wells, that catalyzed women’s athletics in the mid-1970s at the U. Wells was hired on at $9,400 a year to coach three sports: volleyball, basketball, and softball. Meanwhile, the men’s baseball coach was paid $28,000 and the football coach in the $60,000 range.*

My high school years in Tampa were true “college prep” for academics, but also in sports. My athletic ability shined at the Academy of Holy Names, under beloved swimming coach, Craig McConnell. It was Craig who developed me into both a national-class swimmer and leader of my peers. In the swimming offseason, I played volleyball and found team sports even more gratifying than individual events. Our Varsity Volleyball team won State twice, where I found success as a front-line hitter and power server thanks in part to upper body strength developed through swimming. My time at the Academy under the watchful eyes of the nuns by day and dedicated coaches before and after school prepared me both athletically and academically for the rigor of college and Division I athletics.

During my high school years, unaware of conditions of inequity in the “real world,” there was a pioneering group of female leaders armed with Title IX who were paving the way. One of those was Terry Ganley, who went on to become the first female All-American in any sport for the “U,” first student-athlete to receive the U of M Presidents Leadership Award, and eventually was a Big Ten Coach of the Year. She amassed a legion of hundreds of All-American swimmers under her coaching tenure and multiple NCAA national champions. * Quite simply, the leading ladies of Freeman, Wells, and Ganley wrote the script for my arrival and opened up opportunities for thousands of future women athletes to obtain a first-class education while excelling at sports.

The timing of my arrival to Division I swimming under the AIAW (Amateur Athletics Association for Women) at Minnesota began the fall after Ganley graduated in 1979. Women were not yet governed by the NCAA (that happened just before my junior year in 1982). Terry was hired on as the part-time assistant coach under Jean Freeman, while also serving as the Gymnastics team secretary. As a wide-eyed and ambitious freshman, I attempted to play two Division I sports: volleyball and swimming.

Arriving the summer before the fall quarter as a walk-on junior varsity volleyball player for Linda Wells, I was given a food budget of $5 a day and a dorm room at Sanford Hall. I remember being envious of the football team’s training table as I walked in from volleyball practice and smelled their steaks. As I popped open a can of Chunky soup in my stark dorm room, I felt a long way from home. I wanted to play two sports I loved — volleyball and swimming, but soon learned that Division I athletics was a whole new level of competition that created more shoulder pain. Reluctantly, I quit the golden gopher volleyball team to focus on swimming, to rest my shoulders, and most importantly, to earn my swimming scholarship.

My first two years of swimming at Minnesota were governed under the AIAW with a scholarship that covered tuition, fees, room, and board, but not books. I envied the male scholarship athletes with registration privileges. The male athletes picked up their books (at no cost to them) while I waited in long lines to pay. That was just how it was back then. Male athletes had the privilege. Frankly, the joy of being able to receive a scholarship for swimming and pursue my degree was a gift unimaginable just a few years earlier. My last two years swimming for the golden gophers were under the NCAA umbrella. As new guidelines of equity enabled new privileges, my books were paid for as well and I got to skip the lines!

Leaving Minnesota, I had BA in hand, three All-America awards, some Big 10 Titles, and a President’s Leadership Award, just like my coach Terry Ganley had modeled before me.

Years, in fact, decades sped by as I was married, raised a family, worked, and contributed to my Batavia, Illinois community. Meanwhile, Minnesota women’s athletics continued to raise the bar of excellence for the females in sports that came after me, just as it should. But in 2010 my beloved coach, Jean Freeman, succumbed to cancer near the end of her career, leaving us much too soon. As a testimony to her legacy of leadership, the U named the new aquatics center after her, which was both fitting and surprising. Hat tip to the U for naming the “Jean K. Freeman Aquatic Center,” after a pioneering female leader and champion of women’s athletics instead of a major donor! Whenever I visit the Jean Freeman Aquatic Center and walk through the Swimming Hall of Fame, great memories rush over me. Without a doubt, women’s athletics helped mold me into the person and leader I have am today.

Minnesota’s natatorium is state-of-the-art, regularly hosting Big 10’s and national-caliber meets as a premier destination that my generation of swimmers could only have dreamed of while training at Cooke Hall. The icing on the cake is a $166 million dollar Athletes Village that opened in 2018 at the U for both male and female athletes. Division I athletics today has great privileges, and also carries great pressures. The recent devastating suicide of Stanford’s star soccer player, Katie Meyer is a wake-up call and sad reminder that equality also brings along with it new realities. The mental health effects of female athletes’ success, failure, and pressures of striving for perfection need to be recognized and addressed.

Over the years, Title IX has been looked to for guidance in discrimination on the basis of gender, sexual harassment, equity in pay, and most recently for gender identity challenges. “Dear Colleague” letters have been a voice of conscience written from time to time and a “3-prong test” to determine if organizations are effectively accommodating the participation needs of underrepresented sex were put into place in 1979. This test evaluates the following three areas:

1) The number of male and female athletes is substantially proportionate to their respective enrollments, or; 2) The institution has a history and continuing practice of expanding participation opportunities, responding to the developing interests and abilities of the underrepresented sex, or; 3) The institution is fully and effectively accommodating the interest and abilities of the underrepresented sex.

The limits of Title IX were challenged in 1984 under Grove City -v-Bell, where applicability to specific programs was reversed. Then in 1988, over the veto of President Reagan, Title IX’S institution-wide coverage was restored. Today’s Title IX struggles and challenges revolve around gender identity and salary equity. As Lia Thomas, Penn State transgender swimmer recently claimed the NCAA women’s 500-yard freestyle title, new challenges to Title IX are being issued. I don’t know what to feel about how Lia’s victory will threaten or broaden Title IX. My initial reaction questions fairness to the women born with female bodies. Men’s bodies are naturally larger framed — taller with wider shoulders and smaller hips, which in a sport like swimming is a distinct advantage. I’m no doctor, but am uncertain that hormone therapy is the equalizer and I also don’t feel that exclusion is the answer. Fairness now headlines questions surrounding the future of the Title IX formula as former male athletes participate as women and claim titles.

To bring this story full circle, our youngest son Owen married a Division I volleyball player who also benefitted from Title IX and received a volleyball scholarship to Loyola Chicago where they met. Today, Natalie is a creative and talented writer and mother to two of our grandchildren. We now have two granddaughters (and one grandson with another on the way). My hope for our grandchildren is that they only read about inequality and inequity in the annals of history and it is not part of their lived experience. But I also know change takes time and persistence.

A pull quote from Amanda Termuhlen, M.D. featured in the Minnesota Alumni spring 2022 magazine jumped out at me to highlight more Title IX unfinished business. “All those years ago, I thought the (reasons women weren’t advancing) was because the pipeline was leaky. Today, one of the biggest leaks is salary equity.” * Yes, equality doesn’t yet translate to equity. We still need to stand up and continue to follow the models of Freeman, Ganley, and Wells for the benefit of the next generation of athletes who want to make athletics, coaching, and athletic administration their career paths. It is not one’s gender identity that should determine the rate of pay, but the quality of work and contribution that is rewarded.

I owe a debt of gratitude to the parents of girls who advocated for our rights, and to Rep. Patsy Takemoto Mink, who chiseled away at the barriers to progress for women athletes everywhere. More thanks go to my coaches Craig, Jean, and Terry, and to pioneers like Linda Wells whose persistence built a strong foundation, which is now legacy at Minnesota. My dream for our granddaughters is for them to write a follow-up story of Title IX at 100, thanking all the pioneers and champions who came before them to establish equity. Until the day we reach true equity, may we ever strive to live into the words of the Minnesota Rouser fight song, “Firm and strong, united are we.”

(*Statistics cited from University of Minnesota Alumni spring 2022 magazine articles on Title IX at 50)