Tomorrow marks fifty years since Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 was enacted by Congress and signed into law by President Richard Nixon. It prohibited sex discrimination in any educational program or activity receiving any type of federal financial aid. It brought girls’ competitive sports into high schools just in time for our daughter, Lisa. Three years later, she was a freshman who began participating in girls’ track, volley ball and softball teams. The retired Illinois State Trooper continues to play slow pitch softball and volley ball with women’s recreational league teams.
When I attended the same high school in the 1950s, the Rockford Peaches were playing with the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League but the idea of competitive sports for females hadn’t trickled down. Twenty or thirty of us belonged to the Girls’ Athletic Association that met after school twice a week to play sports among ourselves.
Besides learning to play a game, a girl who is a member of a school team acquires many life-long skills such as leadership, competition and friendship. She establishes priorities and manages her time–practices and games take a chunk out of her day but she still must do her homework and maintain her grades. Dealing with coaches and game officials, she might not always agree, but she respects authority. She makes sacrifices for teammates such as bunting a softball pitch to advance the runner on base knowing she will be out at first but her team will score a run. She ranks her abilities between the star player and the bench-sitter. By the time she enters the adult world, she is ready to take an active part.
In 2002, after the death of Hawaii’s congresswoman, Title IX was renamed the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act to honor the bill’s major author. Mink, who was the first Asian-American woman to serve in the legislative body, had been familiar with discrimination.
Have you ever been a member of a competitive sports team?