Women’s sports on the rise because of federal law

Title IX — two little words with big implications — is a concept on the minds of every athletic director in the country, said one local AD.

Saturday marked the 40th anniversary of the landmark congressional legislation that, among other things, mandated female athletes have equal opportunities in sports. Derek Waugh, the athletic director at Dalton State College, said that institution is just beginning to enter an arena in which that aspect of Title IX even matters.

The college is beginning a men’s basketball team as well as a women’s volleyball team in two years. There are also plans to develop a women’s basketball team.

“As an athletic director, we make sure that as we roll out anything for men, we’re rolling out the same thing for women in terms of scholarship opportunities, teams (on which) to participate,” Waugh said.

It wasn’t always so.

Lindsay Reeves, athletic director at North Georgia College and State University — the Gainesville institution where dozens of Whitfield and Murray County students are enrolled — calls Title IX “the greatest thing that ever happened for women in sports.”

When she was in college in the 1970s in upstate New York, the idea of Title IX was still slowly weaving its way into public thought. Women played basketball, but they weren’t allowed to be a part of the NCAA. Waugh likened the women’s league to “glorified intramural” sports.

Now, women are not only allowed in the NCAA, they’re always given at least equal opportunities, officials said. Reeves said opportunities are supposed to grow proportionately with enrollment but never drop below 50/50. Colleges with a higher female population are required to field more teams or kinds of sports, she said.

About a third of all athletic directors in the NCAA are female, Reeves noted.

“Fifteen or 20 years ago, you would have never seen that,” she said.

It’s no wonder given that for decades women weren’t even allowed to play full-court basketball.

Retired Dalton teacher Carolyn Foster said when she was enrolled at Dalton High School in the 1950s, she was very athletic, but “basketball was about all they had.” Even that wasn’t full court.

“They started adding on after I graduated, but they didn’t have any (sports) like tennis, no, and the softball teams, no,” she said. “Everything was geared toward the males.”

Yet Foster majored in physical education when she attended Young Harris College and Georgia State College for Women in Milledgeville. She went on to coach basketball in Rockmart at the junior high level. That’s despite the fact she never played competitively in college. The opportunities just weren’t there. There were intramural sports, but that was it.

Now, Foster plays tennis competitively, going to tournaments and playing matches against people from all over the area through the North Georgia Tennis Association.

It’s a different time.

Today’s athletes, like golfer Casey Truelove, a North Georgia junior majoring in accounting who graduated from Northwest Whitfield High School in 2010, have lived only during an era of opportunity.

Truelove said she picked up the clubs her eighth-grade year and stuck with the sport all through high school. There are six girls on her team. They practice four days a week, work out for three and on some weekends voluntarily get in some extra swings.

“It’s really helped me become more dedicated,” she said of being on the team. “I’ve had to really work hard to get where I want to be, and it’s not something that is easy. You really have to work at it if you want to be good.”

Waugh said some sports still struggle to attract female athletes — golf, for example — and colleges sometimes have to offer more scholarships for females than for males. He said that’s likely to change over the years as more and more girls get into sports. It took years, he added, just to get to this point.

“I think Title IX was probably ahead of its time in terms of culture and that culture has gradually caught up in terms of participation,” he said.

Yet Title IX’s provisions for female athletes weren’t without controversy.

Some colleges seeking to balance the number of opportunities for males with those for females cut men’s sports in an effort to fund women’s sports.

“I know wrestling was a sport that was commonly cut, men’s swimming,” Waugh said.

Schools with football teams had, and still do have, additional considerations.

“Really, since football is a sport where only men play, (if) you’re giving 85 football scholarships, now you’ve got to match that on the women’s side,” he explained. “The schools that don’t quite have the budget that decide they’re going to do football, now they’re going to have to cut something, generally on the men’s side.”

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Women’s sports on the rise because of federal law

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