When Beth Whitney Mahar was a gymnast at the University of Illinois, she had to buy her own uniform and pay her own travel expenses. She didn’t even have a coach until the wife of a teacher stepped forward.
“We didn’t know any better,” said Mahar, who graduated in 1970. “It didn’t matter that we weren’t recognized, received no funding and were virtually invisible. We were just so grateful to participate.”
More than three decades later, the university is making amends to Mahar–and all the other female athletes who played for Illinois before 1974–by awarding them a varsity letter.
Until Title IX, the landmark legislation that prohibited sex discrimination in any educational activity and is still controversial 30 years later, women were ineligible to receive the coveted “I” that conferred status and excellence.
Now, some 200 women, including at least one who competed as far back as the 1930s, will finally get their due. They will come to the Urbana-Champaign campus Friday from every corner of the state, as well as California, Oregon and the Virgin Islands, to bask in the spotlight they lacked during their playing days.
What the university lacked in timeliness it will make up in star treatment. The weekend will kick off with a welcome reception and introductions at the women’s basketball opener against Wayne State. On Saturday, they’ll be recognized during halftime at the Northwestern football game and gain entry to the “Varsity I” tent, which had always been off limits. On Sunday, they will receive their framed letters at a brunch.
Mahar, 55, plans to accept her award by doing a cartwheel across the stage, much to the chagrin of her two teenage sons.
In recent months, the trend of honoring these pioneering athletes has gained national momentum. The University of Minnesota and the University of Iowa paid tribute a year ago; Illinois State feted their female athletes in February.
“I don’t know if you could call it a `sweep’ yet, but everyone’s consciousness has been raised,” said Tom Porter, U. of I. special projects director.
Because of sketchy records, efforts to find the women relied heavily on word-of-mouth. University staff also pored over old yearbooks, noting participants in field hockey, basketball, softball, volleyball and a handful of other sports, then matching those names against alumni lists.
The search turned up about 1,100 candidates, including 93-year-old Anna Donnabelle Lewis Kirby, a track star from the Class of 1936, who will be the oldest honoree.
Despite the hurdles they faced, some of the women still snared Olympic berths, national titles and induction into the Women’s Sports Hall of Fame.
“There’s a real desire to capture this history while it’s here,” said Porter, adding that the university will seize this opportunity to chronicle stories that were missed the first time around.
Though many of the recipients have long since swapped their swimming goggles for bifocals and cleats for sensible shoes, the passion they feel for women’s athletics remains as strong as when they toiled away in anonymity.
“Our names aren’t on a plaque. … I don’t even think we have a team picture,” said Mahar, a physical education teacher at Homewood-Flossmoor High School. “But what we did get is a huge shot of independence.”
Growing up in Calumet City, Mahar and her younger sister, Sue Whitney Colvin, would do handstands with their father–a gymnast during the 1920s and ’30s–and were fierce competitors in neighborhood games such as kick the can. But when it came time for something more organized, such as Little League, they were told those pursuits were reserved for their two brothers.
Colvin, 52, accepted that explanation until a sorority sister recruited her to play “extramurals” for the softball team in 1972, the year Title IX became law. She became a .300 hitter.
“After every game, we used to scan the newspaper, but there was nothing. … One time, we found two column inches, and I was just so excited to see my name,” said Colvin, who graduated in 1974, the year Title IX was implemented.
“I was a little envious of the girls coming up … because I felt that I had really missed out on something.”
Women were first admitted to the U. of I. in 1870, but organized physical activity didn’t start until four years later when Louise Allen, the director of the School of Domestic Science, initiated a women’s calisthenics program.
By 1895, the university started granting course credit for physical fitness classes, thanks to the efforts of Ella Morrison, the department’s first director, who posted a John Milton quote on the gymnasium wall: “To Be Weak Is Miserable.”
The following year, the first organized women’s athletic event–a basketball game against Illinois Wesleyan–was held at Military Hall. The score: a 28-14 victory for the Illini.
Subsequent decades were almost as quaint. In 1970, funding for all women’s programs was a meager $5,000. Bag lunches, bunking in private homes for road games and holding bake sales for gas money were business as usual.
“We were so naive that we didn’t realize that anything was wrong with it,” said Linda Bunker, a member of the Class of 1968 and now a professor in the kinesiology department at the University of Virginia. “We even officiated at our own games … and no one ever questioned our integrity. There was a real sense of honor and pride … for testing how good you are today and how good you will be tomorrow.”
This year, some 204 female varsity athletes are competing in 10 sports at U. of I. In 2002, $5.8 million was budgeted for women’s sports, of which $1.9 million was spent on scholarships.
Nationwide, the participation in women’s college athletics zoomed from 30,000 in 1972 to 150,000 this year.
The change was even more profound at the high school level, which saw the numbers swell from 300,000 to nearly 2.8 million, according to the Women’s Sports Foundation.
Some critics say those opportunities have unfairly affected men’s sports. The National Wrestling Coaches Association filed a lawsuit this year against the federal government on behalf of a coalition of men’s sports, noting that while more than 350 women’s teams have been created since 1974, more than 400 men’s teams have been axed. The case was dismissed last month.
Advocates for Title IX say schools could provide more chances for everyone if they trimmed the hefty budgets of high-profile sports such as football and basketball.
Phyllis Hill, 75, who coached several sports at the University of Illinois from 1952 to 1977, sees no turning back.
“It opened up a whole new avenue,” she said. “For the first time, people were able to see that girls and women had talent and skills. All they needed was the same opportunities to express them.”
Carolyn Bechly, 53, is traveling half way across the country to the Urbana-Champaign campus this weekend as much for the camaraderie with her golf teammates as for her varsity letter. A school guidance counselor in Roseville, Calif., Bechly still plays golf three or four times a week.
“We were a special group–we made changes, as well as good careers for ourselves,” Bechly said. “It’s time to acknowledge a great chapter of our lives.”
