Celebrating 50 years of Title IX

Little did Johnston and her teammates, who had to pay their way to meets and tournaments and drive themselves to and from them, as the women’s golf team — one of just a few sports teams at the school that even offered competitive women’s sports — did not receive any funding, but their coach was helping transform the scope of women’s athletics and gender equality by helping pass Title IX.

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 was passed on June 23 of that year, putting into federal law that federally funded programs and activities could not discriminate based on one’s gender. That meant that college and high school athletics, which had a decades-hold grip in men’s and boys sports like football in basketball, would now have to provide equal opportunities for women.

Prior to Title IX, girls sports did exist at local high schools, but in a limited capacity. The Girls Athletic Association is where girls could play sports after school, in scrimmage or practice formats within their own school, with some rare occasions of teams taking on neighboring towns.

But there were no state tournaments like the boys had with the Illinois High School Association. There was no funding for uniforms or busses, just passionate PE teachers who wanted to give girls the opportunity to pursue their passions.

And when the IHSA began to recognize girls sports after Title IX passed, pillars of the GAA like Barb Redeker (Watseka) and Jo Grogan (Kankakee) were immediately hired as coaches of any and every sport at their schools. Darla Moldenhauer, who graduated from Illinois State University in 1972, was hired that fall at Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School, and helped the school launch sports in 1973, beginning a coaching career that lasted until 2005.

Like Johnston, Moldenhauer absorbed the progressive mindset towards athletic gender equality at ISU, where the first women’s national college swimming and basketball tournaments were hosted during her time as a Redbird. That feminist mindset is what Moldenhauer brought, along with her love of sports, to Bradley-Bourbonnais.

“We were taught to work hard, represent ourselves and our school well and be good sports with good sportsmanship,” Moldenahuer said. “All of those true core values I think many of us, especially the early coaches, believed in.

“There were mixed feelings at the beginning — men ADs and coaches who didn’t wanna share a piece of the pie and athletic budgets are only so big,” she added. “There was some pushback in the early years, and I don’t think it was meant to be personal, but here we had these women who wanted equality.”

In the 50 years since, pioneers like Moldenhauer and dozens of other women who helped create athletic programs with little-to-no formal coaching expertise at the start, to create the culture that has created state champions, All-Americans and new generations of coaches who are able to continue passing along the lessons that came with the foundations those before them laid.

One of those coaches is Amanda Hammond, an assistant strength and conditioning coach at Bradley-Bourbonnais, the first woman to hold that title in school history. Hammond, a 1998 BBCHS graduate, played volleyball for Moldenhauer, including the barrier-breaking match during her senior year when the volleyball team first played in the boys gym, now known as the main gym.

“It’s been hard to do but it’s definitely come a long way,” Hammond said of the progress made in women’s and girls sports. “I remember when we taped lines down in the boys gym for volleyball, and Darla was happy, but she asked why they couldn’t be painted on and why it had to just be the boys gym.”

The image of those volleyball lines taped on the court is representative of what some see the progress of the last 50 years as. For someone like Moldenhauer, a local feminist icon, to fight so hard for something seemingly so simple 25 years after she began her fight for equality as a coach, is both a testament to the people who have worked so hard and a reminder of how much progress was still left to be made in 1998, much of that left open today.

According to data website fivethirtyeight.com, 90% of women’s college coaches were women when Title IX was enacted. But as federal funding starting hitting women’s sports, male coaches found their way over as well, capturing more than half of the women’s college coaching market by the mid-1980s. At no point since then have women held more than half of the women’s coaching jobs in America.

Khadaizha Sanders, a 2015 Bishop McNamara graduate and state championship-winning girls basketball player, was hired as the head coach at her alma mater in May. It wasn’t until she got to college at Rutgers University, where she played for Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall-of-Famer C. Vivian Stringer, that Sanders had the opportunity to play for a woman head coach.

“I don’t take anything away from men coaches and every coach I’ve had has been great and I have so much respect for them, but a man doesn’t fully understand what a woman goes through on a day-to-day basis as opposed to what a man might go through,” Sanders said. “It affects us emotionally and physically, and I think as a woman coach you can look at a young woman more as a person than as a basketball player or softball player.

“For me it was a comfort thing, and I knew, woman to woman, she understood me and the things I might be going through.”

Sanders is cautiously optimistic that women will continue to break the barriers that are even put in front of them now because of the women who came before them. So is Laura Harms Cantillo, a former teammate of Hammond’s at BBCHS before a college All-American and professional softball career that predated a nine-year softball coaching career at Bishop McNamara that included a 2013 state title and nine All-City championships.

Citing recent examples such as the United States Women’s National Soccer team and the recent strides made in equality in the NCAA Women’s Basketball National Tournament, as well as a recent influx in local women coaches and athletic directors, Harms Cantillo is one of several women who have taken note of the next wave of progress being made.

“Obviously it kind of stinks that we’re still fighting for that, but it’s nice that women are feeling that they need to push back and they can see the change,” Harms Cantillo said. “Women are glad it’s finally happening, but I think women just need to make sure they know they have a voice and that we can stand up.”