Sporting Attitude
Young ladies barely competed, and sportsmanship was the goal. Title IX changed all that big time
By Kara Chalmers
Photographs By Dai Sugano
Before 1972, when a high school girl enjoyed playing sports, she had an option--it was called the Girls Athletic Association. It was called by some "honors P.E." The girls did not have access to the indoor facilities--the domain of boy athletes--but they played outside, coached by the female physical education teachers, during the last period of the day. Girls strived not to win, but to have good sportsmanship. And when teams from other schools came over on "play days," the home-team girls did their own officiating and would pass out lollypops, or pour their rivals cups of soda.
A lot has changed in 30 years. Saratoga and Los Gatos high schools have achieved parity in the number of sports programs and the spending for their boys and girls programs. The schools recruit equal caliber coaches for both girls and boy's teams and pay the coaches equally. The schools have administrations that place equal emphasis on boys and girls sports.
"Whatever one team gets, the other also gets," said Saratoga High School Athletic Director Mike Navrides.
In 1972, Congress passed Title IX, a section of the educational amendments, to counter gender inequities in any educational institution that received federal funding. Title IX prohibits discrimination against girls and women in federally funded education--including athletics programs. Besides giving women and girls opportunities to attend colleges on athletic scholarships, Title IX has given some girls the chance to just participate in certain sports for the first time, and it has given many of them the chance to excel at those sports.
And with young girls' exposure to so many national and international role models, things can only get better.
"This is the first year since Title IX that has really shown what it's done," said Judy Ellis, former Saratoga High School girl's athletic director, coach and teacher, referring to the 2000 Olympic games in Sydney, Australia. "It's a direct result of more opportunity for those people to compete and get coaching at a high level. People in my age group paved the way for that to happen. We lost some stuff, but we sure gained a lot, too."
At both high schools today, coaching is the one area that has not seen an increase in female representation. Los Gatos High School Athletic Director Mark Magagna, who has been at the high school for 16 years, said that with the huge rise in participation rates for girls in high school sports over the years, he would have expected to see a similar growth in women coaches.
"It's not parallel," Magagna said. "You're still seeing a majority of coaches are male."
And fans, or lack thereof, are still a sore subject.
"Girls water polo gets hardly any recognition," said senior SHS player Sarah Oberhauser. "The administration and the coaches are fine, I think it's just been that way for a long time."
Senior field hockey and soccer player Keala Meyer, also from SHS, agrees, as do many other athletes at both schools.
"At Saratoga High School, boys' sports are attended more by fans," Meyer said. "People are more used to watching a guy play basketball."
Saratoga High School women's water polo player Kori Shih aims at the goal during practice at the school's recently completed pool.
Hair ribbons and winning
With the passage of Title IX, high schools girls were first given the chance to really compete. When schools switched from GAA to girl's sports around 1973, girl's teams were given standings, and games and scores were written up in local newspapers and announced over the schools' intercoms. All of a sudden, winning became important, according to Barbara Reeder, who taught physical education, and was the girls' athletic director and a coach at Los Gatos High School for 21 years, beginning in 1966. Today, Reeder teaches at Saratoga High School.
"In GAA, nobody ever paid attention," Reeder said. "It was fun and games. Yes, there was competition, there was a lot of competition, but it wasn't important competition."
To be picked for the prestigious GAA, girls had to have an A or a B in physical education, but this did not mean the girls necessarily had to have athletic ability, according to Reeder.
Reeder tells the story of the first year of girl's sports, when a male coach, a former football coach, began coaching the girls.
"Here's this man's voice, yelling at these girls, and they didn't quite know what to do," Reeder said. She said at their first team meeting, the girls had wanted to talk about what color hair ribbons they were going to wear for the upcoming game and what kinds of lollypops they would give out.
"The difference in the way it was then and what it is now, it's unbelievable," Reeder said. "It's a real big difference from hair ribbons and lollypops being important to winning being important."
Reeder said that by the time she had become the girl's athletic director in Los Gatos, the majority of the coaches reporting to her were men.
"One of the things I noticed is that we as P.E. teachers didn't know how to coach," Reeder said. "We were never trained. When girls sports started, we didn't know how to push the girls."
Ellis, who began in Saratoga in 1967 as a physical education teacher, said, after Title IX was passed, the girls still had a long road ahead of them.
"The male coaching staff didn't buy into it," she said. "There was a lot of hostility ... It was like killing their golden goose. We had to start sharing the facilities and also the revenue."
Girls' sports have evolved, Ellis adds, but in the process, some things have been lost, partly because men are still coaching most girls' sports.
"The pressure to win is there more now," she said, and added that the emphasis on sportsmanship and doing things right has been lost.
Changing times and coed teams
Saratoga High School head wrestling coach, Alex Reburn, whose combined junior varsity and varsity team is comprised of 20 boys and six to eight girls, said that girls on wrestling teams, playing against boys of their own weight, has become much more common since Reburn was in high school.
He said he sees no difference between his players, whether they are male or female.
"They're all wrestlers," Reburn said.
Girls' water polo became a varsity sport at SHS in fall 1996, and is one of the newest girls' sports at the school. The girls' and boys' teams played against each other in a six on six scrimmage when the schools held a dedication ceremony for its brand new pool in August. The girls' team won 12 to eight.
In 1972, SHS offered girls' gymnastics, volleyball, swimming, tennis, field hockey and basketball. Under the GAA system, the sports were rotated every nine weeks, so that girls chose from two sports each of four seasons.
Girls at Saratoga today can play the above sports, except for gymnastics, and can also play softball, water polo, track, cross country and soccer. Saratoga's coed teams, where girls compete directly against boys, are badminton, wrestling and golf.
At Los Gatos High School in 1972, the girls were offered swimming, tennis, field hockey, basketball, gymnastics, softball, soccer, badminton and volleyball. Today, except for gymnastics, girls can play all the same sports plus water polo, track, cross country and golf. The coed teams at LGHS are badminton and rowing.
Molley Means is the coach for the LGHS women's water polo team. She watches her students practice at the new SHS pool where they must do their practicing because of inadequate facilities at Los Gatos.
You've come a long way, baby
"One of the things that's changed is it's OK for a girl to be an athlete now," Reeder said. "Even when we first started with girls sports, it wasn't something a majority of girls wanted to be called--an athlete or a jock."
Today's girl athletes in Saratoga and Los Gatos have made being an athlete a huge part of who they are.
"I think being an athlete says a lot about you," said Anita Reyes, a senior LGHS field hockey player and the top scorer on the team. "It means so much more than you just play sports well."
Anne Ricketts, who ran track and cross country at SHS and today runs track at UC-Davis, because of a partial athletic scholarship, said, "In high school, it was the main thing in my life, it's what I thought about all the time."
It became apparent in interviews with top female athletes at both high schools that they all placed a high degree of importance on sports, when they were asked to describe themselves.
"Athletic, determined, competitive," said LGHS volleyball senior, Kelly Rinehart, who plays on the varsity team, along with her fraternal twin sister, Lauren. "It's a humongous commitment, it's 75 percent of our life," Kelly said, speaking also for Lauren.
Many of the athletes said that sports provide structure in their lives, provide a healthy outlet and a social circle. Some even say sports keeps them out of trouble.
"It's pretty much all I do besides school," said Oberhauser, the water polo player and swimmer for SHS.
Oberhauser said she definitely plans on playing water polo in college. She said she just wants to play and it doesn't matter to her whether the school is division one or two.
Amanda Wise, a senior varsity tennis player at SHS, who has also played softball, says sports easily comprises half of her time, "When I'm not playing tennis, I'm a huge baseball fan," Wise said, as she watched the Olympics on television. "I love football. Generally, when I watch TV, it's a sports event."
"It does seem like from the time I graduated until now, girl athletes seem to be better trained, more serious about the sport," said Navrides, who is in his third year as athletic director at SHS. "I think there's a lot more women role models today."
He said there wasn't as much emphasis placed on girls' sports when he was in school in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He said he thinks there's a bigger interest in girls' sports now, although he admits there are still more fans who attend boys' games.
"In general, girls now know there is more opportunity out there if they do well in their sport," said Nicole Garzon, head girls' water polo coach at Presentation High School.
Garzon herself attended San Diego State University on a partial scholarship for water polo--a women's sport the college started in 1995, partly due to Title IX requirements.
"Title IX helped," she said.
At San Diego State, women's swimming had been discontinued in 1984 and reinstated in 1994, when Garzon entered as a freshman, partly to make scholarship opportunities equal for both women and men college athletes.
She said girls are becoming more and more competitive as a result of more college and athletic scholarship opportunities and more willing to do what it takes to obtain those scholarships.
When LGHS head field hockey coach Henry Reyes coached girls' tennis 25 years ago, he said the intensity of the athletes was the same as that of the field hockey players he coaches today. But he said the focus, ambition and drive wasn't as strong back then.
Amanda Wise plays for the SHS women's varsity tennis team.
A coaching shortage
The majority of head coaches at Saratoga and Los Gatos high schools are male. There are 12 female coaches on staff in Saratoga out of 68, and only one is a varsity coach. The rest are junior varsity coaches or assistant coaches. In Los Gatos, three out of 17 head coaches are women.
"I would really like to find women coaches for girls sports," Navrides said. "For role models."
Coaches and assistant coaches are underpaid, as are teachers, according to Navrides, which may partly explain the dearth of female head coaches at both schools.
Presentation water polo coach Garzon, said it would be nice to see more female coaches out there, but that high schools today, especially in Silicon Valley, cannot be picky, and have to take what they can get.
"There's a desperate need for coaching," said Garzon, who works at a full-time job in the private sector on top of coaching. "Living in the Silicon Valley, you do it for the love of the sport and being able to help out kids."
But she thinks there may be hope yet, as more young female athletes graduate from college and return to their home towns to coach, as she herself did.
The female track coaches at Davis, one of whom was the 1996 Olympic coach, seriously influenced Anne Ricketts' decision to attend the college. She had never had a female coach until college and said there are a lot of differences between men and women coaches.
"With men coaches, you may be hesitant to say you're tired or hurting," Ricketts said. "At least with my coach, there's a lot more consideration and discussion at the beginning of every workout ... a little more openness."
Ricketts said she is more comfortable talking to her female college coaches about some issues concerning running.
"But I don't have a preference," she added.
Keala Meyer, too, said that while the job should always go to the most qualified coach, whether male or female, she likes the way she can communicate with her field hockey head coach, Cortney Kelly, a recent LGHS graduate.
LGHS vollyeball team member Lauren Rinehart prepares to return the ball during the recent game against St. Francis in the LGHS gym.
One-sport wonders
Another way girls' sports has changed from the days of GAA, when girls played four sports a year, is the prevalence of focusing on one sport, although the official policy at both Saratoga and Los Gatos high schools is to encourage athletes to participate in as many sports as possible.
Dave Schirtzinger, assistant athletic director at SHS and head tennis coach, said in the past 10 years athletes have gradually begun to focus on one sport, rather than play multiple sports.
Rinehart said she feels passionate enough about volleyball to choose to stick with it over all other sports and said she "kind of fell in love with the sport" when she began playing in the sixth grade.
Coaches agree that the popularity of club sports has grown over the past 10 years, and this may account for the focusing. He said often it is the influence of outside club coaches, and even some high school coaches, who may put pressure on their athletes to stick to one sport and not play any others. Club sports are generally defined as private groups or clubs, not organized by schools, that require membership fees and the athlete assuming expenses for competition travel.
To water polo player Oberhauser, it's better for the athlete to play more than one sport.
"If I didn't swim, I wouldn't be in as good of shape," she said, but adds that playing three sports might be "pushing it."
Meyer started playing field hockey her freshman year, after years of playing soccer while growing up. She began playing sports at the age of 3, coming from a family of four big brothers and sisters who were very much into sports.
"After playing soccer for so many years and concentrating mainly on soccer, it was nice to concentrate on something else," Meyer said.
"I think in high school, student athletes need to play as many sports as they can and enjoy the experience," Schirtzinger said.
Los Gatos High School head girls' volleyball coach Joe Ripp agreed.
He added that another change he has seen in girls' sports over the years is the increased emphasis on strength training. He said that in the last three or four years, he has had his teams lift weights as part of spring and summer conditioning programs. Many other girls' teams are doing the same, he said.
"There's a lot more of that going on these days all over," Ripp said. "The football team does something similar."
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