MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Athletics departments from all over the country today are celebrating 50 years of women’s sports as a result of the federally-mandated Title IX provision of the Educational Amendments Act of 1972. Title IX, as it has since become known, was introduced into law on June 23, 1972 to protect women from discrimination based on sex in educational programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance. That meant West Virginia University and other public educational institutions receiving federal money for research and scholarships had to become compliant with the new law in order to continue receiving it.
Naturally, the two biggest questions for WVU were how to do it, and, more importantly, where was it going to get the money?
At the time, the athletics department struggled mightily dealing with those two critical issues, but fortunately, there was a trio of committed women on campus with some creative solutions – the Founding Mothers of West Virginia University women’s sports, if you will: Kittie Blakemore, Martha Thorn and Dr. Wincie Ann Carruth.
“We knew (Title IX) was going into law, and we were ready for it,” Blakemore, at the time an assistant professor in West Virginia University’s School of Physical Education and one of WVU’s leading women’s sports advocates, recalled.
Former WVU women’s tennis coach Martha Thorn recalled the years leading up to the University’s decision to finally adopt women’s sports on April 10, 1973 being filled with frustration, angst and disappointment, and staunch women’s sports supporters such as Blakemore and Carruth, chair for women’s physical education at WVU and a “true, true Southern lady from Mississippi,” had their efforts to be heard stonewalled at almost every turn. But that changed on June 23, 1972 when the Educational Amendments Act was signed into law. “At that time, President (James) Harlow saw the handwriting on the wall,” Blakemore recalled in 2013, seven years prior to her death. “You have a big land-grant institution that is going to lose a lot of federal money if they don’t go with this. With all of those kinds of things in your corner, you can certainly go after the possibility of starting this.” In early August 1972, West Virginia University Athletics Director Leland Byrd, on the job for just one week, walked into his office at the WVU Coliseum and noticed a telephone message left on his desk by administrator Eleanor Lamb. It was from Blakemore requesting Byrd meet with her and Carruth to discuss women’s sports at West Virginia University. What Carruth and Blakemore had planned for Leland was almost an ambush, if that was even possible coming from two women as kind and as thoughtful as Blakemore and Carruth. Byrd knew the adoption of women’s sports was an issue retiring athletics director Red Brown had left for him, and he also knew it was something that wasn’t going to go away.
“(Kittie) came to me and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got to start a women’s program. I’m here, and I can take basketball, Martha Thorn can take tennis …’ I said, ‘Listen, I can sympathize with you, but we just don’t have any money,” Byrd, who died earlier this year, once recalled. It was a response Blakemore and Carruth had heard many times before. However, this time they were prepared. Since at least 1969, when Blakemore and Carruth were asked to help write the constitution for the women’s portion of the West Virginia Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, Kittie had been efficiently and methodically collecting data on women’s sports programs at other institutions. She had binders and binders stuffed with memos typed up on crinkled, onion-skinned paper, handwritten letters from women’s student organizational leaders and their parents, correspondence from female sports colleagues at other institutions, carbon copies of proposed women’s sports budgets and suggested organizational policy statements for women’s athletic programs. There was WVU student Gail Oberholtzer’s letter to Carruth with the names and phone numbers for all of the WVU women’s tennis club members – all of them with the exception of her own. Gail wasn’t sure what her new phone number was going to be at Women’s Hall for the next semester, she wrote, but she left her parents’ mailing address in Vienna, West Virginia, in case anyone needed it. Blakemore had University of Minnesota professor Dr. Eloise Jaeger’s two-page, typed letter with her suggestions on how she should go about crafting West Virginia’s women’s sports policy. Then there was the University of Kansas’ women’s sports budget for the 1972-73 academic year. The Jayhawks had $11,987.42 allocated for their seven women’s varsity sports that season, with women’s gymnastics getting the biggest portion at $3,539.76. On the other end of the spectrum was the women’s tennis budget of $575.95 for its fall and spring seasons. The four away matches the Jayhawks had scheduled that year ate up most of their budget with an additional $20 earmarked for “hospitality” to cover home matches against McPherson, Kansas State, Washburn and Central Missouri State.
At $5 per event, the Jayhawk women really knew how to party back then!
Blakemore’s files also contained the yearly budget allotments for Fairmont State College’s women’s basketball program, which averaged out to roughly $1,000 per year dating back to the late 1960s. The Falcons, in 1972, spent $348 for uniforms and $15 for one game official, although they sometimes opened up the checkbook for another set of eyes for the more important games.
She had samples of game contracts from Pitt and women’s sports participation charts from Illinois. There was also a mimeographed women’s sports guideline with comments, recommendations and questions: How much control will the AIAW (Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women) impose upon the member institutions? Do the women have any mechanism for enforcing its regulations? Where are the women going to get the structure and finances to function? Are students limited to the number of sports in which they participate? How does one determine or enforce rules concerning the length of a season? What constitutes a practice session? Where do administrators send the verification of eligibility? What are the implications of increased varsity programs for undergraduate professional preparation? But perhaps the most interesting (and most important) record in Blakemore’s file cabinet was a one-page, typed document titled “Discussion of Intercollegiate Program for Women at WVU.”
This was essentially the Magna Carta for women’s sports at West Virginia University. It dealt with the organizational structure for Mountaineer women’s sports, which local and national associations West Virginia University should join (the women preferred the WVIAC initially for competitive and financial reasons), the problems with starting a new women’s program and the budgetary issues it was going to present, facility requirements for practices and games, team scheduling, a plan of action for tryouts and which sports to adopt first. Handwritten notations were made in each column with suggestions on how the coaches should be compensated, which sports should be delayed or phased in over time, where most of the athletes would come from and whether or not a separate Athletic Council for Women should be instituted with the same representation as the regular Athletic Council. It was quite clear to Byrd that Blakemore and Carruth had all of their ducks in a row when they walked into his office.
In fact, they had already prepared a women’s sports proposal for him to consider covering such things as potential coaches, sport suggestions, budgets, insurance and physical examinations, association dues, eligibility requirements, athletic trainers, department staffing recommendations, facilities to be used and the WVIAC, Midwest Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women and AIAW by-laws.
From the outset, Blakemore and Carruth were adamant about joining the athletics department instead of operating solely out of the School of Physical Education because they knew athletics was on much firmer ground financially.
“We can start it, but it will have to be on a shoestring,” Byrd said, as he sifted through the mountainous pile of documents they unloaded on his desk. “I don’t know where I’ll find it, but you’ve got $5,000 this first year.” Byrd recalled Kittie and Martha taking $1,000 each for women’s basketball and tennis, and the same amount was also allocated for women’s gymnastics. “I think they were surprised that we always came in very conservative because I remember Martha saying she brought back money from a trip once, and Leland wanted to know if she had fed all of the players,” Blakemore chuckled. Byrd’s willingness to start women’s sports was just the first hurdle. Blakemore and Carruth also needed approval from an almost entirely all-male WVU Athletic Council (Blakemore was the only female serving at the time). The women’s proposal, with the enthusiastic backing of School of Physical Education Dean Peter Yost, was sent to President Harlow on August 9, 1972. Harlow acknowledged receipt of the document a week later, but it took almost nine months until final approval came from the Athletic Council on April 10, 1973. “The thing that held it up in ‘72 was the fact that the state didn’t know how they were going to pay the coaches,” Blakemore said. “Well, when they finally realized that the coaches were already being paid because we were teacher-coaches, then they didn’t have any question about it.”
It was determined that basketball, tennis and gymnastics would begin in year one (1973-74), followed by volleyball, swimming, track and field and softball in year two (1974-75). In ensuing years, golf, field hockey, lacrosse, fencing, badminton and table tennis were also planned for West Virginia University women’s athletes. Blakemore understood that her ambitious plan might not be accepted in its entirety. She also knew if the women shot for the moon right away and asked for everything at once they might run the risk of getting a much smaller piece of the pie because sports participation quotas were not yet a part of the Title IX equation. “The athletic department really didn’t want us, but they knew – and I think Leland knew – that they were going to have to start with us,” Blakemore said. “I knew it was going to grow,” Byrd added. “I knew they had to make a place for women, and I knew it was going to have to be on par, somewhat, with the men, but I didn’t realize that it would come that fast.
“We moved pretty fast compared to a lot of other schools, I thought,” he added.
At the outset, there were the typical problems and other difficulties that, to some extent, still exist today. There were issues with the women and men being in the training room at the same time, plus, money (or lack thereof) was always a big concern at WVU. However, the battle for adequate practice time at the WVU Coliseum always seemed to be No. 1 on the list of grievances the women had.
“We worked around (the men’s teams),” said Blakemore. “If they wanted the court, they got the court. Since we worked around them, they really didn’t have any gripes to speak about us. We had some gripes, but they didn’t.”
“We picked our battles, and at that time, we really didn’t have a battle,” Thorn noted. “But Leland was ready to do it, and we all learned together.” In 1975, Linda Burdette was hired to coach the women’s gymnastics team and Veronica Hammersmith also joined the department that same year to coach volleyball in the fall and softball in the spring; both were required to teach a full load of classes in the School of Physical Education as well.
And, because Veronica was one of the lowest coaches on the totem pole at the time, her volleyball team usually got the short end of the stick when it came to practice times in the fall once basketball season started. “Men’s basketball was supposed to get 4-7 and women’s basketball got 7-9 and we got 9-11,” Hammersmith recalled. “PE had the floor until 2 o’clock so there weren’t enough hours to do a practice before men’s basketball started.” Hammersmith said that the School of Physical Education paid half of her salary and athletics paid the other half, but a portion of that was reduced in the early 1980s when the department dropped softball for financial reasons. She took another pay cut in the mid-1980s when her teaching duties were phased out. “I took a big hit (financially) when that happened,” she said. “They decided that they wanted them to separate and since my salary was 50-50, I got my salary cut in half when I stopped teaching, so it was really hard for me.” “The money was a big problem back then, even though we didn’t spend a lot,” Blakemore mentioned. “It was still a big chunk of the athletic budget, and we had to be conservative and realistic about what we could get – take what you can and go with that. “I guess I was from the old school where you just do what you can do and you work very carefully with it and don’t make a lot of waves,” Blakemore said. “I found I could get things accomplished a lot quicker if I didn’t make a lot of waves, but yet I was still able to do these things and get them through.” “Kittie and those guys did a really nice job of getting things off the ground,” Hammersmith added. “That was probably the hardest part of the whole thing was getting somebody to let them have teams.” Byrd said it didn’t take long for the athletics department to accept the women, and to the best of his knowledge, there were no major issues – or at least any big grievances that were brought to his attention. “We were very fortunate because a lot of schools did have problems,” he said. This week, we continue our 50th anniversary celebration of Title IX, a landmark decision that made it possible for ALL students to compete in intercollegiate athletics. The outlook for West Virginia University women’s sports has never been brighter, thanks to a couple of pioneering women who, through a lot of hard work, a lot of patience, and, yes, a little bit of guile, made it all possible.
On Friday, our final Title IX 50th anniversary feature recalls the amazing life of Bette Hushla.
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