Thanks to Title IX, Yonni Mills finally stepped off the sidelines and onto the volleyball and basketball courts for Shorecrest High.
The current Bothell High athletic director, who graduated from Shorecrest in 1975 and later placed at nationals as part of Washington State University’s volleyball squad, had always watched her younger brothers play organized ball — and now, it was her chance.
On June 23, 1972, Title IX allowed women equal access to athletic opportunities. It is also identified by the name of its principal author as the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act.
“To be involved in anything organized, I felt like I had just died and gone to heaven,” Mills said last week. “I was in that first group that finally got to do something, so I was super-excited to be in high school and be able to do anything.”
And when she made the team at WSU, her excitement level rose even more, because she was playing on a bigger stage.
“In my eyes, it was one of the coolest experiences I’ve ever had,” she said.
Mills didn’t receive her WSU chenille varsity volleyball letter until 2007 — because they didn’t hand out letters to women early on — and she proudly displays it in her Bothell High office. It was a few decades late, Mills says, but at least she finally got hold of the letter.
MURRAY, SOUNDERS CELEBRATE
To celebrate 40 years of Title IX, U.S. Sen. Patty Murray (above) from Bothell teamed up with Seattle Sounders Women soccer players Megan Rapinoe, Stephanie Cox and Sydney Leroux to speak to a crowd of female athletes on May 2 at Garfield High in Seattle.
“Forty years ago, 37 words threw open the doors to athletics, education and success for millions of young women in our country,” Murray said.
Title IX reads:
No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.
“That law was simple, it was powerful and it has delivered amazing results. Over the past 40 years, participation in girls high-school sports has increased over 900 percent. We went from 32,000 women who were participating in college athletics in 1972, when I was in college, to almost 200,000 today,” Murray added. “In 1972, fewer than 300,000 women across the country played competitive sports. Forty years since this law has passed, today this number is approaching 3 million.”
Rapinoe (above at podium), a member of the U.S. women’s national team, grew up in the small town of Redding, Calif., and had to travel to Sacramento to play for a premier team while in high school.
She said that her parents made the commitment to her soccer career, hoping that it would lead her to college (University of Portland) and possibly beyond.
“I think Title IX to me means the opportunity of having new doors opened, and having doors opened that I didn’t even know existed or that I could see but just didn’t really know how to get to,” said Rapinoe, who has enjoyed traveling the world and meeting thousands of people. “(It’s crucial) having the opportunity to have an education. Maybe I’m not using my degree as it stands right now, because I’m playing football, but in the future, I’ll need that.”
Cox, also a member of the U.S. women’s national team, played club soccer with Rapinoe and also competed in volleyball, basketball and soccer at Elk Grove High in northern California.
She feels that Title IX is a special law that brought her and Rapinoe together on the soccer pitch in their early years and later at the University of Portland. Now, they’re with the Sounders Women and are trying to make the U.S. Olympic team to compete in London, England, this summer.
“I know that those experiences on those teams really laid a foundation for me to be where I am now,” Cox said. “I made so many friends and felt connected through my teams as I’m sure that you guys feel now.”
Leroux was born in Surrey, B.C., and at age 14 moved to Arizona, where she began to make her mark on the soccer scene. She later went to UCLA and is now a member of the of the U.S. women’s national team.
“Thank God for soccer because it brought me so many opportunities and I got to meet all my friends,” Leroux said. “It was just such an amazing experience that a sport and Title IX can actually bring people together.”
HIGH-SCHOOL SCENE
Sen. Murray, who also attended WSU like Bothell High’s Mills, has co-sponsored the High School Sports Information Collection Act with Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine. It is a bill to amend the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 to require the statistics commissioner to collect information from co-educational secondary schools on such schools’ athletic programs.
“(It’s focused to) strengthen Title IX, to make sure it continues to deliver results for women and girls,” Murray said.
As she discussed her first-hand experience of Title IX benefits, Murray noted that she could only participate in a few intramural sports at WSU, but 15 years later saw her daughter play on an organized soccer team.
“It was so great to watch my own daughter get to choose to play soccer, to learn to be part of a team and cheer each other on and learn how to be gracious in victory and in defeat,” Murray said.
Also at Bothell High, boys and girls track-and-field head coach Cathy Boyce’s parents introduced her and her brothers to sports at an early age to keep them out of trouble and focused on their activities on the playing field.
“I never would have thought that there was a time period in which females didn’t experience the same athletic opportunities that males had,” Boyce (pictured above) said at practice last week. “I grew up in an era where it was a given for us; my generation is the benefactors of Title IX.”
Boyce ran cross country and track and played basketball at Lakewood High, where she graduated from in 1997. She then attended Western Washington University, coached and taught in Granite Falls and Portland and has been at Bothell High for the last five years.
She’s run marathons and is bewildered that the first women’s Olympic marathon wasn’t run until 1984 in Los Angeles, where Joan Benoit won in 2:24:52.
Boyce didn’t hear about Title IX until she learned about it in her high-school history class. Nowadays, she teaches young Cougars about it in the civil-rights unit of her U.S. History class.
“I’m so lucky that women that came before us have blazed a path that we then would be able to experience,” Boyce said. “I mean, the thought that my mom grew up in an era in which women were only allowed to play half-court basketball because it (was) deemed to be unhealthy for women or bad things could happen to women.
“And her daughter is able to coach?” she added. “Just watching that change that’s happened in that time period is pretty cool if you think about it.”
Over at Inglemoor High, Kelly Richards is the assistant cross-country coach and watched one of her runners — Tansey Lystad — earn a scholarship to Cal-Poly San Luis Obispo last year. Lystad won the 4A state cross-country title and both the 1,600- and 3,200-meter races at state during track season.
“With the outstanding girls we’ve had at Inglemoor the last couple years, there’s so many more opportunities for them to come after high school. I think a lot of that came from Title IX,” Richards said of scholarships like Lystad’s.
Richards, who took a break from her assistant-coaching job with Inglemoor’s track team this spring to help coach her ninth-grade daughter’s track squad at Kenmore Junior High, first starred in track and cross country at Wenatchee High, where she graduated from in 1987.
A year later at Pacific Lutheran University, Richards helped lead her cross-country team to a NAIA (National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics) national championship. The All-American athlete’s team was inducted into the PLU Hall of Fame last fall, and Richards introduced coach Brad Moore into the hall, as well.
“He was really focused on the women’s program and on recruiting. I was fortunate to introduce him,” said Richards (pictured below at left), who was also an All-American trackster at PLU.
Being part of a women’s team — and a national-championship one to boot — was a far cry from when Richards had to play on boys basketball, baseball and soccer teams as a youth.
“I didn’t feel like it was anything I could pursue as an athlete,” she said. “We weren’t encouraged that much.”
But things soon changed drastically when she entered seventh grade and a girls basketball team was formed. And, of course, in high school and college, Richards was on the fast track to success.
Murray added at the Garfield High event: “Title IX has truly changed our country for the better, and the number of women and girls whose lives it touches is growing every single day.”
