Mountains Beyond Mountains
I was walking out of the alcove where all the teacher mailboxes were housed at Norman High School when I heard the news. I had just picked up the attendance sheets from my box and was headed hurriedly through the lounge back to my lair in the north gym when a couple of sports junkie teachers who were posted up during their planning period listening to local talk radio shared the news.
“Hey, did you hear that OU is dropping women’s basketball?” they said.
“What? What are you talking about?” I asked.
“It’s coming from the University,” they said. “They already did it.”
“Cut women’s basketball? They can’t do that,” I said.
“They just did!” the two guys fired back.
“Well, they can’t,” I returned, incredulous that we were even talking about such a thing. “It’s not possible. Haven’t you ever heard of Title IX?”
And with that I walked out the door of the lounge back toward my high school coaches’ office where I was planning to make girls’ basketball king.
The year was 1990. Title IX was only 18 years old and yet to those of us who had grown up inside of it, it seemed like a forever rule. The equality it mandated and the opportunities we subsequently enjoyed as a result were all we had ever known. Not being allowed to participate in sports was a concept that was incomprehensible to me. When you haven’t slung the machete, it’s hard to understand what the terrain looked like before the road was there. You can’t imagine even if you strain.
I remember thinking, at the time, that things at the University must be such a mess. The decision felt so silly. Unable to wrap my head around it, I thought it must be some sort of a ploy. For what, I had no clue, but I just couldn’t imagine how such a fundamentally irrational decision could rise through the ranks of educated minds without being caught barehanded and wrestled down by at least one courageous, determined soul.
But, I knew neither how internal political structures worked nor how many invisible battles were constantly being waged inside the bowels of institutions everywhere. In order to stop such a thing, one would have to have known that it was coming. Those inside the University of Oklahoma who would have used their teeth to catch that bullet were not in the know.
The Oklahoma administration cut the basketball program’s life support during the WBCA National Convention in Knoxville, Tennessee as coaches from all across the country were gathered for the Final Four. The administration’s spacing and timing was as off as their faulty rationalization. With a throng of coaches in the same city, mobilizing for impact was easy, and the subsequent cry for reinstatement of Oklahoma women’s basketball was swift and strong. Led by the courage and candor of Pat Summit, thousands of coaches and fans wearing red ribbons marched outside Thompson-Boling Arena while female basketball players in Norman picketed, camped out, and fought for the right to play the game they loved. Everywhere you looked women were both broken and more glued together than they had ever been.
The Oklahoma Women’s Basketball program lay entombed for nine days. When it was resurrected, people cheered and hugged and cried. Some even released red and white balloons. However, it only takes a second to leave a scar. Order was restored but shrapnel had splattered everywhere maiming the doers of the deed, those to whom the deed had been done, and all those in between, around, and beside—even if they were all those things from thousands of miles away. The 15 female athletes fighting for their Sooner jerseys got their program back, but the exchanges of fire left them riddled. With holes in their hearts, some soldiered on, some transferred, and some moved on with their lives outside the lines where they once loved to play.
I had no way of knowing, at the time, that the March 8, 1990 national headline would one day soon be mine to respond to and re-tell and out-live/out-work for the next twenty-five years. But it would be. In 1996 when I was hired to lead the program, the scar was part of the package. It was our charge to accept what it stood for. We did our best to wear it well.
It would be years, however, before I would truly be able to comprehend what had happened that spring on the campus across town from my un-airconditioned cave of an office with the raggedy upholstered spice couch at Norman High School. The university’s cancellation of women’s basketball—for a long, long time-- was an event to me. An aberration. A one-off. But what I discovered, after a while, was that the disrespectful decision that had occurred at Oklahoma was only one of a mountainous range. Some were foothills, some were towering behemoths. But many more had come before it and many more would follow. Scaling one simply provided the sightline for the others that would lie ahead. There’s such a difference between intellectually knowing something and understanding it in your bones. A certain amount of living is sometimes required to get your arms around a thing.
Over a decade ago, fifteen years into my career as the head coach at Oklahoma, an aha moment landed in my lap. As I was driving my daughter to school and we were cross-checking schedules to see who would be available to pick her up after practice that day, she saw “Title IX” on my calendar and asked me what it meant.
Bells and whistles went off in my head like a blue-light special at Walmart. Only school drop-off and pick-up can provide such procured moments. This teachable one was mine, so I grabbed it with both hands.
Eagerly, I explained.
“Title IX is the law that says women get the same opportunities men do. You can go to college, just like your brother. You can compete in sports, just like the boys. It’s an edict that says opportunities must exist for females the same as they do for males.”
And before I could continue to elaborate, she looked at me with her eyebrows crunched together as if they were trying to push something off her face.
“That’s dumb,” she said. “Why in the world would anybody need a law for that?”
I had goosebumps from the top of my head to the tips of my toes.
My daughter’s paradigm had no room for silly slights. She couldn’t even fathom a way of thinking that would necessitate such a law. All of a sudden, I could see how far we’d come.
“Ahead beyond the mountains, there are mountains,” our Haitian friends would say.
While that might seem grim at first glance, it’s really quite a hopeful lens. It’s the acceptance that forward progress is a never ending quest.
On this 50th celebration of Title IX, I hope we’ll pause to remember and offer a prayer of gratitude for Patsy Mink, and Edith Green, and Birch Bayh. And Billie Jean King and Annie Meyers and the millions of others who worked both on the stages and behind them so that women might have the right to play…and learn, and work, and earn. We’re where we are because they scaled the mountains in their view.
Plenty lie ahead in ours. And yet, recognizing where we’ve been and what we’ve done need not prevent us from continuing to ascend. We can clap while we climb. Doing lots of things at once has always been our ace.
Happy Birthday Title IX. We live grateful for your gifts.
Sherri Coale