Comes the Revolution

Steve Sweeney paces the sideline, shoulders hunched against the elements. A steady downpour has turned an Atlanta soccer field into a grassy bog. A few yards away, his team of eight-and nine-year-olds, sporting regulation shirts and shorts, churns after the skittering ball. One minute, all is professional intensity as the players struggle to start a play. The next, there is childhood glee in splashing through a huge puddle that has formed in front of one goal. Sweeney squints at his charges and shouts, "Girls, you gotta pass! Come on, Heather!"

At eight, Kim Edwards is in the incubator of the national pastime--tee-ball. There are no pitchers in this pre-Little League league. The ball is placed on a waisthigh, adjustable tee, and for five innings the kids whack away. Kim is one of the hottest tee-ball players in Dayton and a fanatical follower of the Cincinnati Reds. Her position is second base. She pulls a Reds cap down over her hair, punches her glove, drops her red-jacketed arms down to rest on red pants, and waits for the action. Kim has but a single ambition: to play for her beloved Reds. When a male onlooker points out that no woman has ever played big league baseball, Kim's face, a mass of strawberry freckles, is a study in defiant dismissal: "So?"

The raw wind of a late-spring chill bites through Philadelphia's Franklin Field, but it cannot dull the excitement of the moment. For the first time in the 84-year history of the Penn Relays, the world's largest and oldest meet of its kind, an afternoon of women's track and field competition is scheduled. The infield shimmers with color, a kaleidoscope of uniforms and warmup suits. One thousand college and high school athletes jog slowly back and forth, stretch and massage tight muscles, crouch in imaginary starting blocks, huddle with coaches for last-minute strategy sessions, or loll on the synthetic green turf, sipping cocoa and waiting. Susan White, a 19-year-old hurdler from the University of Maryland, surveys the scene. There is a trace of awe in her voice: "When I was in high school, I never dreamed of competing in a national meet. People are finally accepting us as athletes."

Golfer Carol Mann is chatting with friends outside the clubhouse when a twelve-year-old girl walks up, politely clears her throat and asks for an autograph. Mann bends down--it's a long way from 6-ft. 3-in. Mann to fan--and talks softly as she writes. After several moments, the girl returns, wide-eyed, to waiting parents. Mann straightens and smiles. "Five years ago, little girls never walked up to tell me that they wanted to be a professional golfer. Now it happens all the time. Things are changing, things are changing."

They are indeed. On athletic fields and playgrounds and in parks and gymnasiums across the country, a new player has joined the grand game that is sporting competition, and she's a girl. As the long summer begins, not only is she learning to hit a two-fisted backhand like Chris Evert's and turn a back flip like Olga Korbut's, she is also learning to jam a hitter with a fastball. Season by season, whether aged six, 60 or beyond, she is running, jumping, hitting and throwing as U.S. women have never done before. She is trying everything from jogging to ice hockey, lacrosse and rugby, and in the process acquiring a new sense of self, and of self-confidence in her physical abilities and her potential. She is leading a revolution that is one of the most exciting and one of the most important in the history of sport. Says Joan Warrington, executive secretary of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women: "Women no longer feel that taking part in athletics is a privilege. They believe it is a right."

Spurred by the fitness craze, fired up by the feminist movement and buttressed by court rulings and legislative mandates, women have been moving from miniskirted cheerleading on the sidelines for the boys to playing, and playing hard, for themselves. Says Liz Murphey, coordinator of women's athletics at the University of Georgia: "The stigma is nearly erased. Sweating girls are becoming socially acceptable."

They have come a long, long way. Consider:

> Eight years ago, 294,000 high school girls participated in interscholastic sports. During the 1976-77 academic year, the number was 1.6 million, nearly a sixfold increase.

> The Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, the males' National counterpart to Collegiate Athletic Association, with 278 member schools. The A.I.A.W. now has 825 active members, 115 more than the 73-year-old N.C.A.A. National championships in 17 sports are contested under the A.l.A.W.'s aegis, compared with seven in 1972-73. The A.I.A.W. estimates that more than 100,000 women now take part in intercollegiate sports, compared with 170,000 men.

> Since 1973, the first year the A.I.A.W. allowed athletic scholarships, the number of such grants has soared annually. Last year an estimated 10,000 girls from about 460 schools received scholarships worth upwards of $7 million.

> In 1972, the first all-women minimarathon in New York's Central Park drew 78 entries. Last month 4,360 competitors entered the 6.2-mile (10,000 meters) race.

> One of the world's largest manufacturers of athletic shoes, Adidas, reports a one-year sales increase of 63% in its women's shoes. Sales in equipment especially designed for women have soared as females are finally getting gear that fits, from catcher's masks to hockey skates.

Such statistics are impressive, but they merely reinforce the most significant aspect of the explosive growth of women's sport: the new, refreshingly unapologetic pride of the female athlete. Atlanta's Carolyn Luesing, 36 and the mother of two, has been running seriously since 1973, and the sport has become an indispensable part of her life. "I have this compulsion to see what my potential is. I don't do it for anyone else. I do it for myself." Luesing will never make the Olympics, but her feelings, and those of thousands like her, parallel the thoughts of someone who has: Kate Schmidt, 24, who took a bronze medal in the javelin in Montreal. Says she: "I love to see myself getting strong, being competent and taking care of myself. That's probably the most motivating part of being an athlete."

Sport has always been one of the primary means of civilizing the human animal, of inculcating the character traits a society desires. Wellington in his famous aphorism insisted that the Battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing fields of Eton. The lessons learned on the playing field are among the most basic: the setting of goals and joining with others to achieve them; an understanding of and respect for rules; the persistence to hone ability into skill, prowess into perfection. In games, children learn that success is possible and that failure can be overcome. Championships may be won; when lost, wait till next year. In practicing such skills as fielding a grounder and hitting a tennis ball, young athletes develop work patterns and attitudes that carry over into college, the marketplace and all of life.

Yet in America's past this opportunity has been largely limited to males. After a brief period grace, when she would be called a tomboy and allowed to play second base, a girl has traditionally been subjected to heavy social pressure to withdraw from athletics. "Sports was the laboratory where they turned boys into men," says Penn State Psychologist Dr. Dorothy Harris. "As for girls, they were supposed to stand out in the hall, quaking in their tennis shoes. The penalty for daring to take part was to be labeled unfeminine, a social deviant. What is considered healthy psychological development in a man--aggressiveness, independence, ambition, courage, competitiveness--was viewed as unhealthy in a woman. Yet it is precisely those qualities that are found in every athlete, male or female. Whatever it is that works for little boys also works for little girls."

The crusade for women's sport has been helped by a number of court cases, scattered across the country, that have prodded reluctant athletic directors and league organizers into letting girls join boys' teams if there were no similar teams set up for the girls.

Only a tiny minority of girls appear to want to play contact sports against boys. But there is no doubt that the girls want and indeed are insisting upon a fair chance to develop their athletic abilities. Their cause is being substantially helped, albeit unevenly so far, by a section of the Education Amendments Act passed by Congress in 1972: the passage known as Title IX. In essence, Title IX forbids sex discrimination any educational institution receiving federal funds. The prohibition applies on the athletic fields as well as in classrooms. To enforce Title IX, Congress gave the Department of Health, Education and Welfare an enormous weapon: the right to deny federal funds to any institution that does not measure up. Almost all of the nation's colleges and public schools get federal money of some kind--approximately $12.2 billion in all for the colleges, $4.9 billion for the public schools.

How much of those sums could be penalized remains under dispute, but HEW clearly had the clout to change what was happening on the fields of the nation very quickly indeed. Instead, the department has been acting with more caution than deliberate speed. What constitutes a discrimination-free athletic program turned out to be difficult to define. Title IX raised the hackles of male athletic directors and many of their Congressmen. The fear of the N.C.A.A., which has fought Title IX from the beginning, is that the Government would destroy the men's athletic programs, while trying to build up the women's. The argument: it would be financially impossible for any university to create a program for women as elaborate as the two big moneymaking ones, football and basketball. These programs can be immensely expensive. The University of Michigan, for example, spends $800,000 a year on its football team--and grosses $4 million, including $500,000 in gifts from well-wishers. The funds help subsidize the school's other athletic programs. Conversely, if football and basketball were cut down to approximate women's sports in size, the entire system would collapse. The N.C.A.A. warns that Title IX "may well signal the end of intercollegiate athletics as we know them."

Edging into this minefield, HEW took until 1975 to publish a set of regulations to govern application of Title IX. The provisions stopped far short of requiring a school to set up an equivalent women's team for every male one; but if a school had only one team in a noncontact sport, like golf or tennis, women had a right to try out for it. Schools did not have to let females take part in such contact sports as football, basketball, ice hockey and rugby. When it came down to the key question of money, the regulations were vague; they allowed more money to be spent for a male team than a female one, but demanded that "the patterns of expenditures should not result in a disparate effect on opportunity."

The regulations are not due to go into effect for colleges or universities until July 21, and with the deadline drawing near, HEW Secretary Joseph Califano has asked his aides to review the whole matter again. The net result: HEW so far has not denied a penny of federal funds to any high school or college for discriminating against women in athletics, and Hester Lewis, a Title IX attorney in HEW's Office of Civil Rights, admits: "I would say that practically no college or university will be in compliance [with Title IX] by July 21."

Even so, the inevitability of Title IX has forced schools to upgrade their programs for girls, and fast. Says Margot Polivy, the attorney for the A.I.A.W.: "In 1972, before Title IX, women's intercollegiate sports had 1% of the budget of the men's. I would judge today that women's programs--the best of them--are running between 15% and 18% of the men's programs on money. And on the average, women's programs are running about 10%. Colleges are just now starting to feel the impact of what's been happening on the elementary and secondary level. I would expect that participation rate to rise."

At the elementary and secondary level, HEW has had some limited success. The regulations for high schools went into effect in July 1976; so far a score of programs have been altered as the result of the Government's intercession. One example: Oak Ridge, Tenn., where the school district was threatened with the loss of $750,000 in federal funds unless the girls' athletic program was upgraded. On their own, however, thousands of schools have improved their programs.

On the intercollegiate level, HEW has preferred to encourage rather than intervene. Prodded by three formal complaints by women students and their parents, the University of Michigan, which perennially runs one of the most successful men's athletic programs in the nation, has made considerable progress toward equality. In 1973 the school had only informal competition for women; now, just five years later, it has ten varsity teams, to the men's eleven. Next year Michigan will award the equivalent of 30 scholarships at a cost of $100,000, compared with the 190 at over $700,000 that will go to the men. One hotly debated issue: Should the women athletes be allowed to win the famous block M varsity letter so revered by the men? Football Coach Bo Schembechler and Basketball Coach Johnny Orr protested vigorously that they should not, but the women got the Michigan M.

Women may have won that symbolic flight at Michigan; however at all too many schools they are still slighted, still second-class citizens. At the urging of HEW, for instance, the University of Georgia has started to make amends for a program that spent about $1,000 on women's athletics in 1973. The figure is now up to $120,000 (vs. the men's $2.5 million), but the indignities remain. Item: male golfers receive an unlimited supply of balls, while the women are given one per competitive round. Says Liz Murphey: "Sometimes the guys give the girls some just to be nice. Things are looking better, but it's very slow."

Springfield (Mass.) College, a school that has specialized in training coaches and physical education instructors since 1885, has long had a substantial program for women. Yet even there the men's swimming team has access to the pool for three hours each day; the women are allowed into the water for only one. So Deborah Kinney, a seven-time All-American distance swimmer, goes to the pool at 6 a.m. for an extra workout before beginning her day's studies. Says she: "An hour of practice isn't much use to a long-distance swimmer."

Whether fearing HEW or determined to right a wrong, schools across the nation are making substantial strides. At North Carolina State, the budget for women has risen from $20,000 to $300,000 in four years, and scholarships have increased from none to 49, including twelve for basketball, a fervent sport in the area. (Comparable figures for the men: a total budget of about $2 million, 180 scholarships for all sports.) U.C.L.A., long a leader in men's sports, is now winning women's championships. Next year U.C.L.A.'s women's budget will be $527,000 (vs. $3.7 million for the men). The Bruins' investment in women athletes is shrewdly placed. Women's basketball at U.C.L.A.--with a national championship team led by Ann Meyers--plays to crowds of three and four thousand, and gate receipts more than offset expenses. The pragmatic Meyers notes that national television coverage of their A.I.A.W. championship game last March well served the cause of women's sports. Says she: "What's important to U.C.L.A. is that it is getting coverage, regardless of whether it's men or women."

Like the men, the captains of Yale's varsity women's sports now pose for the traditional photograph perched on a section of fence salvaged from the Old Campus. Yale's athletic budget for women is more than $600,000, one of the largest in the nation. About 40% of the university's students are women, and they get some 30% of the funds. Yale's 19 men's teams have fallen on hard times recently: just eight teams had winning seasons this year. But Yale's sportswomen are doing splendidly: twelve of the 14 varsity teams had winning seasons. Success in sports has created confidence in Yale's women athletes. Says Senior Abbe Smith: "Athletics are really important for women at Yale. It's hard enough just being at a traditional male school, competing with men in the sciences and other areas that have traditionally dissuaded women from participating. Athletics is tied in. It has to do with self-esteem."

For all the hue and cry and hopes surrounding Title IX, the future of women in sport will be shaped not by regulations but by what is happening every day on fields and gym floors, where women and girls of all ages are discovering the joys of competition.

For every recalcitrant administrator, there are thousands of women like Connecticut Housewife Carolyn Bravakis--women discovering that, years after organized athletics have failed them, the world of sport can still be theirs. Until 1975, Bravakis' closest encounter with athletics was leading cheers for the high school football team. "All my life, I never did anything," she says. "The only time I went outside was to hang wash." Then her brother organized a local 10,000-meter road race, and she decided to enter. When she managed to complete only half of the course, recalls Bravakis, "I was so disgusted with myself that I started running seriously."

One year later, she had worked up to 50 miles a week and entered her first Boston Marathon, finishing 29th among women runners. This year, she was 12th, breaking the esteemed 3-hr, barrier with a time of 2 hr., 54 min. for the 26.2-mile marathon distance. (In all, some 200 women completed the course.) The loneliness--and the hardship--of the long-distance runner leave her unfazed: "I have more self-confidence, more energy than I had before. And when I run in the rain, I feel about six years old."

Sport is also fun for Yvette Lewis, 15, but it serves another purpose. She hopes that basketball will be her ticket out of the ghetto, a time-honored route for males. Yvette is already getting letters from college coaches congratulating her on a dazzling sophomore season at Los Angeles' all-black Fremont High School. Softly, she speaks of her dreams: "I feel I could get a better job by going to college than staying in the street. Plus it's the right thing for a young lady to do."

Yvette's athletic gifts are equal to her hopes. Her coach, Laura Holden, states unequivocally: "Yvette is the most talented player I've ever seen. When I first saw her shoot, I just about fainted." But Holden is leaving Fremont, and no coach has been hired to replace her. Uniforms are in such short supply that they must be shared by three teams; Yvette has to retrieve her uniform from a volleyball player to pose for photographs. Says Holden: "If she was a young man and had this kind of potential and ability, there would be no question. But she doesn't get a fair shake." Fair or not, it is Yvette Lewis' best chance: "I'm going to stay with basketball and go as far as I can go with it."

The future for exceptionally gifted women athletes grows brighter: athletics is a meritocracy that, once discrimination is eased, provides a sure upward track for the talented. Women tennis and golf professionals already enjoy lucrative careers; Chris Evert alone has won almost $1.5 million in prize money over the past five years, $453,000 of it just last year. The development of other pro leagues is just a matter of time and the promotion of audiences willing to pay to watch women play.

Athletic Director Dee Kohlemeier of Hoover High School in Glendale, Calif., holds a minority view: "Girls sports are boring. I can watch a gym class for boys that has better skills than a varsity girls basketball team." Officials at New York's Madison Square Garden disagree. After a 1977 women's college basketball doubleheader drew 12,000 fans--who were treated to Montclair State's Carol Blazejouski's 52-point performance --Garden planners started to work on a women's tournament and similar bookings. Said one official: "We are in business to make a profit. If it helps women's sports, so much the better. But the bottom line is the bottom line--we can make money on women's basketball."

With success come all the pressures that long have been part of men's sports. The new emphasis on winning--and luring customers through the turnstiles--has produced a familiar syndrome of corruption. College recruiters, though technically barred from sweet-talking hot prospects, have nonetheless found ways to hound young, often unsophisticated athletes. Tales of under-the-table payments and inducements--a new car or postschool job--have begun to circulate. The A.I.A.W. has no full-time enforcement unit to oversee violations, subscribing instead to the credo that conscience is more powerful than compulsion. "We are built upon self-policing," says Joan Hult, head of the A.I.A.W.'S Ethics and Eligibility Committee.

However lofty that principle, it is difficult to maintain when large investments--in scholarship money, facilities, travel expenses and television revenues--are at stake. Already basketball coaches are luring transfer students to their campuses with no fear of penalty: the A.I.A.W., unlike the N.C.A.A., does not require transfer athletes to sit out a season. A 5-ft. 10-in. forward with a good fadeaway jumper can, and increasingly does, play musical colleges. Michigan Athletic Director Donald Canham watches from the sidelines and notes: "The women had a golden opportunity to establish an athletic program with the men's mistakes as a guide. I think women will regret the change. They now have almost an exact copy of men's sports--with all of the mistakes."

Women may well retort that the men should clean up their act, but it would be a tragedy if women cannot avoid mistakes and exploit the opportunity that lies before them. The revolution in women's athletics is a full, running tide, bringing with it a sea change--not just in activities, but in attitudes as well. Of sport and its role in preparing both sexes for adult life, Harvard Sociologist David Riesman says: "The road to the board room leads through the locker room." He explains that American business has been "socialized" by sport. "Teamwork provides us with a kind of social cement: loyalty, brotherhood, persistence." Riesman is one of a group of scholars who believe women have had trouble rising to high managerial positions in part because they never learned the lessons taught so well by competitive sports.

That surely is changing. Women now play an aggressive brand of lacrosse, as shown on TIME's cover by Penn State's Karen Pesto. (In that game, Penn State tied Maryland 6-6, but later defeated its rival 9-3, to win the first national championship for women's lacrosse.)

Women are even beginning to play rugby, a disorderly contact sport that has always been a male preserve. Wearing shorts, shirts and cleats, the women grunt and curse in the scrum and pursue the ball with kamikaze intensity. To watch rugby is to wince, no matter the sex of the participants, and the women's only concession to the game's wide-open brutality is an acceptance of the need to substitute skill for muscle. In Chicago, a league of young women gathers each spring weekend for a rousing game--followed by the traditional round of beer drinking and songs.

No matter how important the shift in society's attitudes, the crucial change, the enduring alteration, takes place in the lives of individuals. Each time a young girl acquires the discipline to polish an athletic skill or learns to subject her ego to the requirements of team play, she helps gain the self-confidence that marks the healthy adult. Girls are showing they can be as determined as boys. In Lee, Mass., a high school softball pitcher named Linda ("Luke") Lucchese, 18, informs the opposing bench, "Forget it, you guys. The gate is shut." Then she wins the game 11-4. Luke's attitude is shared by World-Class Miler Francie Larrieu, 25: "I have learned through athletics that if you believe in yourself and your capabilities, you can do anything you set out to do. I have proved it to myself over and over."

Researchers have found that the virtues of sport, when equally shared, equally benefit both sexes. Notes Dr. William Morgan, of the University of Arizona's Sports Psychology laboratory: "Athletes are less depressed, more stable and have higher psychological vigor than the general public. This is true of both men and women athletes." If, as folklore and public policy have long insisted, sport is good for people, if it builds a better society by encouraging mental and physical vigor, courage and tenacity, then the revolution in women's sports holds a bright promise for the future. One city in which the future is now is Cedar Rapids, Iowa. In 1969, well before law, much less custom, required the city to make any reforms, Cedar Rapids opened its public school athletic programs to girls and, equally important, to the less-gifted boys traditionally squeezed out by win-oriented athletic systems. Says Tom Ecker, head of school athletics, "Our program exists to develop good kids, not to serve as a training ground for the universities and pros."

Some 7,000 students, nearly 3,000 of them girls, compete on teams with a firm no-cut policy. Everyone gets a chance to play. Teams are fielded according to skill level, and a struggle between junior varsity or C-squad basketball teams is as enthusiastically contested as a varsity clash. Cedar Rapids' schoolgirl athletes compete in nine sports, guided by 144 coaches. Access to training equipment is equal too. The result has been unparalleled athletic success. In the past eight years, Cedar Rapids boys and girls teams have finished among the state's top three 68 times, winning 30 team championships in ten different sports.

Girls' athletics have become an accustomed part of the way of life in Cedar Rapids. At a recent girls' track meet, runners, shotputters, hurdlers, high jumpers pitted themselves, one by one, in the age-old contests to run faster, leap higher, throw farther. For many, there were accomplishments they once would have thought impossible. A mile relay team fell into triumphant embrace when word came of qualification for the state finals. Team members shouted the joy of victory--"We did it!" --and then asked permission to break training: "Now can we go to the Dairy Queen, Coach?" Granted.

The mile run was won by 17-year-old Julie Nolan of Jefferson High School. Sport is, and will remain, part of her life. "I've been running since the fifth or sixth grade. I want to run in college and then run in marathons." She admires Marathoner Miki Gorman, who ran her fastest when she was in her 40s. "That's what I'd like to be doing," she says. Asked if she has been treated differently since she got involved in sports, this once-and-future athlete seemed perplexed: "I don't know, because I've always been an athlete."

Kelly Galiher, 15, has grown up in the Cedar Rapids system that celebrates sport for all. The attitudes and resistance that have stunted women's athleticism elsewhere are foreign to Kelly, a sprinter. Does she know that sports are, in some quarters, still viewed as unseemly for young women? "That's ridiculous. Boys sweat, and we're going to sweat. We call it getting out and trying." She has no memories of disapproval from parents or peers. And she has never been called the terrible misnomer that long and unfairly condemned athletic girls. "Tomboy? That idea has gone out here." It's vanishing everywhere.

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