The Birth of Athena: Scripps, Sports, and Title IX

Search every nook and cranny at Scripps, and you’ll never find a student that can’t define Roe v. Wade or the 19^th Amendment. As a progressive women’s college, we consider these landmark achievements in the struggle for women’s rights. But do we pay the same attention to Title IX? At a CMS women’s soccer game, I overheard a player ask her coach what it was, and when I told my peers what my latest article would cover, I mainly received blank stares. So allow me to clarify: Title IX, also known as the Patsy Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act, guarantees that no one can be discriminated against, excluded from activities, or denied benefits “from any education program or activity” that receives any kind or amount of government funding based on their gender. And you should absolutely know about it.

The most famous application of Title IX is to sports programs, and the availability of and participation in women’s sports across the country has skyrocketed since the law’s introduction forty years ago. The law also has other, less known applications, including its protection of female students from discrimination based on pregnancy or marital status. Yet, as with all civil rights legislation, Title IX is not invincible—the Bush Administration regularly challenged it—and it was not an instant fix.

Jodie Burton, CMS’s Senior Woman Administrator, said, “We are not equal.” She pointed specifically to the lack of female coaches for women’s sports. CMS Associate Athletic Director Kathy Troxel added, “All you have to do is look around at the PAC-12” to see the ongoing inequality in collegiate athletics. With the continued importance of Title IX in mind, I decided to look into the history of sports and recreation at Scripps.

“Physical activity was encouraged from the very beginning [of the college],” librarian Judy Harvey Sahak explained. Land where Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Hall and Harvey Mudd College now stand was used for swimming, horseback riding, and several other activities; in Scripps’ first decades, dorms competed against one another annually in a “Sports Day.” The first mentions of organized competitive play in campus records were in 1967, with the establishment of a formal Scripps tennis team. Coached by Gerry Lahanas, the team competed in the Southern California Women’s Intercollegiate Tennis League, a separate entity from the NCAA, which did not facilitate women’s sports until the 1980s. The Scripps tennis team competed against teams from USC and UCLA, which would be unheard of now, and regularly finished at the top of its division. The most astounding part of their success? Lahanas told the Scripps College Bulletin that some of her players didn’t start the game until they came to college. What a difference four decades makes—highly experienced women compete for spots on CMS’s team today.

In 1976, four years after Title IX passed, Scripps worked with Harvey Mudd and CMC to create a joint athletic program specifically for the benefit of female students. According to Burton, Scripps’ physical education department, led by Lahanas, fought for the Athenas mascot as opposed to the Stags, which represented masculinity. During this inaugural year, the joint program, then called SCHM, provided tennis, swimming, volleyball, and track teams for female students. By 1980, cross country and basketball were added. With the establishment of HMC on Scripps land and the creation of the joint sports program, Scripps athletics largely moved off-campus, but the opportunities for competitive play increased.

Burton, who began working at CMS in 1979, said that she was privileged compared to her peers in women’s athletics, but that problems still persisted in the years following Title IX. Male staff had their own offices, but she shared an office with Lahanas and the rest of the female coaches. Budgets for women’s sports “weren’t anywhere near” the money allotted for men’s sports, but speaking out often meant losing your job. Today, according to Burton and Troxel, CMS budgets are relatively equal, and women’s teams receive equal time on the fields and in the gym. When alumni donate to a male athletic program, CMS works carefully to match that donation for the women’s program. However, women’s sports programs across the country, especially in Division I schools, remain underfunded and underappreciated compared to men’s programs, and the work of Title IX is by no means complete. Both Burton and Troxel expressed concerns that women are becoming “complacent” in the fight for gender equality in sports. As a society, we point to women’s presence in the workforce, on ESPN, and on the field as signs of progress and equality, but female athletes continue to make less than their male counterparts, and many doors open for male athletes and sports journalists remain closed off to women.

Burton urged today’s generation not to be satisfied with our society, and especially our options in the sports world. “We still have a lot of battles ahead of us.”