{"id":551,"date":"2013-05-26T08:06:07","date_gmt":"2013-05-26T08:06:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/?p=551"},"modified":"2015-03-12T11:18:53","modified_gmt":"2015-03-12T18:18:53","slug":"the-birth-of-athena-scripps-sports-and-title-ix","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/2013\/05\/26\/the-birth-of-athena-scripps-sports-and-title-ix\/","title":{"rendered":"The Birth of Athena: Scripps, Sports, and Title IX"},"content":{"rendered":"

Search every nook and cranny at Scripps, and you\u2019ll never find a student that can\u2019t define Roe v. Wade<\/em> or the 19th<\/sup> Amendment. As a progressive women\u2019s college, we consider these landmark achievements in the struggle for women\u2019s rights. But do we pay the same attention to Title IX? At a CMS women\u2019s 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 \u201cfrom any education program or activity\u201d that receives any kind or amount of government funding based on their gender. And you should absolutely know about it.<\/p>\n

The most famous application of Title IX is to sports programs, and the availability of and participation in women\u2019s sports across the country has skyrocketed since the law\u2019s 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\u2014the Bush Administration regularly challenged it\u2014and it was not an instant fix.<\/p>\n

Jodie Burton, CMS\u2019s Senior Woman Administrator, said, \u201cWe are not equal.\u201d She pointed specifically to the lack of female coaches for women\u2019s sports. CMS Associate Athletic Director Kathy Troxel added, \u201cAll you have to do is look around at the PAC-12\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cPhysical activity was encouraged from the very beginning [of the college],\u201d 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\u2019 first decades, dorms competed against one another annually in a \u201cSports Day.\u201d 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\u2019s Intercollegiate Tennis League, a separate entity from the NCAA, which did not facilitate women\u2019s 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\u2019t start the game until they came to college. What a difference four decades makes\u2014highly experienced women compete for spots on CMS\u2019s team today.<\/p>\n

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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

Burton, who began working at CMS in 1979, said that she was privileged compared to her peers in women\u2019s 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\u2019s sports \u201cweren\u2019t anywhere near\u201d the money allotted for men\u2019s sports, but speaking out often meant losing your job. Today, according to Burton and Troxel, CMS budgets are relatively equal, and women\u2019s 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\u2019s program. However, women\u2019s sports programs across the country, especially in Division I schools, remain underfunded and underappreciated compared to men\u2019s programs, and the work of Title IX is by no means complete. Both Burton and Troxel expressed concerns that women are becoming \u201ccomplacent\u201d in the fight for gender equality in sports. As a society, we point to women\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Burton urged today\u2019s generation not to be satisfied with our society, and especially our options in the sports world. \u201cWe still have a lot of battles ahead of us.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2012 is the 40th anniversary of the Title IX legislation that outlawed gender-based discrimination in federally funded colleges and revolutionized women’s sports. To mark the date, we look into the history of recreation at Scripps and the development of the Claremont-Mudd-Scripps athletic program.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":43,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,246],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-around-campus","category-volume-5-issue-1"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/43"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}