sla review: gogol, hard fought victories

Hard Fought Victories: Women Coaches Making A Difference

Reviewed by Theresa Tiso, School of Health Technology Management, Health Sciences Center, Stony Brook University

NOVEMBER 2, 2004 archive

In 1975, I began my teaching and coaching career at a community college by sharing uniforms with other women's teams, buying our own warm-ups and away jerseys, and practicing from 7:00 - 9:00 PM after the men's basketball team was finished. Even as the other female coach and I took turns educating the male coaches and administrators about the legal implications of Title IX, we continued to organize our own conferences, train our own officials and coaches, conduct our own skills clinics, write our own bylaws, and conduct our own championships until we had an outstanding functioning athletic organization by women and for women and girls. Twenty-five years later I completed my coaching career facing the same battle for gym space that I thought would never have to be fought again. And yet it did. And the battle continues to be fought by courageous women coaches who only want one thing -- equal treatment for the female student-athletes as compared to the male student-athletes.

As I read Sara Gogol's well-researched and written account of these true pioneers in women's sport coaching, I felt a twinge of nostalgia as I recognized some of the women I have coached against and others whom I have always admired. Although Sara Gogol has never coached, she is successful in presenting a personable yet objective, and a well-researched yet appealing, story of the many outstanding women who have paved the way for all girls and women to enjoy the fruits of competition on the college level. The breadth of the book includes head and assistant coaches from non-scholarship Division III schools to relatively highly supported Division I championship teams, and describes coaches of all ages, experience levels, athletic and educational backgrounds, and racial/ethnic and sexual orientations.

The book is divided into thematic chapters with each theme supported by the intelligent reporting of their stories, many times in their own words. Hard Fought Victories and Long Time Coming focuses on Portland State and Delaware volleyball coaches, Marlene Piper and Barbara Viera, Texas track coach Beverly Kearney, Willamette College's Paula Petrie, Kansas coach and administrator Marian Washington, and Cal State-Fullerton softball coach Judi Garman. It is difficult to believe that many of these women were denied basic amenities for their programs that their male counterparts would never dream of having to do without. The head coaches of many women's teams drove their own vans and set up their own equipment, and fundraised for overnight trips as the men's teams often flew to contests with a whole bevy of assistants and other support personnel. Many women coached more than one sport without any paid assistants, worked as a women's administrator, raised money, and taught classes. Judi Garman's story of her long fight for a first class softball facility highlights the extraordinary determination, intelligence, and managerial skills that many of these women had to possess in order to deal with the constant rebuffs, denials, and discrimination in allocating funds from the male administrators.

"'I think the battle just finally wears you down' " (p. 45) Judi said on the eve of her retirement, never having the chance to coach her teams in the long-fought for softball stadium. Why would they do it? What motivates these women to put forth their best effort year after year? As sport sociologist and the director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport, Mary Jo Kane has said

" 'female coaches can teach lessons about what women can do which go beyond the world of athletics. Women can be leaders…competitive, major successes in all professions. Girls who play for female coaches can look at them, and say 'I can do that, because women before me have done that' " (p. 49). For many, "Years after they'd played for her, women would thank Judi (Garman) for all she'd taught them and the positive effect she'd had on their lives" (p. 46).

Nebraska softball coach Rhonda Revelle "explains the essence of coaching as 'trying to bring a group of people together, that group experience, and the ebb and flow of it, the ups and downs, the struggle, the adversity, the love, the frustration' " (p. 63).

In Teachers, Role Models, and Mentors and In The Limelight, a valid argument is presented for an "embodied knowledge" that girls acquire when the learning comes from others like them, i.e., women coaches. Brown University ice hockey coach Digit Murphy breastfeeds her child on the team bus (how many of us have seen that?). Marianna Freeman became head basketball coach at Syracuse University because she gained the confidence from coaching with legendary Vivian Stringer at Iowa who took the time to teach her the intricacies of her profession. Women's Sports Foundation executive director, Donna Lopiano discusses the research that shows how many girls automatically assume that men are better coaches than women. How would these girls know otherwise if a woman had never coached them? Acosta and Carpenter's groundbreaking research on the effects of Title IX sums it up: "'Girls and women must be able to see females in positions of leadership and decision-making … because the benefits transcend sport and reach to all phases of life and development and accomplishment'" (p. 65).

Many well known coaches accept their role as spokeswomen for their sport on national and international levels with humility and respect for their sport. Texas' s Jody Conradt has recorded the most wins of all women's basketball coaches yet she attributes her success to: being "in the right place at the right time.'" Tara VanDerVeer's 1996 Olympic Gold Medal Winning basketball team had as much impact on the transformation of women's sport as the Olga Korbut and Nadia Comeneci gold medal gymnastics performances in previous Olympics. Her constant challenge to her players to "'Develop pride in how you do things…coming out and playing hard all the time, not just when you feel like it or when it's convenient or for a big game'" (p. 78) put the pressure not only on America's team (the Games were played in Atlanta, Georgia that year) but also on herself as their coach. Tara VanDerVeer remembers that "'Winning the gold was the top priority, but riding on that success, just below the surface, was the future of women's basketball itself'" (p. 78). After their gold-medal performance, Lisa Leslie, Dawn Staley, and Cheryl Swoopes became household names due to the phenomenal post-Olympic success of the Women's National Basketball Association and Tara VanDerVeer survived the post-Olympic letdown to continue her pressure-packed coaching at Stanford.

Long Time Coming, Fighting For Equity and Other Battles are revealing descriptions of the changes in the coaching profession throughout the thirty years of Title IX implementation, becoming law in 1972. Margie Wright (Fresno State), Stephanie Schleuder (Minnesota) and Joann Wolf (Mew Mexico-Highlands) took on the burden that many high profile women coaches undertake when they work tirelessly within the system to provide equal opportunities for their student-athletes, even as the Office of Civil Rights was investigating their schools for noncompliance with Title IX. These are first -hand accounts of the terrible toll a lawsuit can take on individuals and their families. However, Sara Gogol is a writer and an educator, not a sociologist, and she continues her book with an engaging account of family women who coach - Notre Dame's Debbie Brown and Muffet McGraw, Purdue's Kristy Curry and of the particular hurdles that African-American coaches such as UNLV's Deitre Collins and George Mason's Pat Kendrick experience in the volleyball world.

In A Question Of Attitude and Ways of Coaching, the discussion of homophobia and the comparison between the traditional "male model" of coaching with a female "more inclusive agenda" is well researched and presented. When Portland State's Marlene Piper describes how her runner-up volleyball team "'did not go down without a battle'" in the last ever Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) volleyball national championship in December 1981, her words were also representing the end of an era, one in which "a sport for every girl, and a girl for every sport" had been the operative model (p. 33).

The book concludes with a look at A New Generation of younger coaches and the Challenges and Rewards that face all women coaches today. Any negatives? The notes section is not numbered and it may be difficult to track down a reference, yet this also contributes to the highly readable style of the book. I believe that Sara Gogol has presented my former profession in a manner that is well researched, factual, and inclusive. This text has an important place on the bookshelf right next to Susan Cahn's, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth Century Women's Sport, Pat Griffin's Strong Women, Deep Closets and Mariah Burton Nelson's Are We Winning Yet?

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