A Team of One’s Own

To the 12-year-old girls crashing the boards at Chatsworth’s Mason Park this summer, Title IX might just as well be the name of a new rap group. The only title they care about is “Coach,” the only numerals, the ones on their basketball jerseys.

It’s been 25 years since Congress passed the landmark legislation requiring boys to share school playing fields in equal measure with girls. Since then, Title IX has limped through the courts like a gimpy point guard trying to maneuver through a full-court press. And the hullabaloo over it has yet to die down.

But for these girls--who have been kicking soccer balls, swinging bats and shooting baskets since they were toddlers--playing team sports is a birthright . . . as much a part of growing up as wearing bright green nail polish or getting your ears pierced.

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When Cliff Mickool was growing up in the 1960s, he played baseball and football at his Van Nuys school, which offered boys’ teams in half a dozen sports.

For girls, there was volleyball.

The lines were distinct and seldom crossed. Boys played sports. Girls “came to our games to cheer us on.”

“I always figured I’d be coaching my son’s team one day,” he said. And he did, briefly, when Cliff Jr. took up baseball, then soccer and basketball in Chatsworth Little Leagues.

But now it is little sister Lauren--who joined her first team when she was 5--getting the lion’s share of Dad’s coaching.

It is something Mickool could not have envisioned 30 years ago--a daughter as athletic as she is pretty, who plays sports year-round and excels in soccer, softball and basketball. And him, huddling here in the gym, explaining to her team--a bunch of giggly 12-year-olds--how to set up a give-and-go that would crush the opposition.

“The girls,” he says after practice, as he makes them run laps, “are great. They’re easier to coach than the boys because they listen better. And they play just as hard.”

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Before Title IX became law, only one in 27 girls played school sports--the equivalent of one girl in each classroom.

Corrine Pincus can remember when she was that one--the odd girl who wanted so badly to play basketball that she joined a local boys’ team. They let her play until she was 10, then bounced her out. Because she was a girl.

It would be another five years before Title IX passed, giving her a second chance to play, when her high school formed a basketball team two years before she graduated.

Today, Pincus is 40, a mother of three, and coach of two teams--including her daughter’s--at Mason Park.

And one in three girls around the country is playing school sports.

Title IX was enacted in 1972--the year I graduated from high school, another would-be jock lost to the cheerleading squad because my campus offered no girls’ sports teams.

It was part of a package of education legislation and said simply that “no person in the U.S. shall, on the basis of sex . . . be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity.”

Persistent legal challenges blunted its effect. It took years for lawyers and school administrators to accept that, yes, it applied to sports programs too. If you’re going to offer boys the chance to play football and basketball, to run track, play soccer and swim, you’d better offer girls that same breadth of opportunity.

At the high school level, girls’ teams finally began springing up at campuses across the country, and schools already fielding girls’ teams raised their status: They got actual uniforms and travel budgets and practice time, just as the boys had for years.

As a result, between 1971, the year before Title IX, and 1995, the number of girls playing high school sports increased 662%.

But at the college level, it has taken more than a generation to reflect that change.

Many universities procrastinated initially, reluctant to take money from profitable men’s programs to fund sports teams for which few women were prepared. Some ignored the law, others fought it in court . . . and lost.

Now, faced with a legal mandate to bring spending on women’s sports in line with budgets for men, many colleges must either add women’s teams--an expensive proposition--or cut men’s. And most, according to the NCAA, are seeking equality by cutting the number of sports for men.

That is the route that Cal State Northridge took earlier this month when it scrapped its men’s volleyball, baseball and swim programs, unleashing a barrage of criticism of both the school and the 25-year-old gender equity requirement.

It is a “madcap assertion,” one letter-writer said, this Title IX presumption that women “will naturally participate in athletics in numbers equal to men” if given the opportunity.

Another lambasted collegiate women who, by insisting on their rights, are “ruining the athletic careers of hundreds, if not thousands, of . . . student-athletes.”

Male student-athletes, we presume.

Just don’t tell that to the 12-year-old student-athletes working on their layups in the Mason Park gym. They’re not thinking about athletic careers; they just want to beat the Mason Park Bruins next month.

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There is a youthful skepticism of lectures that begin with the equivalent of the hoary “I had to walk five miles to school through the snow, wearing cardboard in my shoes, uphill both ways.” But that’s probably how I sounded to the girls when I began telling them how different it was for their moms at this age.

How there were no soccer leagues or basketball teams for little girls. How excelling in sports meant being called “tomboy”--or worse--by the neighborhood kids. How you worried that no boy would ever like you if you played too hard or looked too good on the field.

I watch these girls--my daughter among them--as they take the court, their ponytails flying and nail polish flashing Day-Glo bright. A few wear lip gloss, one has glitter sprinkled across her cheeks. Sports bras peek out from beneath their jerseys.

Are they worried, I ask later, that playing basketball will make them seem unfeminine, that boys won’t like them if they stick with the game through their teenage years?

They look at me blankly, like I’m speaking a foreign language.

“But the boys play too,” says Rachel Patta, 12. “And almost all the girls I know play sports.”

What? A kind of peer pressure pushing girls into sports? In the life span of Title IX, it seems, the girl jock has gone from being the subject of whispered innuendo and cruel jokes to setting the standard for her friends. Who would have thought, schools picking homecoming queens from their basketball teams?

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The Mason Park girls’ league--the Valley’s largest--was started three years ago by a teenage girl who needed a place to play.

Lindsay Amstutz was in 10th grade when she set her sights on a spot on the Monroe High basketball team. She knew she needed practice, so she asked officials at Mason Park--where her father had coached her brother’s team--if they would offer a program for girls.

Not enough interest, they said. “They said they had a coed league. . . . That meant two girls, who never touched the ball and were mostly decorations,” said Amstutz, now a sophomore at Stanford University.

She responded by rounding up 45 girls--enough for five teams--that first year. And the program has grown each season since.

Now there’s a summer league and winter league, with divisions for girls from 7 to 18. There are 20 teams and more than 200 players, and dozens more on a waiting list. Teams are picked through a draft to ensure balance, and everyone gets a trophy and a chance to play.

Until this summer, Amstutz never got a chance to play on a Mason Park team; she wound up coaching teams of younger girls instead. “I wish I’d had this kind of chance when I was a kid, and I wanted to give it to them,” she said.

“Any girl who wants to play should have a place.”