Inside Pioneers of Title IX remember the early days.
Several from region were pioneers in fight for gender equality
The fight for equality in sports started well before Title IX.
RPI athletic director Lee Mcelroy, a champion for racial and gender equality during his four decades of athletic administration experience, remembers working out as a linebacker for the UCLA Bruins’ football team in the weight room when an unexpected athlete walked in.
“It was Donna de Varona, the Olympic swimmer. We were all shocked because women never went into the weight room,” he said of the 1960s.
De Varona already was a famous athlete when she went to UCLA. By the time she was 17 she broke 18 world swimming records and won two gold medals at the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo.
“We asked her, why are you here?” he said. “She said, I’m here to weight train. And she proceeded to go inside and started working out and coming in regularly.”
At the time, de Varona was unable to compete in college — there were no programs or facilities for women.
That incident undoubtedly began to happen throughout the country.
In Amsterdam, junior Donna Nevulis, a 1975 graduate of Wilbur H. Lynch High School, petitioned the school administration to allow girls to have a softball team. She was initially told no because there wasn’t any money in the budget.
“The only option I had going into ninth grade as far as doing anything athletic was cheerleading,” Nevulis said. “But when I was a junior we all started asking, “why can’t we have sports?”
At that time she and many of her friends were playing organized softball and other sports in the summer.
“I spoke to the athletic director and bugged him so much he finally said, OK, you can have a team if you find a coach,” she said. She wrote up a flyer, made copies and put it in all the teachers’ mailboxes. Luckily for the girls, a social studies teacher stepped in. Pat Reilly, already an accomplished wrestling coach, agreed to coach the girls. Reilly would later become a New York State Hall of Famer as a wrestling coach.
She returned to the school as a teacher five years later after graduating from Brockport.
“Things were pretty much the same as when I left. It was pretty disappointing,” she said.
She became a coach and slowly helped build up school programs for girls — including modified and
junior varsity softball.
“They fought me toothand-nail, it was a struggle,” Nevulis said. “I remember coming back from college and being like, have you people ever heard of Title IX?”
Her pioneering efforts were rewarded in 2017 with an induction into the Amsterdam School District’s Hall of Fame.
At Siena College, Joyce Eggleston became Women’s Athletic Coordinator in 1978 when gender equity was in its early stages. There were two scholarships available to women athletes when she arrived, she said.
“Siena wasn’t jumping right out there as a formerly all-male school,” she said of her early days at Siena. “You knew about the government regulations but nobody was really checking on anybody at that point.”
She spent more than three decades working as an administrator in the athletic department and
was at the forefront of the college’s compliance, gender and racial equity efforts.
The turning point, she said, was when colleges and universities jumped from the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women to the NCAA in the early 1980s.
“You almost felt like a traitor, jumping to the NCAA. But it just opened up more opportunities,” she said. “Men had better uniforms, facilities and we knew we had to catch up. But it wouldn’t happen
overnight.”
“I grew up not having opportunities. I wanted to play Little League and I couldn’t. I think in the early days, women were just thrilled to have opportunities,” she said.
Universities in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference grew their athletic departments by learning from each other, she said. Barbara Church, senior associate commissioner, was the MAAC’S “original pioneer” of equity in athletics, Eggleston said. Church and Eggleston, now both retired, left a blueprint for resolving Title IX issues to those who followed.
The 1990s saw Congress put teeth into Title IX by forcing schools to disclose their policies in relation to gender equity compliance.
In 1992 when Mcelroy was at Sacramento State, he was asked by U.S. Rep. Cardiss Collins of Illinois to testify before the U.S. Congress about Title IX. His testimony and that of
others led to Congress enacting Collins’ H.R. 921, the Equity in Athletic Disclosure Act, designed to amend the Higher Education Act of 1965 to require institutions of higher education to disclose gender participation rates and program expenditures.
“It mandated that every year universities have to report to the federal government how they are managing gender equality and how they are managing Title IX, so I was one of the original people involved in that,” Mcelroy said. For 14 years prior to joining RPI, Mcelroy served as director of athletics at the University of Albany.
Fifty years later, Mcelroy is now part of the
NCAA discussions over the issue of Name, Image and Likeness (NIL). That discussion is sure to include NIL’S impact on Title IX.
“NIL is going to open up a lot of opportunities for women,” Mcelroy said. “We’ve come a long way and we still have a long way to go.”
“It’s more than just athletics. It’s the academics, it’s the leadership, it’s the ability to make an impact in our communities. The more we look at it from that perspective the more we will see the need to invest more in women’s sports,” he said.