Creativity, ingenuity went a long way in the early days
campus. In 1969, they helped write the constitution for the women’s portion of the West Virginia Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, but school funded, varsity women’s sports were stonewalled.
That was until the law was actually passed, and on April 10, 1973, West Virginia officially adopted women’s sports, beginning with tennis, basketball and gymnastics in the 197374 season and volleyball, swimming, track and field and softball in 1974- 75. West Virginia was forced to fund them or lose federal funding itself.
The decision for West Virginia was helped, though, in that paying the coaches was not necessarily an issue. All taught classes on the side and were paid by the physical education department already, so a gaudy, advanced salary wouldn’t be necessary.
So Blakemore coached basketball, Martha Thorn took tennis and Nanette Schnaible coached the gymnastics team. A year later, Schnaible decided to move back to New York, and Linda BurdetteGood, a graduate student at the time, took over the gymnastics program.
“She did start it, and she kept pushing,” Burdette-Good said. “Kittie was amazing, and she still taught all the classes, and then she got rid of some and became assistant athletic director as a senior women’s administrator. She did a lot to help all the sports. You can’t go any place in the country that they aren’t familiar with Kittie.”
Veronica Hammersmith took over the volleyball and softball programs in 1975, and though she remembers some hard times, she also remembers the joy of giving young women a chance to compete for their university.
“It wasn’t easy. We didn’t have very big budgets or anything like that,” Hammersmith said. “The main thing was the kids. They got to play, and we got to play. We got into scholarships fairly early. It was a building process. It took several years to get to where wefelt like we were really able to give them what we wanted to as far as the chance to compete and have the proper facilities and travel arrangements and all those kinds of things. It wasa learning experience and quite gratifying that we were able to do what we did.”
Saying “it wasn’t easy” might be underselling the trials and tribulations of the early years.
Burdette-Good recalled multiple stories of the hoops the early women’s programs had to jump through. She remembered, in the women’s basketball team’s first game, they wore pennies for uniforms. Then, after the game, they and their opponents ate cookies and drank soda and Kool-Aid together.
For the gymnastics team, practice was held in the second-floor balcony of the old Stansbury Hall on campus. There was a pathway on the second floor fans would use to reach their seats, and during practice, the team turned that into the vaulting runway. During meets, the team would have to lug all the equipment from the balcony down to the floor, then back up again after the meet finished.
Hammersmith also remembers the difficulty of finding facilities consistently. When basketball season started, that made three teams who wanted to use the WVU Coliseum for practice: both basketball teams and the volley ball team.
The volleyball players often got the short end of the stick, having to practice from 9-11 p.m., after both basketball squads had wrapped up. It was even worse for Hammersmith’s softball team, who practiced on an intramural soccer field or at a city park, where they actually had a softball field, which served as a homefield for games, as well.
In fact, softball was ultimately shut down in 1982, and Hammersmith says part of the issue was the program never had a true facility and didn’t have the money to build one.
“I had a gymnastics meet scheduled on a Tuesday night, which was strange. ... [The basketball coach] was pretty cooperative,” Burdette-Good said. “I would go talk to him and give him my schedule, and if he knew it, he didn’t schedule a practice. He came home from a game, and he was not happy with the play, and he called a practice the next night. Well, we had a gymnastics meet, and I had to cancel it for a basketball practice.
“It’s not his fault. The person in charge of facilities didn’t tell him. He was doing what he always did, and they were afraid to tell him.”
The list goes on from there. In the early years, coaches had to pile their players into a van and drive to road games, matches and meets.
Burdette-Good remembers her team qualifying for a regional in Eau Clair, Wis., which was at the same time as a basketball regional in Mount Pleasant, Mich. The teams rode in a bus together to Michigan, then the gymnastics team flew across Lake Michigan to get to its event. Afterward, the gymnastics team flew back to Michigan and the teams rode home in thebus again.
Salaries didn’t match up, assistant coaches were difficult to pay for and schedules were sometimes difficult to create.
“The biggest thing about it is, it’s supposed to be comparable. If you gave me the budget of football or men’s basketball, there’s no way I could use it because the uniforms aren’t as expensive,” Burdettesaid. “I could outfit my whole team for the price of a football helmet back then. If football had the best uniforms, gymnastics needed to have the best uniforms. They did pretty good with all of that. There’s no way my gymnastics team — nor would I want them to — could eat as much as the football team. So we didn’t need more money; we needed comparable, to be [equitable]. That’s the one thing West Virginia did try to do.”
Little by little, women’s sports at West Virginia gained more equality and amenities. By the time Hammersmith retired in 2010 and Burdette-Good followed suit in 2011, the sports were unrecognizably improved.
Facilities have advanced, full-team scholarships are available, salaries are much more comparable and the coaches don’t teach parttime anymore.
The movement needed a bit of a push back then, when Title IX first came into existence. Blakemore, Carruth and Thorn gave that push, putting all their ducks in a row for Burdette-Good, Hammersmith and the rest to join in and keep pushing forward.
“It’s night and day,” Hammersmith said. “It’s so much better now, and there’s so many more girls and women taking advantage of athletics and being able to play on teams, be able to go to college, be able to get a scholarship, be able to have the kinds of things to be successful that we never really dreamed of at the time, [it] is just so gratifying. I’m just so happy for them that they’re at this place at this time. It’s sort of a minor miracle.”
“[The men’s basketball coach] came home from a game, and he was not happy with the play, and he called a practice the next night. Well, we had a gymnastics meet, and I had to cancel it for a basketball practice.” — Linda Burdette-Good