Coach’s Title IX legacy lives on
I recently discovered Oct. 6 is National Coaches Day, designated in 1972 to honor those “friends and counselors” who get satisfaction through the achievements of others. Fittingly, the proclamation was endorsed by President Richard Nixon less than three months after he signed Title IX.
I know it’s only March, but coaches and Women’s History Month have been on my mind, and I’d like to highlight one who influenced hundreds of San Antonio women in the years transcending Title IX.
Libby Johnson was a standout student and star tennis player for the Hamlin High Pied Pipers before earning degrees at Mcmurry University and Baylor University. After accepting a job in 1967 as St. Mary’s University’s first female coach, she would spend the rest of her life in the San Antonio area.
In five years at St. Mary’s, she established women’s basketball and volleyball programs and set up the school’s physical education program. Express-news columnist Karl O’quinn also noted her unlikely appointment as men’s golf coach, writing that the 5-foot-5-inch-tall coach with the “West Texas twang” had to look up to her male players.
She especially enjoyed coaching women who played for the love of the game, apparently turning down an offer from the new state school in town. Other coaches were observing her from the opponents’ bench, and she was at the top of their list when an opening came up at Trinity University in 1972.
For the next eight years she would be tasked with operationalizing Title IX, even though the original 37 words of the act didn’t provide much
detail. It would be another three years before formal regulations were defined. In the meantime, she taught multiple classes and juggled three fledgling women’s varsity squads, while earning less than a high school coach.
All appreciated the wisdom she shared in her cramped
office, which served as both a “sanctuary” and a training room (since only the men had access to treatment facilities). I was in on some of those conversations as a member of her softball team, and I later cultivated a different relationship when I interviewed her as student sports editor and daily
newspaper sportswriter.
Johnson would have loved knowing her players secretly referred to her as “Mama Libby,” considering her own mother died in Johnson’s junior year of high school.
Perhaps her most significant post-title IX challenge was the widening talent chasm between schools that offered athletic scholarships and those that did not. In one example, her Tigers qualified for the 1978 state basketball championship, only to fall to a powerful Baylor team in the first round. The tallest player on Johnson’s eight-member squad was 5 feet, 11 inches. In contrast, the 17 Bears players included five at 6 feet or taller.
Regardless of the differences in size and skill, players remember how she still imposed high expectations — often sprinkled with humor — to prepare them. One called her a master motivator who also encouraged them to play with their hearts.
In my research, I found little about Johnson’s posttrinity life after 1980 beyond her four years at Saint Mary’s Hall. In 1991, she died suddenly of an apparent heart attack. When I located her gravesite in Boerne and compared it to her mother’s marker in Hamlin, I noted one maudlin fact: They both died at the age of 49.
I wish she could have survived to see the seeds she so laboriously planted have blossomed in so many ways. Trinity women not only dominate their Division III conference in many sports but are using sports to form a foundation for future success in life.
I recently stumbled over my first résumé from 1977. At the top of the references list? Libby Johnson. I’ll never know if she helped me get my first newspaper job, but I hope she would be proud of me — and of the progress since those challenging years.
Betsy Gerhardt Pasley is a retired corporate communicator from San Antonio. She was one of the first women athletes to earn a Trinity varsity letter, the first female sportswriter at the San Antonio Light and the author of the recently released “From the Sidelines to the Headlines: The Legacy of Women’s Sports at Trinity University,” by Trinity University Press.