2021 Kansas Notable Book; Marlene Mawson, Part 2; Unknown

welcome back to keep your presents i'm kay macintyre today on k pr presented marlene mohsin she's been called the mother of women's sports at the university of kansas she's also the author of mine since mission itself the story of how she built the women's intercollegiate athletics program aka you from scratch kelly talk to me about the title of your book my sins mission and the boat at the university of kansas that bears that name the crew competitions actually you didn't start until after the turn of the century at a u n and that was because the competition in kansas wasn't there either or even in the region but when it started the crew team aka you rehearse and they practiced and they compete year on the kansas river and a corridor right here in tampa they have a ball pass down on the river in fact when they first started there was not aboard else there they just had to put their votes inside of offense and to lock them up in that way

but when they got a boathouse they were able to put their boats in the boat house well i came back to lawrence after i retired and in nineteen thirty two thousand i should two thousand thirteen they were acquiring a couple of new use goals for which is what you call a boat and crew and one of this going well two of the skulls were going to be new that year and the coach for the crew team and contacted me and asked if they would be all right if they named one of the two boats after me i was that i was astounded i i didn't have any app i didn't have any reason for them not to and i said well if you really want to welcome the team ahead and decided to name the boats afterward women that they admired and i was named for one of the boats and amelia earhart was the name for the other boat so i wasn't really good company but i was surprised when they wanted to christen the

boat and they asked me to come to her gun and rechristened it there and i saw the name on the boat was ma since mission and right there it hit me you know that they have caught the essence of really what i was trying to do in the early part of the athletics program here and so when i was ready to write this book that seem to be a natural title and so i just lifted it i asked their permission and they granted permission to use the title of their boat as the title of my book what did you see as you were miss ann mckee of my mission i may not have understood that that was the primary mission for why i was hired a k u but i had from the time i realized i didn't get to compete in college when i wasn't matt a young cop a college kid i wanted to and able other women to be able to compete like i

had competed in high school and i am so glad to know that now it's possible that it's possible now for nearly thirty fifty years in your work must have mentioned you detail how often the women's facilities are hand me downs there the discarded facilities ends equipment from the men's teams at that time did the wood athletes resent that or was that just considered well this is this is what we have i think they were glad to have a place to play an even though they didn't get to play where men got to play or in the favored time a day periods that the men go the play they were just glad to have the opportunity to compete because that had not been true at least i'm talking about the time that i coached and before the unthinkable a couple work but i think after

the infidel a joke over they began to see what man good already and what they had already and they knew the title nine would help them and so they began to expect mars and visiting mr lane math and she's the author of my sense of mission wanting women's intercollegiate athletics at the university of kansas really what made you want to write this book the k club director candace dad back ask me after i head done at present station at one of the many k club kinds of events if i had ever written down the stories i was telling at these events and i said well no and she said well you know we don't want to lose the story so why don't you consider writing them down solo i had i thought about it at the time but that was the six years before actually sat down to really do it but them my twin sister passed away

after of battling a lung cancer for seventeen months and i was at a loss to fill my time because i had been at her bedside all the time and it was sort of therapeutic for me to write and so i thought i would just start writing what i remember and i began to write in january of two thousand sixteen and after a while i had what i thought was a book that actually by august of two thousand seventeen and that was the beginning but it has been edited many times since then and now i have a book that is more than just what happened than it's a memoir of how i saw what happened one of my favorite parts about your book mosses mission is at the very end of the book and that no offense to you as a writer but they're not your words there though words and

reflections of some of women athletes at the university of kansas covering a long period of time talking about including their beliefs well as i begin to write this i thought that there are some places that maybe could be enhanced that i just didn't recall and i thought well as the athletes that were there at the time to fill in some soul i just don't ask me keiko director to contact the women who participated prior to the takeover of the unthinkable a because that's a time period that my book covers and asked them if they would like to write something they remembered and soul we had twenty eight responses that wrote what they remembered about being an athlete at the university of kansas during those first twelve years that would've been from sixty eight until ad and nineteen sixty eight till nineteen eighty and i i was astounded because most of them

didn't remember incident says of how the program developed but they remembered the feelings they had about competing and about how they might enjoy a bare their teammates and isn't that really what you hope most people would get out of being involved in sports well of course that's to me and the reason for competition and sports competition is because you put your physical prowess in your tricycle mere physical experts he's against somebody else and it's the enjoyment of knowing you've done your best even when you lose you know you had been your best and you feel the physical exhaustion from it but you also had that little high and the thing with marley marvin sease the author of martha's mission really takes us to two thousand nine when you were inducted into

the eu athletics hall of fame that allen fieldhouse well i was very surprised that i had i received this letter that said oh you have been voted into the hall of fame and we're going to have an addiction ceremony in february of two thousand nine and at the time i had been the chair of the department at illinois state university and allen well nine years by then and so i agree to fly back to kansas city and he motored into lawrence end and be here for their induction ceremony and it so happened i was the only one being injected that just rings and they had a are they organized a dinner that was in the key union and i was never so surprised to find that there were more than forty tables of age in that room and i was the only reason they were there i had no idea i had that kind of following especially since i've been gone for more i you

know nearly ten years and i hadn't been in athletics for maybe twenty years before that because i my athletic time period that it was probably just about the first six years and so it was almost surreal too walk out of the center of naismith court in our field house and be recognized for the work that i had done so many years ago and the athletes that had come back in a reunion sort of but they kind of surrounded the court an and i recognize some many of them where my kid that now we're successful in their careers and to stand there and to know that all of this is happening and it's happening to me end and it's a recognition for something that happened so many years prior it was so it was a and a life moment that you just never experienced again there's something a little

teary just thinking about that you know here you are in the center of everything in the end what's going on is only because of year that day and you think of how many years and how many roads you went down before all this i came to fruition and you're just sort of in wonder that this recognition is finally there it's really you were actually you and had your career over at a time of just amazing changes in women's sports did you have a sense of that at the time or definitely definitely i was involved us and the state i was a first a president of our organization i was the president of that region after i'd stop coaching in fact i continued an athletic administration is that the state and national level i was on the national board when they identity was forced to fold it when incidentally

took over so i was involved at different levels all the way through even though i didn't have athletes under my direction in the latter years i knew exactly what was happening across the state and across the nation and i write about that in my book but it was sounds there was a time that you could see change you knew that when announcements were made emotions were carried and conferences that that was at another milestone and you continued to see the numbers grow and grow because you know we have dead nine nearly nine hundred institutions there were a member of a i don't view at the hand whereas the incidental a was barely at five hundred i'm really glad you brought up and see double a because i'm one of the surprising things to me in reading your book was that initially that have the double a had no real interest in women sports intel they did well

the change really started i guess when the title nine came in and they realized that they were kind of put on notice that women's athletics and they had had been going for a pretty strong for five years and the numbers have been increasing and they realized that the women's up programs at their institution were joining in ai debbie association of intercollegiate athletics for women and they they worse and stronger numbers than men and they saw that there was interest in and spectators there was interested in and women's sports there was competition among institutions and they wanted can maybe change their mind and we're not just talking about a person or a board were talking about man who are representative of their institution from all of the institutions across the country and i think they began to be alert to the fact that

this is not going away and so we better get control of it i visited marlene mass and she's the author of muffins mission launching women's intercollegiate athletics at the university of kansas or when at one point you were referred to as the mother of k u athletics how do you feel about that title well the first time i knew i thought that imprint was actually at my initiation into the yankee you call flames and i acted sort of surprise me because nobody asked if they could say that but that was my nickname but then i i kind of felt like boy here you know what all these girls had been under my to reach under my direction and they sort of are my family and you know i know that a lot of sports teams think of their group as family and so

although i don't have any children of course i felt kind of like those kids were mine and i still find them as the lungs as my teens my players so maybe they were my children and maybe i was of the sort of their mother but i don't think they thought mother dough rolling you yourself have played every sport coats many sports do you have a favorite well probably basketball is my favorite get down to me it it requires the most strategy lamont the most the quickest you know i played softball for a long time that you have time to think about what happens when the ball is hit me you know where i throw it in the end of who needs to get the ball first and basketball things happened very quickly and as we've watched the game of

basketball evolve you realize how much more quickly and is gone and politically that occurred because of the thirty seconds as shot clock but i i like basketball because it has so many different ways this strategy works and and i like that part that's the competition for me talk about how some other sports have changed over over the years the volleyball for one when i played in college hi i didn't even know there was a game of olive olive high school we did learn that the high school but i learned in college and then you had six hits to one side of the court that is each where you hit it twice and so it ends and the serve was underhanded so that you could make sure it got over the net and and you know you still rotate it in there were six players but you never got out of your area and so far eyeball changed dramatically because that was the three hits is they develop the allegedly

rules and it was three hit so on one side and so you learned to set the ball you read is receive the ball and you said it and then just like that whereas before you just can you try to get it under control by six hits and so and then before you didn't walk down the block you know that's a big part of a defensive game and over hand hit for the service a big part of the defense again and so a volleyball as drastically change basketball of course of change from this time i played which was to court was a basketball now you play full court basketball and then occurred write in the nineteen sixty nine to nineteen seventy three period that's why we didn't have a national basketball championship until after the experimental rule of full court was in force that was just an invitation all in those three years while the experimental

rule out going full court was them being tried out to see if women really could run that much of course they could get hold of limited deal but he ran the length of a football field all the time and they didn't get tired so why were women running in a basketball court and retired and they weren't i'm really glad you brought that one up because i grew up in iowa and in iowa that two quarts of women's basketball model continued i think until that early nineteen thirty nine that day they had for several years in the transition two tournaments for girls one was the full court term and the other was the half court tournament because there was more interest in women's and girls' basketball in iowa then the boys' basketball the girls got television much lot sooner than boys did because of the high interest there and sold out the raids forced particular for the state of kansas any other changes in sports that you've seen over the

years well i think for one thing there's been such a great variety offered because in the beginning you know we had six ports and former team sports and swimming again gymnastics for the other two but even you look at gymnastics and what they can do now i mean no you know we were glad to be able to stay on the beam let alone do all kinds of things on the beam and we just had a few women that were strong enough to do uneven bars and and so gymnastics has improved a lot but you know now he starts when they're like preschool you know in private types of us were clubs and and so at one of the things that i think that we're going to have to guard against in this is for not only girls little boys to and that is while they're still in their gross cycles you know their bones are fit for some of the torque and and stress that we put on their bodies and so we've got to be careful that across the

boards one of the things that i know there's been some concern about e and athletics is the rise in one sport athletes and ned a lot of athletes who maybe a generation ago would play basketball and polly bought and maybe go out for track giving some of those muscles a chance to rest and also developing different skills over the year that now there's much more of a focus on just working on that one sport the threat they have year round schedule so that you have the training schedule you have the practice schedule you have to compare a schedule and then you go to the off season schedule and you have the strength training in and you know all through that it's one of the reasons why we have sports medicine and athletic trainers when we started with women's we didn't have the luxury of having and that kind of thing and so each woman took yourself but

now when people start their kids as young as elementary school there has to be somebody taking care of those kids that understands what did the what the stresses of the physical stress is our only is the young bodies when you look at women's college sports today how would you sum up how about how things stand now i'm concerned right now about women enjoying the sports for the reason that they participate instead of for the notoriety for what they can gain in monetary things you know advertisements or whatever you know particularly with this new ruling every athlete can go out and get their own sponsorship and i'm afraid that a with loss of group control and i'm talking about them the

athletic department on campus and i'm talking about the national organization in athletics it seems to me that the that control the laxity of control is allowing for whatever can be exploited will be and i'm concerned about the exploitation of the athlete when if you had a piece of advice for someone starting out a coaching career or a career in athletics and particularly maybe for women athletes that they want one thing educate yourself up about all the forces that are imploding because we've got organizations in lot of legal reasons for how things are done but look at terms of the educational value that is not just academic educational value but education in terms of

experiential things things that make you a better person because a part of sports and fairness and sportsmanship is about being a better person a competing unfair terms so that when you when it means something more than just i manipulated the system and and i think that that has something to do with the how you're taught to b an end prepared and maybe even have an interim thanks terry and juno and turns are particularly a good way to learn how systems work and the political push and shove the monetary values that are invalid saying what decisions are made there is so much to learn and part of that can be learned if you want to pursue a career or through call a gem preparation is to sport management programs because they look at all the aspects

not only the physical aspects but also the social psychological aspects that are in them apart why people compete really but when you look back on your time at the university of kansas and your career in building a women's athletic program is one special memory you'd like to share with us i think of probably all the spring of nineteen seventy one because in february i was directing the national volleyball championship aka you ann and there were way more spectators than you could've ever imagined wanted to come we only had the south's gm of robinson available to us and it was so crowded that you could hardly breathe in there but we probably had around three thousand people in that one gm but they surrounded that very small volleyball court at the times and well was a small

volleyball court but it was a small space in that jam and comparison that was sort of the climax year twelve two years of effort to bidding for that tournaments and getting it and then preparing for it with no help and except for students students help put that on and then that's just within a month were on our way to the national invitational basketball tournament in north carolina which we had not expected to be able to go to because we had no money to go but we found a way to get there that spring was probably the best memories that i have and i probably right in more detail about those differences than anything else you leave us with a reading from your book this is the passage about me coming back after having been and gone from lawrence kansas sent kay you for

i guess about twenty years and i have not been here to see firsthand how women's athletics had developed but i was very surprised to find that they can head explode into the way us and and that there were new facilities particularly built for athletics than for women and any it was at almost unimaginable i was sort of dream it was a fantasy almost a cd is set in reality nearly a half a century after the initiation of pay you women's athletics the final stages of the free a new stadium construction projects were evident in rock drop park in the summer of two thousand thirteen as i walked up the ramp from the park actress gate to the overlook of the new softball field soccer field on either side i had my first glimpse of the beautifully groomed bluegrass field spreading across the soccer field to the layout and over the right side of the ramp was the

shimmering green outfielder turf surrounding the oprah colored so oil compound of the white lie in a softball field the future of my breath away as i surveyed the scene i never could've imagined it seems so surreal that facilities as beautiful as these two stadium had just been built for kate women's athletes and these new feel certainly were not renovated hand me downs from a former mayor and sports facility such a wonderful facility was beyond reality for women athletes when i coach fifty years ago i reflected back on the tractor mode and seeded open fields where mike a huge field hockey and softball teams practice and engage in competition and i felt proud of these cave women athletes who had endured so much adversity in their own college years

leading to this meticulously landscape soccer field state of the art softball diamond and a world class track and a couple years later the new test facility state at the south end of the stadium just recognizing that several new cases worse programs sports facilities were built because katy women athletes deserve to have high quality spaces for practicing and competition and made me feel full failed that all the effort and perseverance of all those years it been worth it and had paid off that's marleen marston the mother of a k e women's athletic reading from her book my sins mission launching women's intercollegiate athletics at the university of kansas it's one of a kansas notable book award from the state library of kansas marlene thank you so much for visiting with us today i appreciate you inviting me and i am always glad to extol the

gratitude that i feel and the women athletes that persevered so long ago they're still around and there's still competing martha's mission and the other kansas notable books will be honored at the kansas a book festival coming up on september eighteen you can find out more about the kansas book festival that cancers book festival dot com i'm kate mcintyre kbr presents is a production of kansas public radio at the university of kansas kansas public radio has a copy of mosses mission to give away compliments of the university press of kansas if you'd like a chance to win a copy leave a comment on cape years facebook page not on facebook drop me a line they came back entire aka you dot edu that's k m c i n t y r e a k u dot edu did you miss

my recent conversation with rebecca taussig at our keep your prisons book club she's the author of sitting pretty the view from my ordinary resilient disabled body video of that event is now on keep years youtube channel so you can watch any time on kansas public radio dot org