2021 Kansas Notable Book; Marlene Mawson, Part 1; Unknown

and how do you build a women's college sports program starting from scratch i'm kay mcintyre and today on k pr percent will meet the one man who did just that at the university of kansas marlene month and is the author of my sins mission launching the women's intercollegiate athletics at the university of kansas welcome eileen thank you so much for inviting me mohsin this mission has been named a kansas notable book each year the state library of kansas the likes the team of the best new books about kansas or by kansans and the muslims mission has been named one of those cancers notable books for this year congratulations thank you muffin with chord mayor of the undergraduate and graduate programs and assistant sheriff in caves department of health physical education and recreation from nineteenth sixty eight to nineteen ninety she coached many sports along the way and we'll talk about your college career coming up and the huge

changes in women's sport since the nineteen sixties but first tell me about growing up in cass county missouri and your interest in sports from a young age well i grew up on a farm like many of my high school classmates there were only a hundred kids in school and so there wasn't enough for boys in school to have a football team and so there were seven other schools in the county that had small enrollments and we formed a conference and they had girls sports just like boys and every time there was a scheduled game of it that the boys or the girls the other one was there too and so we both rode the same school bus to the school and we completed that way but as i grew up i had chores you do on the farm of course but after the tortured and if there was still daylight i'd go play out the site of the barn where i would hit fund goes against the bar and

then i try to catch that ball before it dropped to the ground and i did that a long enough that i made the softball team the first year i was in high school and i didn't have a basketball court and so i was good at that but i was in luck because at that time girls splayed either on one end of the court as defenders are on the other end of the court as often as the players and i could play nba fans because i had quick reflexes and i can stay in front of those opposing forwards and so i played defense a couple of years until i had an opportunity to get better and then i laid off and my last couple of years in high schools some of our listeners might find it ironic that you had more opportunities going to a smaller world school then those young women who were attending urban school so often we think that they're smaller school districts the rural school districts don't have as many opportunities that in fact in your case it

was just the opposite that's correct out and one of the reasons of course was in the communities in these eight day towns the girls were considered as important as the boys because a farming community doesn't say girls do this and boys do that i grew up with her six sisters and we had no poison our family and so we did chores just like if we were boys on the farm nobody knew that it was a girls job or a boys job and that was the way it was in all these communities and it's one of the reasons why girls felt like they could be athletic without being labeled you write quite a bit about your twin sister did see share your interests in sports or she she tried let's put it that way and she didn't really care for the vigor that produced first rationed she just didn't want to have to swear she was so much better than i was in music and so

she pursued music and i pursued sports and we both were glad to support the other ones she was on the ball games but like you know on the bench and glad to be there before the nineteen sixties most colleges and universities to the extent that they had any programs for women actually they were playing days or sports days what were those play days off from the nineteen twenties when women were curtailed from playing but say competing in sports our women that educators across the country decided that it was not important for girls to be vigorously involved in activities in fact they were warned by physicians that it was going to hurt in there reproductive organs if they were vigorously involved of course they were looking at the pioneer women that were doing a lot of the heavy physical work but altering the twenties

thirties in and into the forties playing days were what they were allowed to do in and it was maybe a week and maybe a saturdays when a school announced they were having a play date in what sports and any girl that wanted to come would come sign up and she would be assigned to a team maybe nobody on the team was from her school but he displayed much not even a full game maybe a quarter of a basketball game or a half of a field hockey game and then you went on to the next ward it was just to be fine and not competitive for sure then an actor there were war two when there were several organizations so several factories particularly that had women workers that that hadn't recreational program and women began to play as a group against other teams from other the factory's arm production lines and it was a lot of interest women realize that it was fun to be competitive as a group and so in schools

we started having his work days meaning that you could stay as a school team rather than going as an individual to this one day as season kind of an event and so those were called sports days and they persisted through the nineteen sixties did you participate in those i know because i was participating in high school as a i'm a competitive guy conference but in college yes i did participate in sports days and i made the team for both basketball softball and volleyball and out played and other colleges on one day per season and it was a sports that's like it was down this year at least you got to go with kids that you know other people other it makes that you knew that you were classes with and you had completed just enough to be selected out there working if they

could take the whole class about women so you had to complete a little bit but that we found that the girls that had come from cass county were much more likely to be chosen because we have a lot more scale we have the more experience and so we got to compete in sports days with those we competed against a nice ghosts obviously with nearly muffins she's the author of martha's the mission launching women's intercollegiate athletics at the university of kansas willing we'll talk about title nine in a minute but we're having this conversation on the heels of the olympics talk about the role of the olympics specifically the olympic institutes in developing women's sports well you know we had a new president in nineteen sixty to nineteen sixty i guess i named john kennedy and one of the things he promised was to make it to the moon even though the russian sputnik had gotten there first

and so there was a very strong cold war competition with russia but particularly in the olympics russia was just taking all the medals and the reason why was because the united states only competed with me and because only a few women on their own would enter olympic contests in an even get close to a medal and part of the reason was because we did not allow women to compete when they were young in the united states so the olympic development committee and nineteen sixty four went to the division and girls and women and sport which is a national organization for women and girls physical education and an accord mated with them to develop five national institutes that that were scheduled for the nineteen sixties and during the nineteen sixties then there were these five institutes in which one hundred women were

selected two per state to come to an institute that was offered at a university and then the olympic coaches instructed the women who were selected to expand and they learned how to coach sports that were in the olympics and then they were expected to go back to their state and conducts workshops for other women who were interested in courting support and because these five institute's were held during the nineteen sixties and there was a strong impetus to ban an entrance and motivation ford offering competition intercollegiate liane interscholastic league but mostly intercollegiate at that level and so those five institute's really were the impetus for changing from the play day and the sports day to intercollegiate competition i'm visiting with marlene mohsin she's the author of mosses mission launching women's

intercollegiate athletics at the university of kansas marlene take us to nineteen sixty nine you were a newly hired by the university of kansas to build a women's college sports program from scraps or first of all let me back up just about a year because in january february of nineteen sixty eight there was a commission of intercollegiate athletics for women established by the division of girls and women in sport to start women center collegiate programs and they made the announcement in january february of sixty eight at that national championships for women would begin in nineteen sixty nine and universities scrambled all across the country all at once during that summer too find somebody either that was at a faculty member already a woman in physical education who would start in athletics program for women or and they had to find somebody new and at the university of

kansas there were two women one was within three years of retirement the other was a dance instructor and she was not too far from retirement either and so they look for new young women who had some ability an interest in intercollegiate athletics than a three of us were hired that i happen to be the one that they asked to start a women's athletics program at fault nineteen sixty eight am but we got ourselves ready for competition that fall and in the spring of nineteen sixty nine but the competition really began in nineteen sixty nine i think it's almost impossible to understate the explosion of women's sports talk to me about all the programs that you launched in that short period well first of all because nobody had a team before fall of nineteen sixty eight we had to find out which

institutions were going to develop a team and what sports they would develop and so what we did was we called a meeting of who we do new was in charge of the programs in each of the state's courts at a state institution in the state of kansas and we met in rock springs south for each branch out in a meadow of the kansas kind of south of us are minor and out one weekend we established out what sports we would be able to field again are six colleges and then we'd and made it kind of a rudimentary spiritual who would could play in and so forth but in the fall we hadn't done that this happened in the spring of nineteen sixty nine the fall we hadn't organized at all so it was just a matter of calling at different institutions scheduling can you come over or we'll come over and play again and so that spring we develop the kansas association of intercollegiate athletics for women

and yet there was the first one first time that we had an organization for women's intercollegiate athletics but there was more to come on a national level just a few years later so take us to nineteen seventy two and the passage of title nine then what happens then ok in nineteen seventy two and the summer that was june in fact the congress passed the education amendments act of nineteen seventy two which had several titled but the nice title was the most controversy all because title nine out that education act required that institutions give equal opportunity for regardless of sex for all activities on the campus and it was based on the facts of federal funding so it was really important to its decisions to pay attention to at giving equal opportunity but the thing that was really the most evident that was not equal was of course athletics on all of these campus and there was this effort is our

women having played now already five years in intercollegiate sports and nationally and national championships and they insisted that yes the timeline means that women should have the same opportunities that men do and facilities in funding and an competition of all kinds and so that was a monumental congressional act that made it change and the reason why is because it was it made a legal reason instead of just a political or a social reason for there to be opportunity and but because nineteen seventy two which is the passage of the act in congress there had to be some regulation and for compliance and so the compliance guidelines were written by the office of civil rights and washington and they've got those written in a year so it wasn't until june nineteen sixty three that the compliance regulations were finished for tidal

minds and of course by dan all kinds of men's athletics were contesting the fact that this is unfair to vamp and so we have you know even guess senator tower from texas you know at causing a amendment too title nine to say that men's football and men's basketball should be exempted from the title nine rolling but that didn't that was struck down by congress and so is evident that that this is really going to happen but the compliance guidelines in nineteen seventy three gave five years for colleges to be in compliance thought really wasn't until nineteen seventy eight that compliance was required and considered that the whole decade of women playing intercollegiate athletics before there had to be equal opportunities marlene one of the things that really struck me when you were writing about that period in your butt muffins mission and you talk about the fact that the funding for

women's sports was so minimal that the women's basketball team and the women's volleyball team had to share uniforms not only to support all of the sports cheered uniforms because we really couldn't afford to buy more than once set of uniforms and in fact the first year we bought the shorts and the shells the second year we bought me i'm the jackets and their third year we got to the long pants the university of kansas and perhaps the state of kansas compare to other kyle is a scenic and universities and maybe other parts of the country in our coming up to speed in terms of women's sports it was similar everywhere well before the title nine compliance regulations took effect there was very little maneuvering to get women any

additional we got little songs of instruments of money each year for example we started it two thousand for six ports the next year we had seven sports and we had twenty four hundred the next year we had twenty eight the next year so we went those little instrument in nineteen seventy five i believe our seventy four maybe a we only we had a budget of nine thousand dollars and by then we had i believe eight sports and had then what i don't i came through the board of regents in kansas noted that they were going to have to support women's athletics in order to get federal funding for their state institutions and so they are allotted so a good deal of money in fact about the or sixty thousand dollars for each of the women's sports across the interstate in their

state schools and miraculously k you have a student body that match that and so women's semi athletics budget went from nine thousand and one year to almost a hundred twenty thousand next year and of course that instigated the reason that we really are merged the women's athletics program out of physical education and into miller's athletics then it will be oh one athletics program so that because now there's money man would like to be able to administer that money what that mean in terms of your day to day operations that you were taking women's sports out of the physical education department and putting it in with virginia with the men's athletics well even know there was money there there was and facilities there were facilities because the women's athletics have always been taken and robinson gymnasium which was a teaching facility it had

two full court for basketball and two different gyms next to each other and when in nineteen seventy four when men decided that they will want to merge there really wasn't any place else for any any team to pull it there was allen fieldhouse and there was robinson gm and of course women had not been allowed to be an allen fieldhouse prior to that and so now they were a part of but the band that lights and they were expected to be and allen fieldhouse and so they decided to take the abyss in a locker room for basketball and and use it for all of women's sports which wasn't that much of a change because women had been using the same locker room and robinson and so you know every time a seasoned change will the lockers change because they had different athletes but even at the time al pacino and basketball even though they were playing on

naismith court the women had to go to the public restroom fourteen over there all the fans in order to have a broom outside of the arena so it wasn't exactly overnight air quality it was our human any kind of opportunity but that's when actually left let's begin to expand their facilities and now they have quite a few facilities particularly for women's empathy with marlene mass and she's the author of monsoons mission launching the women's intercollegiate athletics at the university of kansas is a kansas notable book one of fifteen books written by kansans or about kansas we rightly attribute much of the rise of women sports to title nine that you write in your book that there were also cultural and social changes that were going on they really affected women in sports

talk about that well i think that first of all it was not acceptable for women to be involved in competitive sport for social reasons because the fashions that they wore didn't allow them to participate they wore long skirts and bustle said you know you try to be active in that kind of apparel we're not the low impossible they couldn't astride sit astride a bicycle and all of sudden we have been rumors so you know so that they can't strike of us sit astride a bicycle now as we progress through the decades and they are more active women are more active than the apparel changes to its old fashions allowed women to be more active and because they were more active it was more excess acceptable in social circles and even though they still were considered to be maybe tom boys

and out they could only do that until they were of age an age that they might be attracted by the opposite sex and then you better be starting to act like a young lady which meant act like a feminine person rather than as an active person you are sedated and proper and you have an egypt that looks like a sedate moments do you feel like that changed in the nineteen seventies along with the right thing coast ports to a certain extent but just look at the olympics if you see now and the peril that they wear the apparel is not for their ability to move but it's for the attractiveness to me and really look at how skimpy some of the air uniforms our beach volleyball for example or even the track uniforms that are barely covering the essential parts of the woman the men are not wearing those kind of skip the things that that tells you that it's not for the purpose of movement but the purpose

of sexual attraction and a number of the women's sports teams are pushing back against that and we've seen some of the volleyball teams really the women's volleyball teams really drawing attention to the fact that there's no reason why they need to be wearing these can be uniforms and a number of the i believe it was the german gymnastics team is now competing in you know towards rather than the leotard suis typically associate with a nest eggs that's right an analyst just are some obvious examples of it set the exploitation of women it's basically it's really what you started your career in the nineteen sixties as our high school coach could you have anticipated in your wildest dreams the way college sports and women and sports in general would have changed over the decades i don't think so and let me just say that when i started teaching in high school i only coach or it

stays in that was like once a season and so i really didn't consider myself a coach but even then or women's physical educators even though they were in shorts in the gym most of the day when they were teaching their classes you came to school dressed and skirt and hollows and heels and you change when she got through the gm you talk your classes all morning and when it was the noon hour a new head juror lunchtime in the school cafeteria you're expected to change back into your shirt and heels and opposed to walk to the cafeteria to eat lunch he came back he changed back into your shorts and you were in that as long as you're in the gm you were to you know dress as you would for teaching gym classes but if you were in the hallway you were expect it to have if he went to the school office to speak to one of the administrators the friends or the superintendent you were expected to have on a skirt heels and hold so you dressed and undressed a lot very quickly you learned how to do that and

a hose were a blessing to have her girdle soft area well things have changed very much so that's why it would be very hard when i was doing that kind of apparel an expectation to play that there we were before we are now today i'm kbr presents i'm visiting with marlene moss in the mother of k u women's sports she's also the author of moss owns mission which tells the story of how she built the women's intercollegiate athletic program at the university of kansas from scratch and j mcintyre my conversation with coach mohsen will continue right after this