She laughs now, but Lynda Goodrich remembers "play days" with disdain. More social occasion than sport, real competition was discouraged. Play days ended with punch and cookies.
We’re talking basketball, not croquet. We’re talking high school hoops.
In 1962, the year Goodrich graduated from Lake Stevens High School, play day was as good as it got if you were a girl.
"All the girls would come to one school to play. No more than two girls from one school were allowed on a team to keep us from getting too competitive," she said.
It was half-court basketball, six to a team. Only one rover could run full court.
"They thought it would be harmful to our reproductive systems to do much running," she said, dredging up a bizarre notion I’d long forgotten.
Goodrich, 57, is now athletic director at Western Washington University in Bellingham. She has held that position since 1987, and before that coached WWU women’s basketball.
Play day is an ancient memory, and not a fond one.
In The Herald sports section last Sunday, a picture of red-clad Panther girls conveyed the glee of Snohomish High School teammates as they celebrated a win in the Northwest District basketball playoffs.
Thursday’s sports page told a tougher story. Meadowdale girls had the long faces of defeat during a state playoffs game at the Tacoma Dome. One player, Anne Martin, wore a mask in the game to protect her nose, broken in practice.
A righteous win, a painful loss, it was real basketball — varsity basketball.
If you’re young, you might be thinking, what’s the big whoop?
Look at my 1971 yearbook from Spokane’s Ferris High School, now a big Class 4A school. The sports section has 26 pages devoted to boys — football, cross country, wrestling, basketball (oh, there’s my brother), track, baseball, golf, tennis, varsity, B squads, frosh teams, group and individual pictures, a lot of boys.
Then, boy-oh-boy, you get to girls’ sports and there’s a mere two pages to recognize female gymnasts, tennis players and track and cross-country runners.
Then came Title IX.
The year was 1972, when Congress enacted Title IX of the Educational Amendments. Signed into law by President Nixon on June 23, 1972 — two weeks after I graduated — Title IX prohibits sex discrimination in any education program or activity within an institution that receives federal financial assistance.
Since then, there have been many arguments about equity, compliance and funding. There’s no argument that things have changed. Just look at newspapers or TV sports reports this playoff season.
Hurray, girls are in the game. Boo-hoo, I missed the chance.
Jo Levin was right on time. "My freshman year was the first year we had basketball," said Levin, who started at Everett High School in 1973.
Levin, then Jo Metzger, said Seagull girls took second in a state invitational tournament that first year, and went on to playoffs all four years she played at Everett High. She later played for Goodrich at WWU.
"We were pioneers," said Levin, who returned to Everett High to teach PE and coach girls basketball.
Crediting her Everett High coach, Dolores Sutherland, Levin said "as I get older, I realize we were lucky. We were pretty competitive. It was not some little girly thing we were doing."
Levin no longer coaches, but teaches PE and runs the school’s leadership program. She sees lessons learned in sports as invaluable for life.
"In any corporation, everything is modeled on coaching. There are catchy phrases — we’re a team," Levin said. "You learn a work ethic and to interact."
As a teacher in Seattle, Goodrich knew those intangibles were worth fighting for 30 years ago at the dawn of the women’s movement.
"Girls were saying, ‘Why can’t we compete? We want things like the boys have.’ I remember PE teachers meeting in someone’s home at night to talk about how we could get varsity sports for girls."
Goodrich has spent her whole career watching young women benefit from sports.
"Sometimes on a team, you don’t like everyone, but you have to work together. That’s the way it is in the real world," she said. "There’s a sense of mental toughness. You deal with loss and you deal with winning, and you keep it on an even keel.
"If you’re out there in shorts and a T-shirt, shooting a free throw that can win or lose a game in front of a thousand people, you learn self-confidence. That’s a great thing, too."
I missed it. I was on a parks league swim team, but that was done by junior high. In high school, I was on the drill team. In plaid skirts and red blazers, we marched on the football field at halftime. We were "little sisters" who baked cookies for gridiron gods.
Goodrich is wistful about her girlhood in rural Lake Stevens.
"I loved basketball," she said. "We had a hoop against the barn, made from a barrel. I drove my mother nuts around the house. I taught myself to play. I taught myself a jump shot."
How’d she learn?
"I watched the boys play."
Contact Julie Muhlstein via e-mail at muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com, write to her at The Herald, P.O. Box 930, Everett, WA 98206, or call 425-339-3460.
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