Women who paid dues get their due

At Washington State University this weekend, the women athletes who have come a long way are going a long way back.

Back to six-player basketball and the Women’s Recreation Association. Back to taking five-car caravans to field hockey matches. Back to the days of staging car washes to raise money to buy shoes. Back to the first grudging athletic scholarships and the AIAW. And, yes, back to the lawsuit that changed it all.

Back to occasional “play days.” Back to the Fish Fans.

“And those days we couldn’t even wear slacks on campus,” remembered Mary Sutton McFarland, who graduated in 1941. “I could wear pants to play baseball, but I had to wear a dress down to the old women’s gym to change into them.”

Some of it sounds like fiction now, but not to those who lived through the halting evolution of women’s athletics at WSU – 235 of whom will flood into Pullman for a Saturday night tribute and a chance to share their memories. The school invited females who had coached or played sports at the university prior to 1982, when men’s and women’s athletic departments were merged and letters began to be awarded to women – a situation that will be redressed this weekend.

The reaction has been overwhelming. Late respondents have been relegated to a waiting list.

“Some are coming back saying, ‘Finally – we’ve been waiting for something like this,’ ” said Tammy Crawford, the former Cougar rowing coach who’s been coordinating the event. “For others, it’s more of a reunion.”

But for all, it’s a chance to connect through the generations – for the play-day pioneers to see what’s been built on their foundation, and for current Cougars to understand that female competitive drive predates Nike ads.

For each woman who tried to scratch that itch, the experience differed. Some undoubtedly chafed at limited opportunities or felt patronized – or worse – in a male-dominant athletic culture; others found all the outlet they needed – and unlikely allies.

Gen Watson DeVleming, who would later serve two WSU presidents as an executive assistant, was a campus badminton champion who started dating her future husband, Bob, in 1947, at the end of her junior year.

“We went to co-recreation usually, on Friday night,” she said. “I challenged him to a badminton game and beat him. He was horrified! So we played a second game, but he cheated – you were supposed to use one hand or another and play a backhand, but he kept switching the racquet from one hand to the other. But he told me that was why he married me – because I was the only woman to beat him at something.”

If women didn’t have recognized varsity teams or department support in the post World War II days, they did have variety. This weekend’s honorees played softball, field hockey, badminton, basketball, tennis and volleyball. They skied, swam, danced, golfed and bowled. Some were PE majors, some had roommates who dragged them to the gym. Marylyn Gaiser Donnelly, one of the Fish Fans, taught swimming to professors’ wives on the side.

Fish Fans? That was WSU’s synchronized swimming club.

“We’d put on a big production for Mothers’ Weekend – a musical like ‘Oklahoma,’ or something,” said Donnelly, who graduated in 1959, “and it always sold out.”

Little by little came the nudge for something better. A JoAnn Washam, a terrific basketball player who would later win three LPGA tournaments, deserved more than play days, but so did athletes without her abilities. Field hockey had been an intercollegiate sport prior to 1970 and others followed, all poorly funded and supported. The enactment of Title IX in 1972 spurred reluctant schools into action, but rarely fast enough. In 1979, WSU coaches and athletes filed what would be known as the Blair case – Karen Blair Troianello, listed first among the plaintiffs, is one of the attendees this weekend – not as a Title IX action, but one pegged to the state constitution.

The slights were real, the battles painful and necessary, but the tensions maybe not as severe as perceived. Former swim coach Wilma Harrington recalled not having funds available to travel to AIAW nationals with a diver who had qualified (and went with Washington’s team instead). And when men’s swimming was dropped, Harrington said coach Doug Gibb encouraged his swimmers to show up for women’s tryouts.

“But they weren’t nasty about it,” she said, “and in fact, when they were talking about bringing it back, (athletic director) Sam Jankovich asked if I was interested in coaching the men.”

Former field hockey coach Marilyn Mowatt had the most charming tale of non-cooperation – if there is such a thing – when the grounds workers failed to line Martin Stadium for a game. So she did it herself – with soap powder cadged from the laundry room. It rained heavily after the game that night, and the high school football teams that arrived to play the next evening found a field awash in suds.

“I guess they had half a dozen men hosing it off,” she said, laughing, “but no one ever got on me about it.”

Now it’s understood that it was all just part of the journey.

“What we did was accepted – kind of,” said McFarland, from her home in Clark Fork, Idaho. “We weren’t thought of as nuts, anyway.”

Not then. Certainly not now.