On the 50th anniversary of Title IX, women who led Illinois sports programs through major changes in the 1970s reflected on their teams’ journeys and challenges — and the remaining spaces for improvement.
St. Francis volleyball coach Peg Kopec celebrates with Molly Haggerty after their victory over Glenbard West in the Class 4A final on Nov. 14, 2015.
With the 50th anniversary of Title IX this week, the inequities between women’s and men’s sports in the past — and the present — are again in the spotlight. Kopec and others who led area sports programs through major changes in the 1970s reflected recently to the Tribune on their teams’ journeys and challenges — but also the remaining spaces for improvement.
He worked with Bundy in the final stages of her 29-year career as assistant executive director, but they spent time together long after, talking over weekday lunches about Bundy’s mission to increase girls’ opportunities in high school sports — and the struggles she encountered on that journey.Ola Bundy, shown in 1996, was appointed to administer girls sports for the IHSA in August 1967.
, an IHSAA report stated that girls “should not appear before the public promiscuously in interscholastic basketball games. The game is altogether too masculine and has met with much opposition on the part of parents. The committee finds that roughness is not foreign to the game, and that the exercise in public is immodest and not altogether ladylike.”
As Bundy was pushing for change at a statewide level, the first girls coaches in Illinois were in charge of building programs — and new attitudes — at their schools.The uniforms. That’s what former Fremd coach Carol Plodzien lamented first when thinking back to the early years of her 34-year stint as girls basketball coach at the Palatine high school.
“You are subliminally saying that are not worth cheering for,” Kopec said. “And they’ll say, ‘Frankly, the girls don’t want to cheer for the girls.’ And I say, ‘And frankly, I’m not interested. Then don’t be on the team. Don’t be in that group. This is who you’re cheering for.’ I think that’s a big deal.”
Kopec and Plodzien have since retired after Hall of Fame coaching careers, but they still watch the progress with interest. They see the need for more female coaches and officials, but many areas still are lacking.in May showing participation in girls sports at the high school level rose from 294,000 participants in 1972 to 3.4 million in 2018-19, the last reporting year. At the college level, women’s participation rose from 29,977 athletes in 1972 to 215,486 in 2020-21.
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