Tifton Scene July 2022 | Page 12

| sports |

Title IX A game changer for women ’ s athletics

by Becky Taylor

Fifty years ago , the sports world was in a different place .

Women ’ s athletics were essentially nil at a major level . Even women ’ s enrollment in college was limited . But this was an era of change .
Equality was the cry of the United States . The Civil Rights Act passed in 1964 and groups worked around the nation to bring awareness to various marginalized groups , with farmworkers and women getting major support .
Title IX is the most familiar of these efforts , signed by President Richard Nixon and to be effective June 23 , 1972 . In short , the bill promised that no one in America shall be discriminated against in any school or program that receives federal funds .
Title IX ’ s most noticeable impacts on colleges and high schools involved athletics .
At the time of Title IX ’ s passing in 1972 , the Georgia High School Association offered all of three team championships for women : basketball , gymnastics and track . Tennis was also a championship sport , but crowned its champions individually in separate brackets , rather than as whole teams .
Track was a newer sport for women , having started a team championship in 1968 . That it
Ellen Vickers and Vic Vickers have a reunion with ABAC ’ s 1991 national champion softball team . Ellen Vickers coached the group to the first women ’ s national crown in ABAC history . Photo courtesy of ABAC existed likely had to do with integration . The Georgia Interscholastic Association , which existed from 1948- 1970 for Black schools , was very welcoming to girls participating in track , a sport unknown at that time in the GHSA .
A handful of schools jumped from the GIA to the GHSA in 1966 and more came over in 1967 , bringing with them a solid track foundation . As the sport grew , the GHSA announced in its 1972- 1973 Constitution and By-Laws it was expanding from an open track meet to all classifications .
Unsurprisingly , there was resistance to the idea of women ’ s athletic equality in collegiate athletics .
12 TiftonScene | JULY 2022