Olympic-medalist Jackie Joyner-Kersee celebrates Title IX on UW's campus

Feb. 3—LARAMIE — Jackie Joyner-Kersee remembers a time when watching women compete on television wasn't even a consideration.

Joyner-Kersee — a six-time Olympic medalist who was named the greatest female athlete of the 20th century by Sports Illustrated — celebrated National Girls and Women in Sports Day by paying a visit to the University of Wyoming campus Wednesday evening. Born in 1962, Joyner-Kersee was just 9 years old when Title IX was introduced.

Title IX, a civil rights law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in any school or education program that gets funding from the federal government, was introduced in 1972. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the enactment, giving Joyner-Kersee a good reason to share her experiences growing up through the ever-changing landscape of girls and women's sports throughout the country.

Joyner-Kersee grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and competed in four summer Olympics throughout her career. She won three gold medals, one silver medal and two bronze medals between 1984 and 1996.

Joyner-Kersee won her first Olympic medal, a silver medal for heptathlon, in the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. Four years later, she won gold in heptathlon and long jump in Seoul, South Korea.

She won her third gold medal in heptathlon in 1992 in Barcelona while also winning bronze in the long jump. In her fourth and final Olympic Games in 1996 in Atlanta, she won her second bronze medal in long jump.

Joyner-Kersee was the first woman in history to earn more than 7,000 points in heptathlon and today, over 20 years later, she still holds the world heptathlon record of 7,291 points, according to UW. She continues to hold the Olympic and national records in the long jump, and her 1994 performance in the long jump remains the second-longest in history.

Joyner-Kersee was also a four-year starter in basketball at UCLA and briefly played professionally in the American Basketball League.

At 9 years old, Joyner-Kersee had no idea how much of an impact Title IX would have on women's sports and her own professional career when the new law was passed.

"When I think about Title IX and the possibilities, I never really understood or realized the potential of what was transpiring," Joyner-Kersee said. "For me, as a young girl at 9 years of age, I was running track and really just having fun. ... I wasn't really understanding the whole impact.

"What we have today with a lot of media outlets, you get to see a lot of sports where women are participating on television. We didn't have that. We had three channels in black and white, and that was it."

Joyner-Kersee knew right when she got to high school she wanted to be a professional athlete. With Title IX opening up more opportunities for her to compete in high school, Joyner-Kersee tried her hand at as many as she could, eventually honing in on track and field and basketball.

"At 14 years of age, I made up my mind that I wanted to go to the Olympics," Joyner-Kersee said. "I talked to my coaches and they told me I had the potential, but I had to be willing to work hard. I told them, 'I work hard every day,' not knowing what it was really going to take to get there. It's one thing to say it, it's another thing to put in the work."

At just 18, Joyner-Kersee earned an invitation to her first Olympic trials in Eugene, Oregon. Although she participated in both pentathlon and long jump, she was only invited to the meet as a jumper.

The atmosphere at her first Olympic trial in 1980 was something the standout athlete had never experienced before.

"In high school we might have had 200 or 300 people watching us," Joyner-Kersee said. "At the Olympic trials, there were thousands of people. I'm in the long jump and I'm so nervous, and I'm running down, my knees are knocking, and I jump. I jumped the same distance for all six jumps."

She finished eighth in her first Olympic trial, missing the cut for the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. But Joyner-Kersee already had another opportunity lined up with an athletic scholarship for track and field and basketball at UCLA.

At the same Olympic trials, Joyner-Kersee ran into a familiar face who offered her encouragement after her eighth-place finish. That man was Brooks Johnson, the track and field coach at Stanford who had recruited Joyner-Kersee in high school.

"He whispered in my ear, 'You know, the Lord works in mysterious ways,'" Joyner-Kersee said. "I had no idea what he meant by that. Four years later, I had the opportunity to make my first Olympic team, and Brooks Johnson was our head coach."

Going into her first Olympics in 1984, Joyner-Kersee set a national record at the trials and was the favorite to win heptathlon. But Joyner-Kersee suffered a leg injury going into the finals, something she felt she wasn't mature enough to overcome because she has never been injured.

"I doubted myself, I doubted my coaches and my teammates who were cheering me on," Joyner-Kersee said. "I was so caught up in the negative and what I call not thinking like a champion. I was looking for an excuse and anticipating pain that wasn't there."

Joyner-Kersee finished second in heptathlon and fifth in long jump during her first Olympic Games. Despite winning her first Olympic medal, Joyner-Kersee wasn't satisfied with her performance on the world stage.

"I didn't allow the media to use my leg as an excuse," Joyner-Kersee said. "I had to accept the fact that, if I wanted to be one of the best in the world, things happen and you have to bounce back. I told myself when I left those games in Los Angeles, if God blessed me to make another Olympic game, I wanted to be the toughest athlete out there mentally. Physically, I knew I had the ability to do it."

Four years later, Joyner-Kersee won her first two gold medals in Seoul.

"To be able to stand on that podium, I thought about all the people that saw the potential in me and who believed in me when I didn't believe in myself," Joyner-Kersee said. "To stand there, that is the greatest feeling in the world."

An evolving landscape

Joyner-Kersee learned early on how much her education meant to her mother. Her parents grew up pre-Title IX, and her mother was hesitant about the possibility of more opportunities opening up for women in college and professional sports.

"She didn't understand what I was doing athletically and she really didn't care," Joyner-Kersee said. "She wanted to make sure I got good grades so I could get a job."

Her mother died of meningitis shortly after Joyner-Kersee left St. Louis to start her freshman year at UCLA. While she came back home when she was still sick, Joyner-Kersee returned to California shortly after to follow her dreams of becoming an Olympic athlete.

Joyner-Kersee didn't decide to go back to UCLA on her own. She remembers distinctly being encouraged by her mother's spirit shortly after she died.

"I always talk about how I had the whispers of my mother's voice," Joyner-Kersee said. "Those whispers were always for me to work hard and go to school and graduate, because she didn't have that opportunity."

With her mother growing up in a different time period that saw less opportunity and exposure for women's sports, Joyner-Kersee was able to see the evolution of the impacts of Title IX firsthand. Over the last 50 years, seeing the growth of girls and women's sports at all levels has been one of the most rewarding aspects of Joyner-Kersee's athletic career.

"The biggest changes is the media outlets and really just the appreciation of women's athletics," Joyner-Kersee said. "In some cases, there's a lot more support than when I was coming up. ... To see women's sports being able to hold their own, it's really incredible. I always talk about women being in decision-making positions and being at the table to be able to challenge some of the policies."

Keeping the momentum

Title IX and its impacts on athletics across the country can be seen on a daily basis. While girls and women's sports have come a long way, Joyner-Kersee wants to see that positive momentum for change keep moving in the right direction.

"We need to keep making sure that they don't change the policy, because policies have impact, even with Title IX," Joyner-Kersee said. "We're talking about 50 years now (from Title IX's inception), and in the next 25 years or 50 years, this won't be a big hot topic. It's just a normal conversation.

"I look at the growth, even with the young students here today or young girls who weren't even born when I was competing, they don't even realize the impact of what Title IX has been able to do because their norm is different than what was the norm for us. To see soccer teams and softball teams and basketball teams and how the women have that support, it is pretty incredible, because before, the only time you would see that kind of support would be at the Olympic level."

A big vehicle for change this century has been the inception of social media. While plenty of negatives come along with the platforms, Joyner-Kersee has been impressed with its ability to create instant change, which wasn't always possible when she was growing up.

An example was last year's NCAA Tournament. Quality differences in food, boarding and amenities between men's and women's teams surfaced, causing the NCAA to respond to the discrepancy between the two sports.

"When the women went to the Final Four, their locker room was nothing like the men's," Joyner-Kersee said. "For them to be able to voice that, and all the sudden have instant change happen, before that would have just been, 'You just have to deal with it. Either you play or you don't play.'"

Another big transformation for girls and women's sports has been the evolution of media coverage, Joyner-Kersee said. Before, women's sports would hardly ever make it onto a TV broadcast. Now, girls and women's sports are broadcasted nationally on a daily basis.

For Joyner-Kersee, the 50th anniversary of Title IX is both nostalgic and exciting. It shows how far the country has come as a whole, and how far it still has to go.

The opportunities that continue to grow for girls and women to compete at all levels of competitive sports has been encouraging for Joyner-Kersee, to say the least. As an athlete herself, she knows what sports are able to do for girls and women when the opportunities are there.

"They make you believe in yourself," Joyner-Kersee said. "If you believe in yourself, you can turn a dollar into a believer, as long as you believe. No one can want it more than you. ... Work hard in life, no matter how good other people say you are."

As far as the future of Title IX and women's sports, Joyner-Kersee knows the 50-year anniversary is only the beginning.

"We want to continue to push forward," Joyner-Kersee said.

Alex Taylor covers the University of Wyoming for WyoSports. He can be reached at ataylor@wyosports.net or 269-364-3560. Follow him on Twitter at @alex_m_taylor22.