PIAA shows progress in Title IX, but female athletic director, coaching numbers still lag

Sue Fargo just concluded her 51st season as the coach for Northwestern High School's girls track and field program in Erie County.

Hers has been a lengthy tenure given the seemingly warp speed of present life.

Fargo is even more notable given that the 73-year old officially began her coaching career more than a year before President Richard Nixon signed the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act into law on June 23, 1972.

"The only organized sport for girls was volleyball," Fargo said of female opportunities at her school before the 1972 legislation. "No basketball or track and field."

That law, better known as Title IX, was created to prohibit educational institutions that received federal funding from sex-based discrimination.

Not once was athletics mentioned within the legislation's wording.

And yet, on the eve of its 50th anniversary, the landscape of women's sports, as it exists today, might not have seen the progress it has made in recent decades without the legislative pressure provided by Title IX.

Girls and women's sports participation has risen dramatically nationwide. In Pennsylvania high schools, the amount of women coaching female sports teams has surged throughout the commonwealth. The number of female high school athletic directors also has been climbing, although there is still a large disparity in the amount of male ADs.

Without the Title IX effect, many of Pennsylvania's premier female sports figures might not have had the same opportunities.

There might be no WNBA, where Erie native and Villa Maria Academy graduate Kayla McBride is a nine-season veteran.

There might be no female NBA officials like Dee Kantner, a Reading native who in 1997 was one of the first two women hired to officiate in the league.

And there possibly would have been fewer Olympic dreams fulfilled for U.S. stars such as Lauryn Williams of Rochester, Pennsylvania, who became a Winter Olympic silver medalist two years after she became a Summer Olympic gold medalist.

And the coaching career might not have reached half a century for Sue Fargo, who quietly has helped hundreds of female students at Northwestern become better athletes and people.

"I just really like working with kids and seeing them accomplish something," she said. "I've said for the last 20 years, I'll be done when I can't function anymore. I'm going to go until I can't do it anymore physically.”

The numbers

The National Federation of State High School Associations has conducted an annual survey of its sanctioned state high school sports organizations every year from the 1971-72 academic year through 2018-19. No surveys were conducted for the ensuing two academic years because of COVID-19.

The original NFHS survey listed 294,015 high school females as participating in organized sports.

Its figure for 2018-19 was 3.4 million.

The state-by-state database on the NFHS website dates to 2002-03 (a full 30 years after Title IX was enacted). That year, 114,216 female students competed in Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association athletics.

Pennsylvania's figure for 2018-19: 138,998 – an increase of 22 percent in just 16 years.

Title IX's impact also has resonated in roles beyond the athletes.

Barb Dzuricsko was a freshman at Hermitage's Hickory High School in the spring of 1974. That was the same year the PIAA held its first track and field championship meet that involved girls.

Dzuricsko, 63, represented the Hornets as a sprinter in that meet, which was held at Penn State University.

“I didn't even realize the significance of that until about five or six years ago when I started doing research for something at the school,” she said. “When I read the article (on that meet), I thought, 'Oh, that's pretty neat!' I never understood the significance of that because I was there at the beginning of it.

“Now, you look back and see how much it's grown and the caliber (of athletes) and the number of sports. Back then, we had two sports: basketball and track.”

Dzuricsko went from competing in track and field to coaching and then officiating the sport. She was successful enough in those roles and more to be voted into the Pennsylvania High School Track and Field Hall of Fame.

The hall's 2022 class was formally inducted during last month's state meet, which was held Memorial Day weekend at Shippensburg University. Dzuricsko then returned to her assigned duties as an official for the triple jump competition.

Track and field wasn't the sport of choice for Melissa Mertz during her years at Cocalico, a Lancaster County school. The 1991 graduate preferred field hockey and lacrosse.

Those sports helped Mertz get into nearby Shippensburg University, the longtime host of the PIAA track and field meet. Her studies there led to the PIAA hiring her in 1999.

Mertz currently serves as an assistant executive director and media liaison at the organization's headquarters in Mechanicsburg.

“I'm proud to say I'm someone who very much benefitted from Title IX,” Mertz said. “I don't consider myself a pioneer like (Dzuricsko). But I will say when when you tell (past) stories to the girls now, some of them are blown away.

“That's actually a good thing because it means we've made huge strides even from when I was in high school.”

State coaching ratios

The PIAA's female high school coaching and administrative demographics have shown growth but also indicate there is more work ahead to reach something closer to equity.The USA Today-Pennsylvania network conducted a survey to determine the ratio of female-to-male coaches in each of the PIAA's 12 districts for four core female sports: soccer, volleyball, basketball and softball.

The study revealed that there were 877 female head coaches in those four girls' sports during the 2021-22 academic year as compared to 1,451 male coaches.

In one of those sports – and volleyball – female coaches outnumber their male counterparts statewide. A total of 316 women are head coaches of girls volleyball teams, compared to 235 men.

However, in soccer, basketball and softball, male head coaches still outpace female coaches by wide margins. Men account for 449 of the girls basketball head coaching positions while women account for 191. In soccer, male coaches outnumber females 364-156, and in softball men outnumber the women 403-214.

These numbers don't take into account the PIAA's other girls' sports or any boys' sports, where female coaches are rare other than, perhaps, in track and field.

District 7, also known as the Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic League, is the PIAA's largest district. The survey of WPIAL athletic programs, also showed some intriguing results among the four core girls' sports studied.

In WPIAL girls volleyball, female head coaches outnumbered their male counterparts 78-38. However, male coaches outpace females coaches by about a two-to-one margin in girls soccer (57-29), girls basketball (84-43) and softball (80-41).

The widest discrepancy in the state in regard to a single sport occurred in District 9 softball. Of its 30 programs, only one had a woman as a head coach.

In terms of top sports administrative positions at PIAA schools, women still lag far behind men. Of the 745 athletic director positions statewide, 637 are filled by men. There are only 108 female athletic directors, which represents 14.5 percent of the ADs in the commonwealth.

The highest proportion of female athletic directors came in District 10, where 24.4 percent (11 of 45) are women.

The lowest percentage occurred in the WPIAL, where 11 of the 134 ADs are female, for 8.2 percent. It was the only district that registered below 10 percent. The PIAA's other 10 districts ranged between 11.8 percent and 19.4 percent for the proportion of women in the top athletic administrative role.

A long way in half a century

Fargo recalled when she started the Northwestern High School girls track and field program in 1971. Her athletes had no uniforms, and she had to set up meets with new teams from other schools. She also had to drive athletes to road meets.

The Northwestern team finally received uniforms in 1974, Fargo's fourth year.

"The principal said, ‘We have to get you uniforms,'" Fargo recalled. "They were putrid pink T-shirts with red letters or something like that. We went and bought black shorts."

During a track and field meet this spring, when Fargo was reflecting on those early moments of the program with a mix of nostalgia and perhaps disbelief, she looked at a few of her nearby female athletes wearing their sharp, modern, red-and-black uniforms.

“We came from nothing to everything,” Fargo said with a smile.

The journey of women such as Northwestern's Fargo and Hickory's Dzuricsko tell us that significant progress has been made in the PIAA.

A look at the numbers reveals that there is still much progress to be made among women in Pennsylvania high school sports.

Contact Mike Copper at mcopper.timesnews.com. Follow him on Twitter @ETNcopper.

This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: Despite progress, PIAA's athletic director, coaching numbers lag