Title IX at 50: How the early UConn women’s basketball players, coaches and administrators paved the way to a powerhouse
When Karen Mullins injured her knee during her first season on the UConn women’s basketball team in 1975-76, she had to convince the athletic department’s doctor to perform the ensuing cartilage operation.
“He didn’t want to operate on me because it was gonna leave scars and he didn’t think that it was appropriate for, what he said, ‘a little lady to have scars on her legs,’” Mullins said. “They were definitely hesitant to perform an operation on a female athlete.”
At the time, Mullins, who also played softball for UConn, was paying her own way because there weren’t any athletic scholarships for women. Having the surgery meant she couldn’t work over the summer and would therefore struggle to afford tuition. So Wanda Flora, the program’s first full-time coach, approached the athletic department about getting Mullins some assistance.
Mullins became the first female student-athlete on scholarship at UConn — but only because there happened to be a leftover football one available.
“John Toner was the athletic director at that time and he was chairman of the NCAA,” Flora said. “He knew that we had to start getting our women’s athletics up because Title IX was in place, and pretty soon there was going to be problems if they didn’t get the women’s sports up to par.”
Title IX legislation had been passed into law over five years prior, on June 23, 1972. This week marked the 50th anniversary of the mandate against sex-based discrimination in education and activities that receive federal financial assistance. Its effects weren’t felt across college athletics right away, though. Regulations were approved for athletics in 1975 and gave colleges three years to comply.
The Courant spoke with nearly a dozen former players, administrators and coaches about the early years of the UConn women’s basketball program following the passing of Title IX — long before Geno Auriemma turned the Huskies into a powerhouse.
“Back then, if you were a female athlete it wasn’t something to be proud of,” Mullins said. “It was not real womanly to be an athlete, you know? You were really battling that perception all the time. And if you did play athletics, then you were automatically gay. So there was just a lot of stigma to being a female athlete, rather than pride.”
Women’s basketball joins varsity ranks
Though it wasn’t part of the athletic department, women’s basketball was still played at UConn before Title IX.
Nancy Dobie and Lou Vassalo participated on the club team under the physical education department from 1961-65. They competed against local schools and players wore blue tunics with numbered white shirts or “pinnies” over them. It wasn’t just the uniforms that made the sport look a lot different back then, though.
“We could only initially play three on one side and three on the other — offense and defense — nobody could cross the line,” Dobie said. “Heaven forbid we run.”
The rules changed in 1962 to allow one “rover” player on each side that could go full court to play offense and defense while the rest had to stay in half court. It wasn’t until 1971 — at which point Dobie and Vassalo were teaching physical education and officiating — that women got upgraded to full court with five on each side like the men.
“I’m happy to know as I sit here and watch on TV that I was a part of the history of the game of women’s basketball,” Dobie said. “That probably is the most enlightening thing in my life — regarding women’s basketball — is being a part of the history and then passing it on to my students.”
The club team became a varsity sport under the athletic department in 1974 as a result of Title IX. But it didn’t operate much differently under the first season, during which the Huskies went 2-8 as Sandra Hamm coached on a part-time, interim basis.
Flora took over the program as the first full-time coach in 1975, though she also was a field hockey assistant and taught physical education classes.
Recruiting at that time certainly wasn’t anything close to what it is now, especially for female athletes. Roberta ‘Bert’ Wachtelhausen (1976-80) ended up on the team because she overhead classmates talking about a seeing flier about tryouts hanging in the gym.
Players often reached out to universities themselves to express interest. In those first years, UConn didn’t have any scholarships to offer. Mullins remembers pep rallies around campus to try to change that.
Beth Vinson (1976-80) came from Massachusetts on in-state tuition through a pharmacy program and was offered a work-study program. She worked in the student union, the library and was the first woman to work in the athletic cage, where they handed out the practice uniforms and other equipment to athletes.
The parents of Chris Gedney (1977-81) were ahead of the times when it came to getting their daughter the best athletic opportunities available. That meant a creative approach to the recruiting process.
“He actually created some recordings,” Gedney said. “I don’t know if it was, I guess it would have been cassette tapes or whatever, and sent them to a couple of different schools to just kind of let them know like there’s this kid down here in the DC area.”
Gedney’s parents also helped her friend Kerri Mansberg (1977-81) land a partial scholarship, meaning she could pay in-state tuition, by creating a book of newspaper clippings and stats.
“If it wasn’t for her and her mom in particular,” Mansberg said, “I probably wouldn’t have ended up with any scholarship at all and wouldn’t have known or even had any options.”
Gedney, a Washington Post All-Met athlete, was the first player on a full scholarship. She went on to become the program’s all-time leading scorer — she still ranks seventh for all-time scoring average (16.0) and holds the record for most rebounds in a game (25).
It was a huge step, but that doesn’t mean the team was on anyone’s radar. That was clear when Gedney arrived in her freshman dorm room and her mom boasted that she was on scholarship.
“My roommate, who’s one of my best friends to this day, she turned around and she goes, ‘We have a girls basketball team here?’” Gedney recalled with a laugh.
Disparities stand out
The men’s basketball team had priority over the women. It was especially noticeable in those early years as the athletic department, already on a tight budget, tried to get up to speed with Title IX.
“I have to be honest with you, we didn’t get a lot of, what do you need, support?” Flora said. “While they wanted us to grow and they wanted us to get better … they were making sure that the men’s programs were going strong, and they didn’t want to lose men’s programs in order to facilitate women’s programs.”
The men practiced in the Field House, where games were played, while the women either practiced in Hawley Armory or Guyer Gym.
“The roof leaked in both places, so the floor was uneven,” Wachtelhausen said. “Sometimes you’d trip on a seam in the court because it was like all buckled. And the roof leaked, so we had buckets and pails on the court to catch the water, and we would incorporate those pails or buckets into our dribbling drills because the only way you could play is to have the bucket there.”
The women also had it worse when it came to the locker room situation. They shared with the field hockey team in the early years. They later used a locker room in a better location at the Field House for games, but it was intended for the visiting men’s teams.
“It was pretty gross,” Cathy Bochain (1979-83) said. “It was just like you went in there after a men’s game and it just stunk. It was dark, dingy.”
The women worked around the men’s schedule for practices and conditioning, often using the weight room in the early morning. They didn’t have their own warmups either, until they were given the men’s hand-me-downs which they’d roll up past their waist to fit into.
“We were just trying to kind of navigate this,” Wachtelhausen said. “This was kind of new. We didn’t know where the boundaries were. We didn’t know how much we could ask for and get. So we just started with the things that were most painful to us and said, ‘Why are these things so painful and they don’t seem to be so painful for the men?’”
UConn only played teams in the New England and New York areas in the first five years. The Huskies usually took multiple large SUV-style vans driven by coaches to away games, going there and back in the same day. In 1979-80, the team took a monumental trip to face Duke and North Carolina.
The men’s team would have flown that far, but it was a big deal for the women to be upgraded to a bus. Players and coaches stayed with various members of Flora’s family in Roanoke, Virginia, on the way there because they couldn’t afford an additional motel (they had one once they got there).
“That was really the start of sort of the program growing, even though we weren’t successful from a win-loss perspective,” Vinson said. “I can remember being really psyched.”
Gedney raised the issue to the administration about the program’s lack of competitiveness under Flora, leading to her being temporarily kicked off the team by the coach and later reinstated. Eventually, the program moved on to new coach Jean Balthaser. Flora insisted she left on her own, though.
Things would shift even more over the next few years as women’s sports went from operating under the female-run AIAW to the NCAA. Led by Balthaser, hired from Pittsburgh, UConn played its first season under the NCAA in 1981-82. The Huskies joined the Big East in 1982-83, the first season the conference sponsored women’s basketball..
“Everything sort of changed for us,” Bochain said. “We went from playing like URI and UMass and Maine to playing St. John’s, Villanova, Syracuse. … I think at the time when we went to the NCAA, we thought, ‘Oh, we’ve gotten to the big time.’ I don’t know, that’s kind of probably arguable if that was better, but I think it’s such a huge organization that you would think that would be.”
The path to progress
Progress was slow in the years following Title IX, but it was gradually happening.
Vinson served as the female athlete representative to the Athletics Advisory Committee for several years in the late 1970s, taking part in discussions over what was the athletic department going to do about making things more equal in areas such as coaches, facilities and number of varsity teams and who they operated under.
“I can remember the conversations being, ‘well we want to do this,’” Vinson said, “but bringing in the conversations of, ‘but our funding is down and how are we going to balance all of this?’”
Pat Meiser joined UConn as senior women’s administrator and associate athlete director in 1983 after ushering in the Title IX era at Penn State as women’s basketball coach and was on the selection committee that hired Auriemma in 1985. She noticed things were handled much differently than the much richer Nittany Lions athletic department, especially with Title IX.
“When I arrived at the Storrs campus, I saw a lot of things that I knew I needed fixing,” Meiser said, “No question, everything. Everything.
“And one of the key themes in that kind of powerful change is leadership from the top, and if you do not have board or presidential leadership that really values the student-athlete experience it’s going to be extremely difficult for any athletic department to have great success.”
In August 1985, John T. Casteen III took over as university president, providing an opportunity to reevaluate how the athletic department and university co-existed through an official task force. The task force’s final 66-page report was completed in 1986. It covered program development, academics and athletics, student life and special needs, and public relations in finance, “was the blueprint for changes in the UConn athletic program history,” Meiser said.
The inequalities between male and female athletes were clear in the report. At that point, nearly 15 years after Title IX, women only made up a little over a third of the athletes. There were 88 male athletes on full scholarship to just 18 women. With partial scholarships included, there were 132 men and 77 women total receiving some sort of grant.
“In spite of the increased numbers of women student-athletes and in spite of their overall level of success — particularly when compared to their male counterparts — in terms of competitive achievements, women student-athletes remain in a disadvantaged position relative to men,” the report stated.
The report noted women didn’t receive the same treatment in regards to training, conditioning, nutrition, housing, meals, and transportation, and suggested more studies be done on how to improve such areas.
In the following years under Auriemma’s leadership, the women started to win more games and push for resources. But former players think the program didn’t start getting the respect until after its first national championship in 1995.
“I think they knew they had to give them more or they were going to lose Geno and they were going to lose the notoriety,” Mansberg said. “Women’s basketball put UConn on the map.”
Looking back 50 years after the passing of Title IX, Auriemma says UConn has “a real proud legacy here in women’s sports,” but also notes there is more change needed for women’s basketball as a whole.
“Obviously, we still have a long way to go,” Auriemma said. “But I hope that we take all the good things that have come from all this and don’t go chasing the palace, chase the men’s model. ... We got to carve out our own road and our own way of doing things. So hopefully we’ll continue to make it even better than it is right now.”
Lila Bromberg can be reached at lbromberg@courant.com and @LilaBBromberg on Twitter.
