Title IX: 50 years later, Pa. women forging paths normally held by men

All it took was a 10-minute phone call.

York County native Bruce Arians had only been the head coach of the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers for a short time when he picked up the phone in winter 2019. He dialed a number with a 717 area code, and Harrisburg native Lori Locust answered.

Ten minutes later, she was an assistant defensive line coach with the Bucs.

Locust, whose ex-husband played for Arians while both were students at Temple University, was one of two women Arians brought onto his staff that week in March. Maral Javadifar was named director of rehabilitation and performance coach at the same time, and the Bucs became the first NFL team with two women on their coaching staff.

“We didn’t talk long, and not all of it was about the job,” Locust said in a phone interview. “He told me I was coming in there to work and learn, not for the media attention. He offered me the job, and that was the start of it.”

History was made again when the Bucs won Super Bowl LV at home in Raymond James Stadium. Locust and Javadifar are the first women to win rings as members of the coaching staff.

Arians followed through on a promise to bring more diversity and inclusion to the staff. He said he wanted to bring women to the staff because “they teach in a different way and see through a different lens. The more ideas, the better for the collective. They bring it in a totally different way.”

Even though Arians moved to the front office in March, Locust was retained as an assistant defensive line coach by new head coach Todd Bowles.

“If anything has surprised me [since joining the Bucs],” Locust said thoughtfully, “it’s that I probably shouldn’t be here,” Locust said, referring to all the things that fell into place to make it happen.

"I had amazing allies who were willing to give someone who was qualified a shot," she said.

Locust is just one of the women with ties to Pennsylvania who have, or are, forging paths in sports positions usually held by men.

Lebanon County native Ashley Moyer-Gleich is one of six female fulltime NBA officials, the most in league history. The 34-year-old wasn’t the first woman to officiate fulltime in the league, that honor belongs to Violet Palmer and Reading’s Dee Kantner.

Professional baseball has slowly begun to add women to its ranks, but not in the umpiring pipeline. The Miami Marlins set a pretty high bar when they made Kim Ng the highest-ranking female baseball executive by naming her the general manager.

The rest of baseball's move toward better inclusion comes in the coaching ranks. New York Yankees' Rachel Balkovec was the first woman to manage a minor league team, leading Class A Tampa Bay to a victory in her first game. San Francisco Giants' Alyssa Nakken became the first woman to coach on the field during a regular-season game just four days later.

In December, the Pittsburgh Pirates hired Caitlyn Callahan as a development coach in its minor league system. It’s the first time in the team’s 135-year history that a woman has been named a uniformed coach.

It hasn’t happened more than a handful of times over the league’s 26-year history, but this year there are more women coaching WNBA teams than men. And this season’s four new coaches are women, including former Penn State star Tanisha Wright.

Two of the state’s largest universities – Penn State and Pittsburgh – have or had women leading their athletic departments for more than five years. Sandy Barbour is retiring this summer after eight years at Penn State. Heather Lyke has been at Pitt’s athletic helm since 2017.

Philadelphia native Dawn Staley made history in October with her seven-year, $22.4 million contract to coach the University of South Carolina’s women’s basketball team.

These women could be called groundbreakers, pioneers and role models. They have worked hard to change minds and be given chances.

But would have any of this happened without the passage of Title IX?

Equal treatment

“No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation, or be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

These words made up the Title IX legislation, signed into law by President Richard Nixon on June 23, 1972.

Athletics aren’t mentioned. This legislation was supposed to help close the gender gap in American colleges, where men made up nearly 60 percent of the overall undergraduate population. It didn’t take long for the percentages to even out.

Analysis by bestcolleges.com shows that the collegiate Class of 1982 contained more women than men. It was the “first time in U.S. history that women earned a greater share of bachelor’s degrees than their male classmates,” the report shows.

Now, nearly 60 percent of the country’s undergraduate degrees are earned by women.

Athletic explosion

When Title IX was signed, the NCAA was an organization for men’s sports. A separate organization was created in 1971, and the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women grew after the legislation was signed.

It was under the AIAW that tiny Immaculata College in Chester County won the first three women’s basketball national championships, and numerous members of those teams ended up being vital to sports’ growth:

• Cathy Rush: Finished her six-year coaching career with a record of 149-15, winning 91 percent of her games. The passing of Title IX allowed schools to offer scholarships to their top players. Unable to compete with those scholarships, Rush retired to raise a family.

• Theresa (Shank) Grentz: A 1,000-point scorer for the Mighty Macs, Grentz went on to coach at Illinois, Rutgers and St. Joseph’s. She amassed a record of 681-360 over her 35-year career and coached Team USA to a bronze medal in the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona.

• Tina Krah: Spent her professional career working with the NCAA, including a lengthy stint as director of the Division I women’s basketball tournament.

• Rene (Muth) Portland: She was the face of Penn State Lady Lions basketball for nearly three decades. Portland, who died in 2018, led Penn State to five Big Ten titles, two Big Ten tournament titles and six Atlantic 10 tournament titles. She finished her 27-year career with a record of 606 wins and 236 losses.

• Mary Scharff: An All-American as a player, Scharff began her coaching career at Archbishop Prendergast High School before joining the college ranks at Villanova and Immaculata, where she coached for 11 years.

• Marianne (Crawford) Stanley: Stanley has had a storied coaching career at the college and professional levels. In addition to the two national titles she won as a player, she coached Old Dominion to titles in 1979 and 1980. She also coached at Penn, USC, Stanford and Cal before making the jump to the WNBA, where she was the head coach of the Washington Mystics and Indiana Fever.

Immaculata College was part of a couple of firsts – the 1972 championship was the first women’s game to turn a profit and the 1974 championship was the first women’s game on TV.

By the beginning of the 1980s, athletics were beginning to change. College budgets were funneling more money into women’s athletics through scholarships and adding teams. The NCAA was beginning to take notice, and by 1982, they were holding championships in three divisions of women’s sports, and the AIAW was no more.

Banned from playing with the boys

Sports have always been a part of Locust’s life.

“I am a fan of football first,” she said. “When I was a toddler, my family would do the Thanksgiving parade and go to the William Penn (now Harrisburg) High School game before dinner. I’ve been a Steelers fan since I was 5 years old.”

She played her share of football, but that didn’t come until later in life.

Locust got her first taste of the difference between girls’ sports and boys’ sports when her mother tried to sign her up for Little League baseball. She played on neighborhood teams, but couldn’t play on sanctioned teams at the same time Title IX was being introduced.

“I remember I showed up with my mom to the firehouse and the guy banned me from signing up,” Locust said. “They wouldn’t let me play baseball. The legislation had to be put in place to get equity."

Locust participated in intramurals at Temple, after discovering that even as a thrower, the track and field team “ran too much.” And she faithfully followed the football team and the career of her ex-husband, Andrew Locust.

Arians told media that “I have known Lori going back to my days at Temple University, and I’ve seen first-hand just how knowledgeable and passionate she is about this game.”

She played some two-hand touch football while in college, but it wasn’t until she turned 40 that the sport took a more active role in her life.

She played defensive end in a women’s football league for awhile until she blew out a knee playing in a game at her alma mater.

And that’s when Locust’s coaching career took off.

Call her Coach Lo

Take your pick if it’s for Coach Lori or Coach Locust. In the end it doesn’t matter. High school players and NFL stars call her the same thing.

She’s Coach Lo.

It all started with some index cards that Locust would work up for Suzy Headen, wife of Susquehanna Township coach Joe Headen.

“Suzy didn’t know much about the game, so I would write out index cards with different things about football and she learned from them,” Locust said. “We sat together as our sons played football.”

Locust worked as a personal trainer on the side, while holding down a fulltime job in insurance, and that was how she dipped her toes into the football sidelines.

A request by Joe Headen to help some of his players improve their fitness levels led to Locust asking to shadow the defensive line coach. That led to networking with other football coaches, which increased her opportunities to learn about the game.

“Ron Kerr, owner of the [now defunct] Harrisburg Piranha connected on Facebook,” Locust said. “I asked if I could spend some time with him to learn more about the offensive line [which he coached].

“He asked how I would feel about coaching men.”

Clearly, she wasn’t opposed.

She said she has heard very little rumblings about her gender over the years. Not from fans, not from the players.

She said she doesn’t have enough time to let that kind of negativity into her life.

“If you aren’t with me, you can watch me work on Sundays,” she said. “It’s self-preservation because that negativity can paralyze you.”

Locust said she keeps that same positive outlook when she’s at work.

“I try to treat the players like people,” she said. “All the players I’ve coached have had fans, at all levels. Every day you go into an office, you see the same people, do the same thing.”

The difference is many of the people Locust works with are household names with huge contracts.

“That’s the players’ safe space,” she said of the team rooms. “I joke with them, smile with them. I even smile at Tom Brady. I mean, he’s Tom Brady.”

Locust laughed when she recounted her first meeting with the legendary quarterback.

“I was in the parking lot getting ready to leave, and he came in to sign some papers [his new contract],” she said. “I walked over to him, introduced myself and told him what I did. I told him my players were going to make his life miserable.

“He looked at me, and said, ‘Good.’”

Calling the shots in the game

Long before Locust was making NFL inroads, Dee Kantner and Violet Palmer were taking a different path toward crashing through the glass ceiling of men’s professional sport.

Instead of calling the shots for the players, they were calling the shots in the game.

Kantner earned 13 varsity letters at Exeter Township H.S. in Berks County in cross country, field hockey, basketball and track and field. While playing field hockey and earning an engineering degree at the University of Pittsburgh, she was encouraged to try basketball officiating.

And even though she spent a few years working in the engineering field, by 1986 she was a fulltime women’s college basketball official. She worked her first Final Four in 1992 and was recruited to the NBA a few years later.

She and Palmer were officially hired by the NBA in 1997, and Palmer earned the distinction of being the first woman to officiate an NBA game when she worked the season opener between the Grizzlies and Mavericks. Kantner was fired by the NBA after five years and has officiated and supervised officials for the NCAA ever since.

Palmer retired from the NBA in 2016 because of bad knees, with 919 games to her credit.

Cedar Crest graduate Ashley Moyer-Gleich benefitted from the trail Kantner and Palmer blazed.

Moyer-Gleich became the NBA’s fourth female official when she joined the league in 2018. She had designs on being a college coach, but when the NBA came calling, she changed her plans.

After officiating high school, college, NBA G League and WNBA games, Moyer-Gleich told The Associated Press she looked forward to the time she could just be known as an official, instead of a female official.

“I know that I’m good enough,” Moyer-Gleich said at the time. “I know I belong there.”

'Me getting here shows there is a possibility'

Locust, who held coaching jobs with several indoor football teams, said it was an internship with the Baltimore Ravens that provided the foundation for what she does in Tampa Bay. Activities are the same the day after the game regardless if that day is Monday, Tuesday or Friday. The week is always determined by when their game is played.

“I assist the defensive line coach in every aspect of the game,” she said. “I watch tape, run daily drills, do evaluations, coordinate things between him and the players. And during games I’m logging defensive calls.”

It wasn’t Locust’s dream to be an NFL coach, or a coordinator, or a member of the front office. But now that she’s on the field, she’s very aware of the weight of that position.

“I get messages from dads who say, ‘I have a daughter who loves football,’” Locust said. “And I think that so cool. They are taking the time to contact me to tell me about their daughter. That stuff just blows me away.”

It’s those fathers who lead Locust to believe there will be more women on the sidelines in the future. Those fathers who want to nurture their daughters into being whatever they want to be, regardless of how many have walked before them.

But don’t call Locust a role model. She doesn’t want any part of that.

“I don’t want people to be a carbon copy of me,” she said. “I like what Laverne Cox said: I think of myself as a possibility model instead of a role model. Me getting here shows there is a possibility.”

And that’s exactly what Title IX was designed to do all those years ago. Provide possibility.

Shelly Stallsmith is a sports reporter with the York Daily Record, part of the USA Today Network. She can be reached at mstallsmith@ydr.com or followed on Twitter @ShelStallsmith.

This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: Title IX 50th anniversary: Pa. women changing game on national level