TITLE IX DOCUMENTARY TO BE DONATED TO INDIANA HIGH SCHOOLS

 

An award-winning documentary on Title IX, the federal law that revolutionized female athletics, will be donated to the Indiana High School Athletic Association’s 396-member high schools in Indiana.

 

The documentary, For the Sport of It: Female Athletics & Title IX,  is a production of The Indiana Women’s History Association with the assistance of the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

 

The Indiana Coaches of Girls Sports Association provided funding to donate the documentary to the Indiana high schools for distribution by the IHSAA.  The IWHA and DL Images, Inc., an Indianapolis film production company, made the film available at cost.

 

The documentary examines the impact of 1972’s Title IX of the Education Act Amendments on female athletics, showcasing several Indiana sports pioneers. Title IX prohibits sex discrimination by educational institutions that received federal funding, which includes most schools and colleges.

 

Today, more than 150,000 women play college sports, compared to fewer than 30,000 in 1972, the year Title IX was adopted. An estimated 2.7 million girls participate in high school athletics, almost a 900% increase over 1972.

 

“Thirty years ago girls and women had virtually no opportunity to play competitive sports and could not get athletic scholarships,” says Patricia G. Barnes, the producer /writer of the documentary and the past president of the Indiana Women’s History Association. “We are extremely grateful to the Indiana Coaches of Girls Sports Association and the Indiana High School Athletic Association for helping us tell this historic story about the role of Title IX in the incredible growth in female athletics.”

 

ICGSA President Bev Arnold says the documentary will be a “wonderful educational tool” for Indiana high schools. “It does an “excellent job of depicting the lack of opportunities for the female athlete to play competitive sports before Title IX,” says Arnold. “It also reminds us that there is still much work to be done for total Title IX compliance even now.” She says the ICGSA is proud to have assisted financially with its distribution.

 

The film was recently recognized by the Worldfest International Film Festival in Houston, TX., an international competition that honors outstanding creative excellence in filmmaking, and by the Telly Awards, the premiere competition honoring outstanding local, regional, and cable video and film productions.

 

The documentary is being used by the NCAA in training programs for college athletic directors and it is being sold nationwide through the NCAA Hall of Champions  (for more information, call the NCAA Campus Gift Shop at 317 916-4438).

 

Indiana Fever guard/forward Stephanie White narrates the documentary, which tells the story of Title IX through interviews with national figures and a series of vignettes featuring Indiana athletes.

 

Lee Nassau, of DL Images, Inc., directed the film, working with editor L. Scott Jones.

 

Indiana athletes featured in the film include:

 

  • Jane Stout Fribley, an 86-year-old grandmother, says volunteer teacher/coaches enabled her to play on a basketball team in small-town Indiana during the 1930s but she says no similar opportunities were available for her three daughters in the 1960s.

 

  • Olympic medalist Cynthia Potter, a former diver at Indiana University, describes one of the first intercollegiate diving championships for women in the 1960s.

 

  • As a young girl in rural Indiana, Beverly Harmon Archibald was such a good baseball player that she was featured in a popular national magazine, Look Magazine. Her career ended when her Little League team evoked a “boys only” rule.

 

  • Track star JoAnn Grissom says there were no athletic scholarships for women when she graduated from Crispus Attucks High School in Indianapolis.  Her coach managed to persuade a coach at Tennessee State University to give Grissom a scholarship intended for a male.

 

  • Patricia Roy, a former pitcher for the Fort Wayne Daisies, a team of the All American Girls Professional Baseball League, discusses her career as the first female on the executive staff of the Indiana High School Athletic Association.

 

The original sponsor of Title IX, former Indiana Sen. Birch Bayh, says the goal of Title IX was to remove inequities in education for women, including sex discrimination in college admissions and academic programs.  At the time, many professional and graduate schools did not admit women or sharply limited their numbers. Although sports are part of the educational process, says Bayh, the sponsors of Title IX weren’t even thinking about sports when Title IX was passed.

 

The documentary features legendary female sports pioneers Christine Grant, retired athletics director at the University of Iowa, and Charlotte West, retired associate athletic director at Southern Illinois University. They describe the aftermath of the passage of Title IX, which marked the beginning of a long and continuing struggle for equity in female athletics.

 

Donna Lopiano, PhD., executive director of the Women’s Sports Foundation, the premiere national advocacy group for women and girls in sports, discusses the profound impact of Title IX on American society and in the perception of girls and women by themselves and society.

 

Barnes said the idea for the documentary came about in 2002 when the IWHA organized a conference in cooperation with the NCAA to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Title IX.  Some of the participants in the documentary traveled to Indiana for the conference.