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Bowling Green State University Athletics
More than 200 female BGSU athletes to get their due at Title IX celebration
February 01, 2005 | Women's Basketball
Feb. 1, 2005
By KIM BATES, Blade Staff Writer - When former Bowling Green State University coach Sue Hager and her female athletes finished their seasons decades ago, the highlight afterward was a simple social hour with cold cuts and pop.
There were no major awards banquets. And no varsity letters.
That's the way it was for most female athletes nationwide prior to the 1972 passage of Title IX -- legislation prohibiting discrimination against females in education, including athletics -- which is being celebrated and discussed in grand form this week at BGSU.
National speakers, including Christine Brennan, an Ottawa Hills native who is a USA Today sports columnist and a TV analyst, will converge on the campus to discuss Title IX and its impact on women in sports.
A highlight of the celebration will be this weekend, when more than 200 women who were athletes before 1977 will receive their long-awaited varsity letters. It is the first such recognition of those former athletes at BGSU and a first-of-its-kind recognition among area universities.
"They're just flabbergasted. They're so excited," said Ms. Hager, who coached women's basketball and softball in the 1960s and 1970s at BGSU.
"These women didn't feel like they were deprived then. They didn't just go out and play like it didn't matter. It was still extremely competitive.
"Now they just consider this icing on the cake. People are recognizing what they did."
After waiting for nearly 60 years, one of the women in line to receive her varsity letter is Dorothy Luedtke, a 1947 BGSU graduate who played field hockey and was a swimmer.
Ms. Luedtke, 79, went on to coach at BGSU and is credited with developing serious competitive sports for young female athletes versus the playful dormitory and sorority matches that had been commonplace.
Similar to the men's teams, Ms. Luedtke and her athletes ultimately traveled for competitions and worked with national groups to develop rules for play. Faculty members volunteered to drive the athletes, and students had to share the expenses for their food, pay for their travel insurance, and create their uniforms.
Their coaches were full-time instructors who essentially volunteered to mentor them, and the women's athletic budgets were small to nonexistent.
"Nobody paid much attention to women. They just played - and I played - because we enjoyed it," Ms. Luedtke said.
Following the passage of Title IX, women's sports received varsity status at BGSU in 1977. Title IX, though, still remains a controversial issue at some universities, said Bernice Sandler, a woman who filed the first charges of sex discrimination against more than 200 institutions in the 1970s.
"We have a long way to go. We're not there yet," Ms. Sandler said yesterday, noting that male sports generally still get the majority of attention -- and money -- at many universities.
Ms. Sandler, who is one of the keynote speakers at the BGSU symposium this week, credited BGSU with its plan to honor female athletes from the 1940s through the mid-1970s.
"This is not a common thing to do. It's really not common at all and it is a nice thing that [BGSU] is doing," she said.
The athletic department's decision to honor the former athletes helped to prompt planning for the Title IX symposium this week, said Vikki Krane, director of the women's studies program at BGSU. The event, she said, has snowballed into something larger than originally planned.
Scott Seeliger, BGSU's associate athletic director, said he's thrilled with the response from former athletes who plan to attend the event.
A committee combined efforts for nearly two years to help locate the women, who number about 800. As a result, about 211 former athletes, from 20 states and the Netherlands, are scheduled to be on campus this weekend, he said.
Mr. Seeliger said organizers decided to push for such a recognition after hearing about similar events at other universities, specifically Michigan State University and Central Michigan University.
BGSU will present the varsity letters to its former female athletes at a special banquet and awards ceremony Friday night in the ballroom of the Student Union.
"We're going to award them their varsity letters," Mr. Seeliger said. "And we want to impress upon them [that] this is not an honorary letter -- this is the letter you earned. But at the time, the outlook was different. And we realize this was what should have happened."
HIGHLIGHTS OF THE WEEK'S EVENTS
