When Title IX legislation was passed on June 23, 1972, it broke landmark ground for women in high school and college sports by mandating equality and opportunity in scholarships and participation.
In Long Beach, however, its passage wasn?t celebrated as something new as much as the latest step in a movement the city embraced two decades earlier.
Long Beach was ahead of the curve when it came to supporting women?s athletics and there was no conceit in town that sports were something just for boys or men.
Youth programs within the Parks, Recreation and Marine Department were there for both genders. The city?s abundant park space and recreational facilities drew as many women as men, especially in sports like tennis.
Club programs flourished in track, swimming and volleyball. As early as 1962, Long Beach State was fielding women?s teams, and between 1970 and 1979, the 49ers won five national championships (in badminton, field hockey and volleyball) and had nationally competitive teams in basketball, fencing and rowing.
Even though Title IX was passed in 1972, its implementation was slow and the NCAA went to court twice to stop it. It wasn?t until 1982 that the first NCAA championships for women were held.
A timeline shows exactly how forward thinking and accommodating the city was.
1952
Pat McCormick won two diving gold medals at the 1952 Olympics and then repeated the task in 1956, a feat unequaled?until Greg Louganis did it in 1984. Not bad for someone who began her career jumping off bridges in Naples.
The first woman to compete in the Olympics from Long Beach, the Wilson High product was just one of the many local kids who took advantage of the plentiful water spots. Besides running around Naples, she made the Colorado Lagoon tower ? one of only two diving towers in Southern California at the time ? her favorite spot in town and bugged the legendry Pete Archer for tips.
?It was just so much fun cavorting as a kid in town,? McCormick said of those days. ?I?d go with my brothers and friends in Naples. The old Pacific Coast Club had a 3-meter board, and that was about it, so we went there.
The lagoon tower wasn?t always open to the public, but the captain would open it for us. We felt it was the greatest thing since iced tea. There was nothing better than diving off and touching the mud at the bottom.
?I?d see Pete and ask him how to do a half-gainer, and he?d say `run, make like you?re kicking a football, and then put your head back.?? Once Archer noticed how proficient McCormick was, he put her in contact with the Los Angeles Athletic Club, where most of the top area divers were training.
McCormick was the first woman to be inducted into the World Swimming Hall of Fame, was in the inaugural Hall of Fame class for the Long Beach Century Club Hall of Fame, and was the club?s first-ever Athlete of the Year.
1959
A tomboy who wanted to be just like her baseball-playing brother Randy, Billie Jean Moffitt (King) played several sports until finally finding her niche on the public tennis courts in Long Beach.
She made Houghton Park her home-away-from home and took advantage of the park?s dedicated program of instruction with well-
respected coach Clyde Walker and was winning youth tournaments before she was a teenager.
In 1959, she played in her first major, the U.S. Open, at the age if 15. In 1960, she won her first pro title, and was hoping to go to Wimbledon but the Poly High principal wouldn?t give her the time off from school.
A year later, the Century Club and a group of tennis patrons donated $2,000 so she could play at Wimbledon, where she won the first of 39 Grand Slam titles, in women?s doubles.
?It was a different time,? King said. ?There were still people out there who thought women didn?t have a place in sports. The principal at Poly who wouldn?t give me time off said I?d never play professional tennis. But at the same time that we had public parks programs were encouraging women.
?I like to say that I was geographically lucky. If I hadn?t been raised in Long Beach, maybe I don?t have the public programs that gave me that first opportunity.
?I had a teacher in the third grade who told me I was an athlete and should compete, and parents who encouraged me. There were adults at the courts who would hit with this 12-year-
old girl. There were the Long Beach tennis patrons and the Century Club who supported me getting to events. And in Clyde I had a real coach who believed in me.?
Twelve years after that first pro tournament, in 1973, less than a year after Title IX was passed, King was playing tennis on national television against Bobby Riggs, a hustler who dogged King into ?The Battle of The Sexes? and then was beaten in three sets by King, forever changing the notion of what women can do in sports.
1960-1970s at the Beach
In the ?60s, Dr. Fran Schaafsma organized virtually the entire women?s program at Long Beach State, establishing beachheads in a dozen sports and organizing competition and conferences with other area schools ? all this prior to the creation of the Association of Intercollegiate Women?s Athletics, the women?s first national collegiate organization.
The women?s volleyball program was a national power ever year under Schaafsma and Dixie Grimmett, Grimmett?s 1972 and 1973 teams winning AIAW championships.
The badminton team won national titles in 1970 and 1974; the field hockey team won a title in 1979, beating Penn State; and the fencing program was a powerhouse in the west in the ?60s and ?70s under Jo Redmon. The first AIAW national basketball tournament was hosted by Long Beach State, in 1970.
?Fran was the one who initiated the programs at Long Beach State and started working with all of the schools,? said Grimmett, the volleyball coach from 1972 to 1985 and longtime campus administrator.
?When I first started coaching, we had five volleyball teams, a varsity and JV team in one league, a varsity and JV team in another, and a fifth team that played against junior colleges. We accommodated all of the women who came out for the team.
?In the ?70s, we fielded 15 sports at one time when you included the coed teams. There were club teams in some sports like track and AAU basketball, but most everyone else was coming from parks programs. There were no high school programs feeding colleges except the Catholic High Schools.?
1964
When women?s volleyball was added to the Olympic program in 1964, there was scant organization of the sport. The U.S. Volleyball Association was the governing body, which was essentially a collection of club teams.
The Long Beach Shamrocks were a perennial champion, winning national titles eight times in nine years from 1962 to 1970. So the nucleus of the first two Olympic teams came from the Shamrocks of 1964 and 1968. Mary Jo Peppler (Millikan) and Barbara Perry (Long Beach State) were two of the three women who played on both teams, and 10 members of the first two teams were Shamrocks.
1968
In 1968, Susie Atwood, not yet a high school student, represented the U.S. on the Olympic swim team, and four years later she won a bronze and silver medal in Munich.
She grew up swimming in the Lakewood Aquatics program operated by Jim Montrella.
?Jim didn?t view men or women any differently,? Atwood said. ?We swam together and trained together. It always seemed we had the same number of women as men. He was progressive for the time. He wasn?t the kind of coach who ever babied anyone, and that went for the females, too ? and there were times when we wish he would have babied us.?
There was no organized high school swimming in the CIF in 1968. When she made the ?68 team for the Mexico City Olympics, which were held in October, she took her Millikan school books on the road with her to keep up with her studies.
?I missed a lot of the first quarter, but I was able to keep up with my studies and pass my classes ? except one. In physical education, I got an incomplete because I wasn?t there. It was the perfect example of the mindset in high school sports at the time. That was the first time I had the sense that being a female athlete wasn?t cool for some people.?
Things changed. Atwood went to Long Beach City College after high school while training for the 1972 Olympics. She went to Hawaii for undergraduate work because it was one of the few schools giving scholarships to women. She eventually went to Ohio State for grad work, where she served as the women?s swim coach ? the first woman to ever coach a Big Ten sports team.
In the same year, Bud Marquette?s Los Alamitos-
based SCATS gymnastics program ? the first professional gymnastics club ? sent two women to the Olympics, with 16-year-old Cathy Rigby posting the best-ever result by an American woman.
1972-1976
Three well-known club teams came of age in the ?70s, Lakewood International, the Pacific Coast Club and Long Beach Comets, and 10 women from those three clubs made the 1972 and 1976 Olympic teams, including Kate Schmidt, who became the first area woman to win a track medal with a bronze in the javelin.
The best known of those 10 had a head start. Poly?s Martha Watson made four consecutive Olympic teams (1964-68-72-76).
1976
Wilson water polo coach Bob Gruneisen was watching a club water polo game and noticed a tall, lanky swimmer who showed some real talent. So he promptly invited Maureen O?Toole to join his Wilson High team ? the boys team, where she earned CIF acclaim as a senior.
After her high school career, she played for Monte Nitzkowski on the Long Beach City College men?s team and continued to play on men?s teams until she went to Hawaii, one of the few schools offering scholarships. She would go on to become a staple of the women?s national team and is widely considered the best player in women?s water polo history.
?If someone told me as a youngster that I?d grow up playing water polo, I would have broken out in laughter and told the person he was crazy,? O?Toole recalls. ?Especially playing with and against men.
?I remember being slugged a couple of times in high school for no reason at all, and I was roughed up on a few other occasions. But it just made me play harder.
?What I did to overcome physical disadvantages when I was playing against men was to be smart and always try to anticipate what was going to happen.
?I wouldn?t have ever gotten into water polo if I had grown up somewhere else. I would have ended up swimming or maybe making the jump to volleyball.?
1970-76
The Long Beach Rowing Association opened its doors to women in 1970, and in amazingly quick fashion, produced a stunning 11 members of the 1976 U.S. Olympic team, including Joan Van Blom, who became the first American rower to medal in the Olympics with a silver in the single sculls.
In the same era (1972), Long Beach State student Jane Loomis launched a women?s crew program at the university that endures today in association with the LBRA.
1970-80
In what would be the last crescendo before Title IX was fully implemented by the NCAA in 1982, the Long Beach State women?s basketball team was a perennial postseason performer, leading up to the hiring of Joan Bonvicini in 1979-80, when she went 4-1 in postseason play.
She would win 325 games in her career at Long Beach and twice reached the NCAA Final Four.
bob.keisser@presstelegram.com
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