Beloit College

Women's Basketball at Beloit College
A Brief Personal View

In 1977, during my first winter in Beloit, I coached the Beloit Catholic High School girl’s basketball team.  In early February we scrimmaged against the Beloit College women’s team, and won.  Perhaps partially in response to a request from the two best players on the college team, Trinkie Heller and Gratia Boehme, I became the volleyball coach and then soon thereafter head coach of women’s basketball.  Partly due to the skills my players brought to the court, partly due to my own competitiveness and eight years of varsity high school and college playing experience, our teams did well during my three years in charge.  To my knowledge, my basketball record (38-17 or .691) is better than that of any of my predecessors or successors, except for Sandy Botham, who coached only one season before moving on to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.  
 
I coached at a time when women, including myself, were beginning to insist on equity for women and men in college varsity athletics.  The passage of Title IX in 1972 had mandated such equity, but compliance did not occur easily or quickly.  At Beloit the status of women’s role in physical education and athletics was complicated by the shift due to financial pressure from a department staffed equally by women and men in 1975 to one dominated by men for many years following the departure of all three women faculty in 1977 and 1978.  When I began to coach the women’s varsity basketball team in 1977, I received valuable professional advice from department chair and men’s coach Bill Knapton, but at the same time I had to fight with him virtually every day to gain the same rights and privileges his players enjoyed.  Whether locker room space, meals after away games, uniforms, or even the quality of the basketballs themselves, to say nothing of salary, the resistance to equity remained remarkable.  Perhaps partly because I insisted on that equity, I was dismissed from my position after each of my first two years as coach, but hired again before the next season began.  Perhaps it is significant that the average tenure of coaches of the women’s team between 1975 and 2008 (the last year for which I have data) has been about four years.  As I wrote in a longer version of this commentary, which I have sent to Frank McClellan and placed in the college archives, such short stays make it damned hard to establish a dynasty.
 
That I was not invited to continue as varsity basketball coach did free me to turn in other directions, but since my husband, John Rosenwald, was to serve as Professor of English from 1976 until 2008, I wonder what I might have achieved had I been able to maintain my status for the twenty-eight years after my final season.  I learned a great deal during my three seasons as coach, and I am pleased and proud to have held the position.  At the same time, I have a clear sense of anger and frustration not only for my own sake but also for all the other women coaches and the women athletes who may have achieved less than was feasible due to an inability of Beloit College to treat women in the same way they treated many men.