Female sports have new concerns 50 years after Title IX
This is the second in a series of articles commemorating the 50th anniversary of Title IX
When broached with the subject of Title IX and what it might mean to her, Mars senior girls soccer player Gwen Howell hesitated.
“I really don’t know what that is,” she said after thinking about it.
Her coach, Blair Gerlach, wasn’t surprised.
“Title IX forever changed the female sports world, for sure, but it’s just not a part of their lifetimes,” he said of current high school athletes. “They’ve grown up playing organized sports in elementary school, junior high, club sports in the off-season ... They figure it’s always been that way.”
“There will always be issues of fairness in athletics. Title IX fixed one. Others are still out there.” — Karns City girls basketball coach Steve Andreassi
Gerlach has coached Mars girls soccer to three consecutive state championships, and the Planets have not lost a game during that stretch. He runs a highly successful club soccer program as well.
Girls soccer players in the area can begin learning the game in organized league play by first or second grade. By the time they reach high school, most are very refined in their skills and knowledge of the game.
Fifty years ago, high school girls soccer barely existed.
“It is impressive and hard to believe how far it’s come,” Gerlach said. “There are benefits female athletes get today as a direct result of Title IX that they don’t even realize.
“A lot of girls today are getting full soccer scholarships in college, while there are much fewer scholarships available to male soccer players. That’s because of football. Girls aren’t getting football scholarships while boys are. That’s the prime fall sport, so soccer helps balance it out by providing more scholarships on the girls side.
“Our girls believe the boys are getting as many soccer scholarship opportunities as they are. They just assume that’s going on,” Gerlach added.
According to Scholarship Stats.com., the odds of a boys soccer player making a Division 1 college roster is 119 to 1, compared to a girl’s odds of 48 to 1. Less than 1% (0.8%) of high school boys soccer players wind up playing in college, compared to 2.2% of high school girls players.
Karns City’s girls basketball team won the state championship in 2000. Dave Kerschbaumer, an assistant coach for that team, said East Brady High School was just starting a girls basketball program in 1981.
“I remember Union (Rimersburg) High School developed a good girls basketball team pretty quickly,” Kerschbaumer said. “If you had the female athletes in the school, which they did, you could become dominant fairly quickly.
“It took a few years before East Brady’s girls finally defeated Union in basketball. Girls basketball in our school district took off after that.”
Kerschbaumer recalled the pre-Title IX years when “girls basketball was half-court, three girls had to pretty much stand still ... You see girls games today and the athleticism is impressive.”
Current Karns City girls basketball coach Steve Andreassi was also an assistant coach on that 2000 Gremlins team that lost only one game — to WPIAL power Oakland Catholic — on its way to the championship.
“We had some standout players before that (2000) team,” Andreassi said. “Leslie Whitmer played in the 1970s and still holds the school record of 47 points in a game. There just weren’t as many of them.”
When Karns City won the girls basketball title, the controversial issue was public schools vs. private schools. That remains an issue in high school athletics today, and affects both girls and boys teams.
“Time changes everything,” Andreassi said. “We were the first public school to win a PIAA girls basketball state title in years and it was years after us before another public school won it.
“There will always be issues of fairness in athletics. Title IX fixed one. Others are still out there.”
