BasketballNotables: Ann Meyers, Anita Ortega, Denise Curry, Rehema Stephens, Dora Dome, Natalie WilliamsChampionships: WCAA (1975-'79), AIAW (1978) Magic moment: With five seconds on the clock and the Bruins behind 74-72 at the 1978 West Regional at Stanford, Anita AJuice@ Ortega stole the ball from a Cal State Long Beach player and raced the length of the court for a game-tying layup. The Bruins won in overtime and went on to win the national championship in Pauley Pavilion.
GolfNotables: Janet Coles, Kay Cockerill, Jean Zedlitz, Lisa Kiggens, LaRee Sugg, Christy Erb, Jenny ParkChampionships: Pac-10 (1990, 1991), NCAA (1991) Magic moment: At the 1991 NCAA Championships at Ohio State, UCLA surged back from a six-stroke deficit to tie San Jose State after 72 holes. Then, in the first extra hole of the sudden-death playoff, LaRee Sugg sank a 25-foot birdie to clinch the Bruin women's first golf title.
GymnasticsNotables: Sharon Shapiro, Donna Kemp, Kim Hamilton, Jill Andrews, Kareema Marrow, Leah Homma, Stella UmehChampionships: SCWIAC (1974), WCAA (1981), Pac-10 (1987-'90, 1993, 1995, 1997), NCAA (1997) Magic moment: Georgia was the odds-on favorite to win the 1997 NCAA championship. Indeed, only Georgia, Alabama and Utah had ever won NCAA women's gymnastics titles -- but in their last event, all the Bruin gymnasts Astuck@ their uneven bars routine to bring the trophy to Westwood.
Soccer
Notables: Traci Arkenberg, Sommer Hammoud
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Twenty-five years ago the woman athlete was born at UCLA -- and sports, not to mention the school -- have never been the same since.
Remember The Trailer?
Green. About the size of an RV. Parked on the lawn outside the Women's Gym.
In 1974, it was the UCLA Women's Athletic Department. Any understanding of the evolution of women's sports at UCLA over the last 25 years has to start at that green trailer, where coaches and a skeleton staff were crammed into their respective cubbyholes for the next eight years. Yet, it was inside that makeshift metal dwelling that the seeds were sown for what would become a nationally renowned program that has transformed female athletes -- once overlooked, underappreciated and sometimes even ridiculed -- into household names, inspirational role models and international heroines like Jackie Joyner-Kersee '84 and Florence Griffith Joyner (Flo-Jo).
I played intercollegiate basketball at UCLA in the prehistoric days of 1968-'70, just a year after women's hoops and volleyball were formed in 1967. My squad was dubbed the 'Bruin Belles' and we wore snug, blue polyester uniforms. Road games? That was a four-hour drive to Fresno in clunky university station wagons, followed by an immediate return trip. Forget any overnights at a hotel. Scholarships? Our biggest perk was a free dinner after every game -- at the local coffeeshop.
Bruin golfers who just returned from a recent tournament in Hawaii, for example, would probably laugh to hear that their coach's (22-year UCLA veteran Jackie Tobian-Steinmann '52) original team wore reversible wraparound skirts that blew up when they swung, or that they only played on local courses that she could drive them to in her Ford sedan. The softball team probably can't imagine that in their coach Sue Enquist's '80 first year of competition, the players wore UCLA's men's track practice shirts and blue shorts or sweatpants as their game uniforms.
Title IX in 1972, of course, changed everything. Back in the late '40s, Tobian-Steinmann spent her days immersed in synchronized swimming in campus aquacades. In subsequent years, women students attended various sports classes or competed on intramural and club teams. The federal education statute required schools to commit equal resources to male and female students, thus spurring universities to action in the arena of women's sports. At UCLA, the chancellor's office quickly saw it was time to comply with both the letter and spirit of the law, which meant the formation of the women's athletic department.
Soon after, in 1974 -- a year marked now as the beginning of the modern era of UCLA women's sports -- Ann Meyers '79 was given the first full-ride women's athletic scholarship in basketball. But the department didn't boast the most auspicious beginning. Former track athlete Shirbey Johnson, who'd been in charge of both intramural and intercollegiate sports as well as coaching several teams, including my basketball squad, was named interim director, but was then passed over for former Olympic gold-medal diver Micki King. King accepted the job -- only to turn it down a week later.
A second search was more successful, landing Judith Holland, a coach and administrator at California State University, Sacramento, in the summer of 1975. "The men's program at UCLA had been so good for so long -- I wanted to duplicate that for the women," recalls Holland, who would stay at the job for the next 20 years. That first summer, however, she spent slaving away on a manual for coaches. "I can't tell you if anybody ever read it,@ she says, Abut it was the start of trying to organize ourselves."
Vice Chancellor Norman Miller '39, Chancellor Charles Young M.A. '57, Ph.D. '60 and even legendary men's athletic director J.D. Morgan '41 were strong supporters of the department.
"I truly loved that man," says Holland of Morgan, who some said wanted to keep down women's sports on campus by keeping them separate. AI think he thought they needed to be on their own for a while to grow," she says.
Holland's first budget was $263,000. ("We spend more than that now on shoelaces," she exaggerates, but just barely -- the current budget for the program is several million dollars.) She used those meager funds to hire coaches at part-time salaries -- many also had to teach at UCLA or elsewhere to make ends meet -- and gave out a few scholarships. Each year, she'd push for more funding from student-registration fees, then add more scholarships and more paid hours for the coaches. Coaches would fund-raise, too: Tobian-Steinmann helped organize celebrity golf tournaments for years, then brought in a corporate sponsor. Holland lobbied for better practice facilities, more out-of-state travel and more media coverage. She hired Daily Bruin sports editor Michael Sondheimer '77 on a trial basis in 1977 to help market the program; he never left. Today, he's associate athletic director for recruiting and is the de facto department historian.
The first coaches Holland hired proved key to the program's success -- such as volleyball's Andy Banachowski '68 (who'd been coaching the Bruin women on and off since he was still a student in 1967 but was re-upped by Holland), softball's Sharron Backus and basketball's Billie Moore. (Holland intuited early on that basketball and volleyball would be the bellwether sports for women, and she was right.) Those three hires alone coached the Bruins to 14 national championships, helped produce a half-dozen Olympic stars and orchestrated countless thrilling moments on grass and hardwood.
Later, track and field coaches Pat Connolly and Bob Kersee would gain international prominence by developing top female competitors for both UCLA and the Olympics -- among them Kersee's wife-to-be, heptathlete/long jumper (and basketball standout) Jackie Joyner-Kersee, now considered one of the greatest athletes of the past 50 years.
Three of Holland's first female scholarship athletes are now enshrined in the UCLA Hall of Fame: basketball's Meyers, who helped put both UCLA and women's collegiate sports on the map by leading her team to the 1978 national title in Pauley Pavilion; track and field sprinter Evelyn Ashford, who competed in four Olympics and won numerous medals; and softball slugger Sue Enquist, who played on the Bruins' first national championship team and has remained at UCLA as a coach.
If you're looking for defining moments in the program, says Holland, just look at the national titles -- and there have been plenty. Indeed, UCLA has won the national award for the best all-around women's program (based on top-20 finishes in every sport) 11 times -- twice as many as any other school. Nowadays, the Sears Director's Cup combines the men's and women's programs and the Bruins are a perennial top-five finisher.
But if you're looking for moments that gave the women's program a "kick in the pants", look at the losing years, she insists, or at the times when hard decisions had to be made. Early in Holland's tenure, for example, she fired highly successful track and field coach Chuck Debus when allegations were made about inappropriate conduct with athletes. That set a strong ethical tone for the department. She also had to eliminate the sports of crew and badminton (in which basketball/volleyball player Denise Corlett '81 won a national title in Arizona, then flew home for a basketball game that night) as competitive opportunities dwindled.
An even tougher decision for Holland was to take a leadership role in the movement for women's collegiate sports to be governed by the NCAA. Formerly president of the AIAW, the women-run governing body since the early '70s, Holland had come to believe that only the NCAA could take women's sports to the next level of better recruitment, greater funding and, ultimately, more recognition.
"I thought I did what was right for UCLA," she says. It didn't make her popular among other women in the profession, who were concerned that the NCAA would take women out of leadership roles. Even so, under Holland, the UCLA women's athletic program joined the NCAA in 1981. Her decision proved right. Merging the women's and men's athletics departments in 1982 brought a feeling of increased parity and resource shariing. In fact, the imprimatur of the NCAA gave women's sports an entirely new cachet, with an attendant increase in national attention, publicity -- and glamour.
"Joining the NCAA was another big step in establishing credibility for women's sports," says Banachowski. "Putting everything under one umbrella just put everyone on the same side." In a physical sense, that umbrella was the J.D. Morgan Center -- a far cry from the trailer of old.
"Women athletes today owe everything to Judee Holland," says Sondheimer. "Without her, UCLA wouldn't be recognized as it is. She was so ahead of her time that it gave UCLA an edge."
Under NCAA auspices, UCLA women kept racking up impressive results, with athletes such as basketball's Denise Curry '82, softball's Dot Richardson '84, volleyball's Liz Masakayan and gymnastics' Sharon Shapiro '84 drawing national attention. It wasn't just campus sports that boosted UCLA's women, however. The Olympic Games have turned the spotlight on a number of Bruin women over the past 25 years, going back to Meyers' participation on the first women's Olympic basketball team in 1976. In 1984, Bruin women won an astounding 12 medals in the L.A. Games. In fact, the '84 Games were like campus sports, with an Olympic village sprouting from the intramural field and gymnastics -- dominated by Bruin men -- taking place in Pauley. Bruin women speedsters showed they had no equal, beginning a streak of 100-meter sprint champions (Ashford in '84, Florence Griffith Joyner in 1988 and Gail Devers in 1992 and 1996) that still hasn't been broken.
With all its upside, though, the 1980s were also a time when Title IX was under threat. The Reagan Administration weakened enforcement of the law, and federal court cases narrowed its impact (until 1988, when Congress passed the Civil Rights Restoration Act to put Title IX back on track). "There was a backlash in the '80s," says Holland, "but it wasn't overt. You just went into work with white knuckles every day." UCLA's basketball program also suffered a blow in 1984, just after a remarkable victory over highly ranked Old Dominion, when star players Char Jones and Michelle McCoy were dismissed mid-season for academic problems. For Holland, it's still a bitter memory, especially since no male athletes had ever been kicked out in similar circumstances. AI shut my office door and cried for an hour after it happened,@ she says. ASure I felt bad for the program, but I really felt bad for those kids.@ Since both athletes were African Americans from inner-city backgrounds, their dis missal put a damper on UCLA's recruitment of inner-city players for years to come -- even though UCLA had been at the forefront of bringing opportunities to African-American student-athletes.
The early 1990s was a time of tough decisions for the athletic department, as a universitywide financial crisis -- combined with a renewed national push for gender equity in collegiate sports -- forced the painful elimination of two successful men's Olympic sports on campus, gymnastics and swimming. On the plus side, however, women's water polo and soccer were added to UCLA's sports roster, and a tradition of excellence has quickly been established in the pool and on the field. Women have also been given the chance to compete in three traditionally male track and field events -- triple jump, pole vault and hammer throw -- that would have been unimaginable 25 years ago. And Bruin fans thrilled to the play of basketball/volleyball All-American Natalie Williams '94, the best two-sport athlete at the school since Joyner-Kersee. The '90s also brought the excitement of the Olympics back to the U.S.A., and more glory for Bruin women. The three U.S.A. women's teams that won gold medals included such former Bruin stalwarts as softball's Sheila Cornell '85, Dot Richardson and Lisa Fernandez '95 and former UCLA soccer coach Joy Fawcett, and once again the track and field medalists included familiar Bruin names like Devers and Joyner-Kersee. The "Women's Games" as Atlanta's Olympics were dubbed, the subsequent birth of two women's pro basketball leagues and a pro softball league and the upcoming Women's World Cup of Soccer (which will hold its gold-medal game this summer at the Rose Bowl) have placed women athletes on an even higher pedestal -- and UCLA's players reap that whirlwind.
Bruin athletes-turned-coaches such as track and field's Jeanette Bolden '85 also help, forging new, proud views of women in sports. She appreciates the glamour that a woman like her Bruin teammate FloJo brought to track and field, but tells her athletes, "Don't put nails on unless you're willing for them to get broken!" "I don't treat my athletes like females," says Bolden. "They're athletes. Their responsibility to the team is the same as it is for males." Like Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own, she tells them, "We don't do tears. You're only allowed to cry three times during the year, and no crying on the track."
With the progress of the '90s has also come a time for some sad good-byes. Bruin stalwarts Holland, Billie Moore and Sharron Backus have moved on to other challenges. Recently, there was the saddest good-bye of all as the Bruins' own Hall of Famer, FloJo, died at the tragically young age of 38.
New leaders and athletes who are products of Title IX have stepped in to guide UCLA into the next millennium. UCLA has its first second-generation scholarship athlete in track and field's Bummi Ogunleye, daughter of 1970s track and field standout Modupe Oshikoya. Associate athletic director Betsy Stephenson, who replaced Holland in 1996, says she experienced little gender differentiation growing up, either as a competitive athlete in high school and college or as a sports administrator. But since her older sister did not have the same opportunities, she maintains a keen sense of history -- something that most of today's young athletes unfortunately lack.
"All kids think they just invented life!" says Bolden. Coaches say that today's female student-athletes also tend to get so focused in high school on earning an athletic scholarship that they forget to refocus their athletic goals once they reach campus -- and might even forget to have fun playing the sport they love.
Stephenson and the Bruin coaches hope to re-instill some of the history, and the upcoming silver anniversary celebration should help. On May 1, a gala dinner will be held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, and the next day a more casual brunch for former and current athletes will take place on Spaulding Field.
"In the 25 years we've had sports here, things have changed so dramatically," says Stephenson. "I want the kids to understand what Annie Meyers and Dot Richardson went through. We need to know the history to understand where we've been -- and to relish where we're going to go."
By Michele Kort '71, M.B.A. '75