The following story ran in the Spring 2020 edition of Bruin Blue Magazine, which hit mailboxes in late-March and will be uploaded online in late-April. 

By Jon Gold
 
Judith Holland was 35 years old and working in the Sacramento State athletic department on June 23, 1972, when the earth shifted beneath her feet.
Valorie Kondos was nine and a ballet dancer, unaware that her future would be altered forever that day.

Ann Meyers was about to be a high school junior, already one of the best women's basketball players in the country, and Sue Enquist was going into her sophomore year at San Clemente High School the day Title IX was signed into legislation by Richard Nixon, altering the sports landscape forever.

Unlike some who would only grow to learn the effects of Title IX in time, Enquist felt her whole world change.
 

"I grew up playing with boys my whole life; you had to just tag along. It suddenly hit us — girls can play boys' sports now," she said. "It wasn't that women's sports would get equal access, it was you could play on the boys' teams. My first intro to Title IX was, 'Are you telling me I can try out for baseball at San Clemente High?' And that's how I got to UCLA. I played baseball. Six weeks before I'm packed to go to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and I get a call from UCLA asking if I would consider coming for a visit. I had no idea about UCLA. All I knew was I loved watching them play football.

"I walked on campus, and I saw a woman playing basketball. I'd never seen a female athlete that athletic. I thought, 'I want to go to school there, and I want to hang out with her. Out there on the court was Ann Meyers Drysdale, who is my dearest friend to this day."

This is a story about how Title IX changed UCLA forever, and how UCLA changed the course of women's athletics.
 
The number that Holland remembers is $283,000.

That's what it took to launch UCLA's women's athletic department, and women's sports in general, into the stratosphere. Just $283,000. To put that number in perspective, it's worth noting that some Olympic sports coaches make that in a year these days.

And it had taken some time to get there, even. This was 1974, two years after the passing of Title IX. The men, Holland said, were slow to win over.

"There were a lot of objections," Holland remembers. "Most of the people at the NCAA thought it was the end of men's sports as they knew it. Because of that, they fought it tooth and nail. It was a real tough time for women. You could see on the horizon something good was there, but not a lot of action."

Enquist said there was never an outward bias toward women athletes, but, she said, "You knew you were second class. You didn't have media coverage, you didn't have shared or equal facilities, no promotion. It was a blind bias, and that's the worst kind of bias. People in positions of power don't realize they're the reason for discrimination. ­ They don't see it."

Fortunately on the playing fields of the UCLA campus, at the athlete level, the tea leaves were already clear.

"Even though women's sports didn't have all the administrative support, the people — the boys, the men, the women — had so much respect for each other," Enquist said. "At the athlete level, there was a built-in respect. We made it here, and we're at the best school with the best athletes. It didn't matter if we were going to watch women's tennis or men's golf — there was a tremendous amount of respect."

Gradually, it trickled up.

In Westwood, attitudes were changing, and, Holland said, "­ That's one of the reasons I wanted to go to there."

"UCLA was at the forefront," she said. "­The exception was UCLA. ­ They did embrace it. ­ They did action. A lot of people just talked about it. UCLA moved right ahead, and that's why I was hired. ­ They formed an entire department separate from the men. ­ The athletics director at the time, J.D. Morgan, was behind women's sports. To this day, I don't think he gets enough credit."

In 1974, anticipating the enforcement of Title IX, chancellor Charles Young created a separate women's athletic department at the university, and Holland was given less than $300,000 to cover everything: coaches' salaries, athletic scholarships, uniforms, transportation, food, everything.

Back then, $283K was a nice chunk of money. But times were lean.

"When I entered UCLA as a freshman, we wore the men's track team practice t-shirts as our game uniforms," Enquist remembers. "On the inside of my shirt was 'WB,' and I knew they were used. WB? WB was Willie Banks! I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. I'm wearing Willie Banks, man, the greatest triple jumper of all time."

Enquist laughed as she recalls the softball team driving itself to games her freshman and sophomore seasons. ­ There was not enough money for buses. ­The team practiced on intramural fields, carving time after soccer and before ultimate Frisbee.

Holland learned how to stretch a buck and how to sell a vision. She worked her hardest on coaching salaries, convincing greats of their game to work for pennies on the dollar. ­The pitch? Get in on the ground floor.

"I hired Sharron Backus as our softball coach right away," Holland said. "I paid her $3,000 the first year, and she used all that money for gas. She had to drive from Anaheim, and she never complained that much. She had to race to practice and home and do it all the next day."
 

Two years later, Holland was able to bring in her first full-time head coach, Cal State Fullerton women's basketball coach Billie Moore. Moore won an AIAW (Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women) national championship in her first season, and Holland was emboldened.

"We just kept adding one or two each year," she said. "The registration fee committee, where we were funded, fought like heck to not have full-time coaches. They didn't want salaries along with benefits. I knew we needed stability in our program, and to get that we needed coaches who were good and who would stay."

Soon enough, the UCLA women's athletics department was thriving, unrivaled by any in the nation.

There were AIAW national titles for outdoor track and field (1975, '77), badminton (1977), soccer (1980), softball (1978) and tennis (1981). And when the NCAA began offering women's national championships and fully supported women's athletics in 1982, UCLA was ready to capitalize.

"It wasn't until I came to UCLA in 1982 and was hired by Dr. Holland, that I started hearing all the talk about how she was the godmother of Title IX," Kondos Field said. "I was like what the heck was Title IX? Having been there so long, I started seeing how she really empowered female coaches and hired female coaches. She was such a champion for female student-athletes."

UCLA had been at the forefront of women's athletics at the beginning in the 1970s, and was at the top for its rise in the early 1980s.

But then cable television came along, and things really changed.

For UCLA women's athletics — and women's athletics as a whole — to really take off, it needed to think outside the box.

Holland spearheaded the NCAA's mainstream acceptance of women's sports, then pushed for expanded television exposure.

"One of the things we had to do was get out of ourselves," Holland said. "We'd been so isolated for so long. People took it as a way of life that we should be separate. We had to get out of that."

UCLA and women's sports found a willing partner in ESPN, the budding all-sports network from far away in Bristol, Conn. Unlike the major networks that were able to offer the big bucks to the NFL and the NBA, ESPN turned to the NCAA to fill its endless hours of live programming.

"It was really in the 1980s when ESPN decided to make the commitment to women's sports," Holland said. "They went from a tape delay of the championships to live, and from live to eventually going deep into the tournament. That was the tipping point from the sports perspective. In 1982 they became a leader for us. We're celebrating that success now. For decades they were losing money covering it. They knew they had something powerful."

It wasn't always easy.

"I was chair of the women's basketball committee in the NCAA for five years, and that's a sport that really took off," Holland said. "We had a lot of meetings with ESPN and they weren't quite so eager. We had to kind of hold their feet to the fi re sometimes just to do the simple things. One of the big arguments we had was they never gave us airtime before the championships. 'Next weekend, coming up.' How hard is that to do? Plugs. To let people know we're going to be on. It took a long time for that to happen."

The tide turned in 1990 with the hiring of Carol Stiff at ESPN. Says Holland, "ESPN started to fully embrace women's athletics once they hired women."

"For us, the pivotal time was when we acquired our NCAA package," Stiff said. "We became the exclusive home of the women's basketball tournament, and with that deal came the softball championship, women's soccer, along with the College World Series, wrestling, swimming and diving. We acquired 21 championships that year. But the big one was the women's basketball tournament."

Prior to that year, the most ESPN had televised was four women's basketball games, and CBS laid claim to the national semifinals and the championship game. There wasn't even a day of rest in between.

For ESPN, it was just as much an act of trust from the NCAA. "- at committee had to make a decision, leave network TV or take a leap of faith with this cable company," Stiff said. "That first year, we went from seven total games, four on ESPN and three on CBS to I believe it was 24 national games, with a day of rest. - thank goodness for people like Judie Holland to roll the dice with us."

It was a Monday night in 2001 when college softball had its moment.

And it's all thanks to Roger Clemens.

Monday, May 28, 2001, the Yankees went into a rain delay with their star pitcher on the mound, delaying the start of the Women's College World Series championship game between UCLA and Arizona, arguably the two best programs in college softball history.

Minutes went by, then hours.

Stiff faced a dilemma. Major League Baseball rules dictated that ESPN was mandated to stick with its marquee baseball matchup until the game was called by the umpire. Stiff knew the time was running out. She called the NCAA.

"Go ahead and play, crown the winner, we'll record it and play it on prime time on ESPN," she told the sport's governing body. "I said trust me, it's going to be prime time, Monday night, everyone home from the holiday, you're going to rate well. And it did, off the charts."

The Bruins lost that day, 1-0, to Jennie Finch and the Wildcats. UCLA might not have come out on top, but the sport of softball won. Women's athletics won big.

"That gave me the ammunition to give to our programing department," Stiff said. "I showed them the number — and it was an impressive number — and it gave us a chance to add more games. - the number was historic, and from that number, we added a preseason kickoff."
 
So where does UCLA — and where does the world — go from here?
 

Less than 300,000 girls participated in high school sports in 1971, the year before Title IX became law. By 2002, that number was 3,000,000. In 2017-18, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations, a record 3,415,306 girls participated in high school athletics.

Nearing the 50th anniversary, women's athletics is more popular than ever. College women's basketball stars are cultural icons. Softball stars adorn magazine covers. Gymnasts end up on Ellen.

When Bruin gymnast Katelyn Ohashi went viral with her floor routine in 2019, Stiff remembers the buzz in the ESPN offices.

"That video went viral — who didn't see that? — and all of a sudden, we're getting calls from higher-ups, 'let's upgrade gymnastics. Can we get more UCLA gymnastics on?''"

Added Kondos Field: "It's really rewarding and it is quite humbling, but as I told Katelyn as soon as that went viral: the most important part of life is to be prepared for your moment, to be ready for this platform. She had to be able to speak on the importance of sports and athletics for all humans, men and women. She had to share how UCLA was a leader in women's athletics and talked about how UCLA is a champion of women in sports."

It's been almost five decades, but it's still true. Looking back at the beginnings, Holland laughs. There were battles. Yes, there were. But it was worth it. For women's sports, and for UCLA.

"What I've learned about life so far is if it's worth having, it's not going to be easy," she said.