Sports

Title IX: Girls Sports Thrive at Oakton

Part I: Female athletes lead Oakton High to its best year in athletics

The first of Oakton Patch's two-part series on the state of girls sports as Title IX celebrates its 40th anniversary.

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In March, hundreds of fans cheered on Helen Roberts and the Oakton High School varsity girls basketball team at the Siegel Center in Richmond as they .

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Among them was Helen's mother Barbara, who stood in the crowd beaming at the sight of her daughter's school embracing girls sports in a way she never imagined possible as a high school athlete four decades ago.

Roberts, like all girls her age in the San Francisco Bay area where she grew up, did not have the opportunity to participate in organized sports until ninth grade. They played in their gym class uniforms. During basketball season, they did not have access to the gym unless the boys had no use for it, playing instead on the blacktop outside. Though athletic boosters existed, they only boosted boys sports.

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And the only spectators at games were her teammates, the opposing team and both coaches. 

Roberts entered high school in 1970, two years before the passage of Title IX, which would affect gender equality not only in athletics but in all aspects of educational institutions that accept federal funds. 

"It was bare bones," Roberts said. "There were basically no school funds ... And that's just the way it was."

Forty years later, each of the three state titles won by her daughter's Oakton High School during the 2011-2012 year were by girls teams: girls basketball, and . The girls squads were responsible for seven of 10 Concorde District and and three of five Northern Region titles, boosting the school to its . It fell five points short of earning the Wells Fargo Cup in the AAA division, which is awarded to the top performing high school in the state.

At Oakton, faculty and student leadership class work together each year to drum up support for all teams as they advance through the postseason, and they have almost always been successful in netting an impressive audience regardless of gender — especially when comparing to the student section of the opposing team at girls games, said Pat Full, who has served as director of student activities at Oakton High for three years.

"It's just what we've always done when our teams get to a certain level," Full said. "This year we had a great group of leaders to help us get the kids excited for both the basketball and lacrosse state finals, better than even last year's crowd for the lacrosse final. Hopefully that has made an impression on the younger kids."

Title IX celebrates its 40th anniversary Saturday, and Roberts says she is thankful both her daughter and son grew up in a community that balks at the thought of girls not having athletic opportunities.

"It makes me so happy to know that these kids, boys and girls, really are growing up in a different world," Roberts said.

'I don't want anyone to think it was a smooth road'

If you ask the female athletes at Oakton High about the girls' dominance this year, they will say they saw it coming. Not because of how American culture has evolved to accept girls in sports. Not because they had to fight the system to get their due. But because they simply had a talented class of female athletes from the moment they stepped into Oakton High as freshmen.

"I think the women's sports at Oakton all four years I've been in high school have been really dominant," said , a Villanova University-commit for girls basketball and Virginia's Gatorade Player of the Year. "Oakton even started a women's weight training class this year because of the number of really good female athletes who just wanted to get better and better."

But Fred Priester, Coyer's basketball coach at both Oakton High and in AAU, said the female athletes who walk the school's halls likely have no idea their success this year is in large part owed to the gender equality battles their mothers and grandmothers fought and won.

Priester has been coaching girls basketball in Fairfax County since 1981. Though he admits to not being familiar with Title IX before accepting the job, he has certainly wielded its power since learning of its existence, most notably to help start girls freshman basketball in the county.

"The first year I'm sure I was very condescending to the girls. My only experience growing up with female athletes was cheerleaders, but I don't think I would've even called them athletes when I was a kid," said Priester, who first volunteered to coach junior varsity girls basketball on a lark. "But once I got to spend time with them, I saw how interested they were, how hard they worked, how they wanted to get better, how much they cared just like any other athlete. I may have chosen to be a girls basketball coach, but I never would have guessed just how involved I would become."

He witnessed, and often fought, the little battles toward gender equality along the way: getting girls games to be played in primetime, securing equal time in the gym, hiring the same referees for boys and girls, ending the practice of offering free shoes at All-Star games to boys and not girls, and more.

"I don't want anyone to think it was a smooth road, but it was certainly a continuous road and steady movement upward," Priester said.

Melissa Shebat, a rising senior and varsity tri-sport athlete on the field hockey, swim and lacrosse teams, has never thought twice about being a girl who plays sports. The culture at Oakton High not only encourages them to play but treats them with respect, she said.

"I do think when boys sports do well, it's easier to focus on it and get the support. But we proved this year that girls sports could dominate and get a crowd, too," Shebat said. "My whole life I've been doing sports, so it just seems normal to me there would be sports in high school and college for girls."

Coyer says her own mother has told her "a hundred times" about only being allowed to play basketball in the auxuiliary gym, and having just one fan: Coyer's dad.

"That sounds horrible. I mean, I just can't imagine nobody in the gym for our games," Coyer said. "We've always had such great support at Oakton. ... I've never felt like girls and boys sports at Oakton were unequal. We split gym time, we have always had great support. Sometimes we've even been able to get more than the boys because we've done so well and have outside support."

Distributing Athletics Funds

Oakton High athletics is largely funded through its own ticket sales and booster donations, as Fairfax County Public Schools does not allot money for athletics beyond salaries for the activities department's staff and stipends for coaches.

"To be honest, football is the moneymaker. Football brings in about half my budget for the year," Full said. "But that does not mean they get half my budget in return. Each sport is allotted money based on need and we're trying to get back to a rotation for purchasing new uniforms. So the money isn't allocated equally by gender from year to year, but it comes out equal over time."

Each sport has the option of raising funds itself for equipment or other needs if the school cannot afford to help them as soon as desired. Last year, football raised about $30,000 on its own to help pay for new helmets, with Full pitching in a small fraction of the total from school funds. A few years ago, girls basketball raised money on its own for school uniforms. 

Seventeen of Oakton's female athletes have committed to play their sports at the collegiate level, where struggles with Title IX continue 40 years later.

Read Part II: 


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