Girls Are Entitled to Equal Facilities
I have a confession to make.
While attending high school in Los Angeles during the 1970s, it never occurred to me how inferior facilities were for girl athletes.
Remember the structure known as the “girls’ gym?”
It was good only for a rainy day. It had no scoreboard, no bleachers and was so tiny that a player driving in for a layup had to worry about crashing into an unpadded wall.
There was no vision of the future. People designing high schools back in the 1960s never imagined large numbers of girls participating in sports.
“It was the attitude,” said Barbara Fiege, City Section commissioner . “Girls don’t play, they shouldn’t be playing, they can’t play.”
Boys played sports in massive football stadiums, spacious gymnasiums and on large baseball diamonds. The girls got a small gym for dance class and gymnastics. Some high schools didn’t even bother to leave space for a softball diamond.
Since Title IX was passed in 1972, debates have been raging on how to best create equal opportunities for girls.
There are no easy answers, as the people of Merritt Island, Fla., recently discovered.
In December, a school board in Merritt Island said it planned to disconnect the baseball field scoreboard, close the concession stand and rope off some bleachers because it didn’t have funds to offer the same amenities at the softball field.
This after a federal court judge ruled the Merritt Island High baseball facility violated federal law that bans sex discrimination in public schools.
Hopefully, no one in Southern California is prepared to adopt such insane strategy. Tearing apart boys’ athletic facilities is not the best path toward reaching equality. But progress must be made. The girls are practicing just as hard as the boys.
The situation at El Camino Real High is a prime example.
The school’s baseball team has won three City 4-A championships in the 1990s. It has a beautiful field with a huge electronic scoreboard, fresh grass in the outfield, a batting cage, a quality public address sound system and plenty of bleacher seating.
Many of the amenities were paid for by booster club funds and were born of labor performed by the players and coaches themselves.
Not far away is the softball diamond for El Camino Real’s 11-time City 4-A champion softball team.
The home for the girls’ team is a backstop on a multiple-use physical education field. No sound system. No electronic scoreboard. No fence.
Neils Ludlow, El Camino Real’s dedicated softball coach, drags the infield, mows the lawn and picks weeds so the field is in the best shape possible when the season begins.
He also has built a batting cage, put up one set of bleachers and has a storage shed. In his wildest dream, he’d love to have a field solely devoted to softball.
“I’ve looked everywhere on campus,” he said. “But there isn’t a way to make it work.”
The girls of the ‘90s continue to pay the price because of the absence of visionaries in the ‘60s.
Thank goodness girls now get to play in the big gym and there are college scholarships, improved media coverage and even professional leagues.
Is everything equal? Not by a longshot.
“You can’t have a softball field on campus if there’s no space,” Fiege said.
But Fiege expects--and the law demands--that girls be provided with opportunities equal to the boys, including facilities.
In Merritt Island, a federal judge rejected the school board’s plan to strip away amenities in the boys’ program. Instead, in a preliminary injunction, she ordered lights installed on the softball field and required the girls be given access to the baseball batting cage.
The school’s explanation for the superior boys’ facility was that it had been developed over 30 years using booster support. That’s a fair, legitimate reason. But federal law makes it clear that the school has an obligation to make sure the girls’ facility is on par.
Times have changed. Everybody must accept it and work diligently toward creating an environment for girl athletes to prosper, just like the boys.
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Eric Sondheimer’s local column appears Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at (818) 772-3422.
