Candace Parker is a peach of a basketball player.
Forty years ago, the Naperville Central star would have been a peach, period. And if not a peach, she might have been an apple or a pear or even a banana.
That’s what they used to call the teams in what used to pass for girls high school sports in Illinois.
It’s well known that girls got few opportunities to participate in interscholastic sports before the early 1970s. What’s not so well known is what they had before that and how life began to change in Illinois, even before Title IX.
Things are so different now that girls take their 365-days-a-year sports lives for granted. So at the end of another school year and while U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige continues to contemplate possible changes in Title IX enforcement practices, it’s worth looking back at the not-so-good old days.
A century ago, girls could play interscholastic sports, and girls basketball actually rivaled the boys game for popularity. Educators, though, deemed hoops as too stressful for the ladies, too masculine and immodest, even though the uniform of the day was long skirts and long sleeves.
The Illinois High School Athletic Association–predecessor of the Illinois High School Association–began to curb girls basketball in 1907, and five years later it prohibited all girls interscholastic sports in its schools.
In 1927, the IHSAA began to sponsor the Illinois League of High School Girls Athletic Associations, a fledgling organization of girls physical education teachers who believed girls’ recreational interests were best served through intramurals. At that time, however, the IHSAA did begin to permit interscholastic competition for girls in two non-contact individual sports: golf and tennis. Interscholastic archery began in 1935.
Few schools fielded teams in those three sports, so interschool girls athletics was limited mainly to “play days,” which usually took place once in the spring and once in the fall. These area athletic festivals included team sports, but officials made sure they did not become true interscholastic competition by putting athletes from several schools on each team.
Teams’ names reflected a particular theme. If it was an “animal” day, the Lions might play the Panthers. If the theme was fruit, it might be the Oranges vs. the Grapes.
Always, the girls would socialize.
“There would have to be some refreshments after to make it `girly,'” said Genelle Samuelson, a 1961 graduate of Rockford East and former teacher, coach and administrator in that city’s schools. “You’d have fellowship, so no one could say you played a game. It was a tea party.”
Sometimes, Samuelson said, girls would get to participate in a “real” sport, such as volleyball. Other times it might be “more Twinkie stuff,” such as relay races or table tennis.
“It was almost like a glorified recreation night,” she said. “We thought it was pretty neat because it was all we knew.”
Girls also participated in statewide “postal” competitions in archery, bowling, swimming and basket shooting. Athletes would compete at their own schools and send their results to the IHSA, which determined the winners.
“It was almost anything to avoid hand-to-hand contact,” Samuelson said.
Play days and postal competitions were a joke to serious athletes such as Marian Kneer, a 1942 Peoria Woodruff graduate who starred on non-scholastic softball and basketball teams while she was in high school and later.
“Play days weren’t any fun,” said Kneer, who later taught at East Peoria and Illinois-Chicago. “The competitive level was zero.
“But when I asked, `Why don’t we have competitive sports for girls, as we do for boys?’ my [physical education] teacher said the IHSAA wouldn’t allow it. She said, `It’s just not good for girls to play.'”
The philosophy underlying that attitude was that strenuous exercise was bad for girls, and so was competition. Charles Whitten, executive director of the IHSAA from 1922-42, expressed it in his 1950 book “Interscholastics.”
” . . . Athletic exercises for girls should be designed to promote not only exhilarating health and physical strength, but also that modesty and restraint of bearing and dignity which we covet for our girls and women,” he wrote.
Whitten didn’t oppose all female athletic competition but said the strain of an interscholastic contest, with its “unwholesome emphasis” on winning, could present a health risk.
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He suggested that a desire for equality with men in various areas of life may have increased emotional problems among women and added, “Let’s have manly men, neither `sissies’ nor prigs, and womanly women, neither amazons nor neurotics.”
Former IHSA assistant executive director Ola Bundy heard such sentiments regularly, even after girls interscholastic sports had become a fact of athletic life.
“All the way along all kinds of things have been put forth a lot of times by some men to keep girls from participating in interschool athletics,” said Bundy, who administered IHSA girls sports programs from 1967 until she retired in 1996.
“They kept saying things like that so girls didn’t want to play. For example, if you tell parents it’s not ladylike to play basketball, then they say, `I don’t want my daughter to play basketball.’
“A number of men in our schools told me, `Girls aren’t interested in playing basketball. They want to be cheerleaders.'”
Another reason men opposed girls sports was they knew girls teams would compete with boys squads for gym time and financial resources.
It wasn’t just men, though, who opposed girls interscholastic sports. Most women physical education teachers also were against them, in part because of the flaws they saw in boys athletics.
These teachers believed that an overemphasis on winning distracted boys coaches from their duties as PE instructors and athletes from their studies.
“That’s why way back when the Illinois League started they wanted to have a program they thought would be appropriate for girls without it leading to extensive interscholastic athletics like they had for boys,” Bundy said.
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