Mary Harrison, Campus Carrier sports editor

Bradynn Belcher, Campus Carrier asst. sports editor

Imagine a coach being hired who is younger than some players on the team. Imagine that coach leading that team to two national championships within ten years of the program starting. Now, imagine that coach is a woman in a male-dominated field in the early 1990s.

This describes the situation of Becky Burleigh, who became the second head coach of the Berry College women’s soccer team in 1989, at age 21.

“It was a little bit of validation that I wasn’t just taking over what [the former male coach] had started,” Burleigh said. “What I was doing was helping us continue and sustain the program.”

This fall marks the 30-year anniversary of the women’s soccer team’s last national championship. Twenty years earlier, the US government passed the Education Amendments of 1972, which through Title IX prohibited any sex-based discrimination in “any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance”.

Berry was on the leading edge of Title IX implementation, according to former student athletes and staff like Burleigh, and continues to promote female success in sports over half a century later.

Paul Deaton, head coach of the Vikings cross country teams since 1996, said he has never felt as though Berry has been non-compliant with Title IX, describing Berry instead as a leader in the field.  At a time when intercollegiate varsity women’s sports were stigmatized and unprioritized, women at the “Martha Berry School for Girls” took physical education classes, and Martha Berry included a gymnasium in her plans for the Ford Complex.

According to Deaton, Martha Berry’s progressive imagination pushed the college to support women’s success in sports in the early years of Title IX.

“From the very beginning, [the] first women’s teams were very successful on the national level because we were the first ones that pursued it equally with the men,” Deaton said.

Out of the eight national championships the college has won, seven have been by all-female teams. In 1976, four years after the law passed, Berry’s women’s basketball team won the college’s first national championship.

Connie Guinn (84C) began playing for Berry soon afterwards, and the Vikings placed fourth in the national tournament in 1981. Guinn said during her time playing in the Ford Gym, both men’s and women’s basketball received large community and student support.

“Berry’s women’s basketball has always been a staple in that area,” Guinn said. “Whenever a team would beat us, it was like, they won a championship. That’s how reputable our name was, the ‘Lady Vikings.’”

Guinn went on to coach the team from 1987-97, and she said that during that time the men’s and women’s teams had equal funding.

Assistant Director of Athletics for Sports Medicine Ginger Swann (93C) played tennis at Berry in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Swann said that athletic training was a male-dominated environment at Berry during that time, as both a student and staff member working in athletic training, yet she received strong support from Bob Pearson, a long time Berry athletic director.

Swann said that when the head athletic training position came open when she was a graduate assistant, Pearson encouraged her to apply despite her misgivings.

As a young female coach in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Burleigh said she also always felt genuinely supported by Pearson, the namesake for the Vikings’ soccer fields. While he pushed for the Vikings to hire a female head coach, Burleigh said she never felt like a token of progress.

After going on to start the women’s soccer program at the University of Florida, where she also led the team to a national championship within five years of its existence, Burleigh was supported from Athletic Director Jeremy Foley.

Her age and inexperience probably made her less threatening to her male counterparts initially, Burleigh said. While losing that up-and-comer status could sometimes change external reception, her institutions remained supportive even as soccer coaching continued to be male-dominated.

“I think as often as you see people who are like, ‘oh man, I can’t believe I just lost to a woman,’ there’s just as many people who are trying to help you along the way,” Burleigh said.

Kathy Insel Brown, one of the players on Burleigh’s 1993 championship team, is now in her fourth season as head coach of the women’s soccer program. She said that until playing under Burleigh, she never had a female coach or considered coaching as a career. Burleigh credited her high school coach with inspiring her in a similar way.

Insel Brown said she still experiences some of the same moments that Burleigh described in the 1990s, such as referees or waiters assuming her male assistant coach is head coach of the Vikings. Insel Brown believes the type of ignorance she faces is a reflection of larger, infused gender biases that are still in place today.

Insel Brown said men still dominate the field of soccer-coaching, and sometimes she is the first female coach that one of her players has had.

Collegiate coaching is dominated by men, according to AP News. Men are apt to coach both men’s and women’s sports. However, according to Insel Brown, seeing a woman as a head coach of a male sports team is an oddity.

Insel Brown said as a mother of Berry men’s soccer player, she can understand the hesitations that male players and wider society would feel about a female coaching male players.

“I don’t see tons of barriers, I don’t see walls,” Insel Brown said. “I think it’s just continuing to educate and push, even on the women’s side. We’re not hitting a wall because men are stopping us, [we just] don’t see ourselves in a coaching role for whatever reason.”

Berry Athletic Director Angel Mason, Berry’s first female athletics director,  said when considering the pay and number of female coaches, variables like salary standards varying on time of hiring and seasoned coaches must be taken into account.

Mason said equity and equality have different definitions, and those must be kept in mind when it comes to assessing Title IX violations at any institution. The number of programs, amount of funding and types of facilities given per sport at each college are affected by real needs of teams.

“Equitable is not dollar for dollar,” Mason said. “We are a small institution, so there’s actually nothing that solely stands alone for just athletics.”

Angelle Thorton, senior tennis player and president of Berry’s student Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC) said that strong female leadership is one of the ways Berry currently encourages female athletes. She has also noticed a pattern of more men coaching women’s sports that women coaching men’s sports during her four years of competing collegiately on a dual-gendered sports. 

Thornton said that as part of the search process for a new tennis coach, they only took qualifications into account and not gender. However, she said that if a program is in the right place, it might be good to take a chance on a less experienced candidate for the goal of representation.

“We have a lot more equity, and I think that sometimes people forget that it’s only been 50 years,” Thornton said of Title IX. “That is a huge milestone, but that is not that long in the grand scheme of things. I think continuing to have people understand what that means and how we got here could, there could always be more of that.”

Many people involved in collegiate athletics nationally, representing a variety of institutions, have seemingly not experienced the same equitable treatment that is offered to varsity athletes and coaches at Berry. Mason holds Berry’s athletic department to a high standard when it comes to gender equity in sports, but other institutions do not instill this ideal into their members.

As an athlete at Berry, Thornton has the unique opportunity to travel throughout the country for conference matchups and tournaments. During travel, she has connected with tennis players from other institutions who communicated vastly different experiences as female athletes, though they wear the same colors to represent the same school as their male counterparts.

“I have peers at other institutions [whose] women’s teams are completely overlooked,” Thornton said. “I think a lot of schools that I’ve heard of from friends say that maybe they’re supporting their female athletes but they don’t feel as supported [as the men], or they don’t feel like their issues or concerns hold any weight when they speak to their admin.”

Though Title IX was enacted over 50 years ago, efforts to maintain equity in athletics have not stopped on a national scale. As recently as 2020, Clemson University announced a decision to terminate the men’s varsity intercollegiate track & field and cross country teams, claiming insufficient funding to be the cause.

Athletes, Tigers fans, coaches, and gender egalitarianism advocates from across the country took to social media to voice their opinions on the injustice and total disregard for Title IX protocol. This time, it was the men that were being discriminated against. ‘#SaveClemsonXCTF’ was trending on social media for weeks.

The men who were stripped of their programs began to threaten class action lawsuits on the grounds of Title IX as they were not offered the same opportunities to compete as the women. The attention that the Clemson athletics programs were getting at this time shed light on the women’s cross country, track & field, and rowing programs which were not receiving equitable treatment and financial aid from the athletic department as their male counterparts.

For the first time in history, both male and female student athletes threatened to jointly sue to enforce Title IX. The strategy worked, and the men’s track & field and cross country programs were reinstated while the university agreed to provide the women’s teams involved in the suit equitable benefits. The last faucet of the settlement required Clemson to work towards being in total compliance with Title IX by instating a Gender Equity Plan.

Title IX concerns do not resolve themselves. It takes a passionate group of individuals to be the impetus of change. Who should be the group that begins the change is often up for debate, but in Guinn’s decades of experience as an athlete and coach, she believes that the fans have the strongest voices to make a difference because many people in power do not take students or coaches seriously.

“[The community] should speak up because you hear people talking and they say, ‘the boys get this, the girls don’t have this,’ but do they say that to anybody,” Guinn said. “Do they spark conversation with administration at a school or? Unfortunately a lot of people don’t listen if it’s just the students because they think they’re whining and complaining. With the community backing the athletes and the coaches and administration showing their support, change can continue to be made.”