In a culture where women didn’t matter, the National Collegiate Athletic Association had no problem looking the other way back in 1971 when a group called the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women was formed as a vehicle for women’s intercollegiate competitions.
For the NCAA, the organization had been a man’s world long before the James Brown song of that same name was a hit in 1966.
A year after the first women’s intercollegiate sports organization, the all-men NCAA gave an institutional yawn when the AIAW enlisted 280 schools and held its first national championship, the same year as passage of Title IX, the federal law that demands gender equality in public schools.
By 1980, the AIAW had 971 schools, 41 championship events and, oh yes, a four-year television contract with NBC.
That last part caught the attention of the all-male NCAA. Multiyear television contracts and the money that flowed from them made the NCAA begin to consider the acceptability of women as athletes. A year later, the NCAA moved in and conducted its first women’s competitions and in 1983 the first woman athletic director at an NCAA school — Maryalyce Hill at San Diego State — had been named. Women’s sports gradually began to gain acceptance in what had been exclusive province of male athletes.
In 1991, it went to a new level when the University of Washington hired Barbara Hedges, a senior administrator at USC, as its athletic director. Hedges was the first woman to lead a big-time NCAA athletics program and that appointment caused a ripple.
“That was pretty significant,” said Roxanne Levenson, the senior woman administrator and compliance director at the University of Hawaii at Hilo. “I think that had an impact around the country.”
Hedges was no neophyte to athletics, she had worked in areas of funding at USC and when she arrived in Seattle she developed a practice of boosters endowing positions on the football team. Instead of just tossing cash into an athletic department barrel, Hedges had donors contribute to the left tackle, the outside linebacker, whatever positions were available, thereby decreasing institutional costs for football scholarships, freeing up that money for other improvements such as salaries and facilities.
Levenson is no neophyte. She may well be as experienced and accomplished an administrator as there is in the school. No question her resume is unparalleled in the athletic department — she was the SWA and more at two larger schools — and that she prominently follows in those historic footsteps of Hedges and Hill, creating meaningful careers as women in intercollegiate athletics, jobs that were not available to them not so long ago.
The title senior woman administrator was a response by the NCAA to Title IX legislation, a way of asserting that it takes women administrators seriously. It is comparable in some respects to the Rooney Rule in the National Football League, which stipulates that every head coaching vacancy must include interviews with a African-American candidate as a way of addressing the dominance in the league of white head coaches.
The NFL found as black coaches were interviewed, their names fell into the annual churn of candidates, opportunities opened up and more black coaches were hired.
The SWA title indicates these women are fully qualified and doing the work that was always handled by men.
There is much work to do, as a recent USA Today poll indicated that only 4 to 5 percent of Division I athletic directors are women in a country in which males are in the minority. The success of normalizing women administrators in male-dominated athletic departments is making incremental progress but it’s far from an approach of gender equality.
Last week in Honolulu, the University of Hawaii Board of Regents held its regularly scheduled meeting, covering a variety of topics, including updates on Title IX from UH-Manoa and UH-Hilo. The presentation, delivered by athletic director Pat Guillen, reported that 60 percent of UHH students are women and 53 percent of its athletes are women, “thus meeting … federal regulations of proportionality.”
Apparently, coming ballpark-close to reflecting the federal law is close enough — can you imagine it being close enough if it were male representations? — but it created an awkward moment for an interviewer last Thursday when, while the meeting was in progress on Oahu, Levenson was asked her thoughts about researching the facts that went into the presentation.
The interviewer made the mistake of assuming the senior woman administrator and the head of the UHH compliance department, would have been involved in the report. Instead, the administration hadn’t informed her of the Board of Regents meeting, and didn’t ask her to contribute to the update.
“Those numbers are readily available,” Levenson said, “I wasn’t involved, but I’m still new here.”
She has been on board less than a year, but Levenson’s resume is the kind of thing that might cause one to wonder why she isn’t running the school and everyone else isn’t taking orders from her. There’s not enough room here to list all her accomplishments in intercollegiate athletics from her time at Pepperdine (associate athletics director, SWA, developed and implemented policies for Title IX), and Seattle University (associate athletics director, SWA, served as department CFO for three and a half years, etc.).
Over-qualified is often the status women obtain to begin to be considered for athletics positions in the NCAA. Her resume is staggering, and in the months that Levenson has been at UHH, people who work with her have been appropriately impressed.
In many ways, NCAA athletics remains a man’s world in too many situations. The SWA title is meant to convey accomplished, demonstrated administrative authority, and no, male employees don’t have any such distinction in the NCAA, an implication that wherever they are employed, ability and accomplishment is assumed.
In some places, to some individuals, the SWA title has been used as a condescension, a patronizing way to give the appearance of gender equality even though the individual may not be included among the decision-makers.
Despite not being told about the gender equality issue at last week’s Board of Trustees, Levenson took no disrespect from the action of the administration, being fully absorbed in a long list of work.
“I’m still new here,” she said, “we are all getting to know each other.”
In her time, she has already made an impact, organizing the school’s first academic awards banquet for athletes, while making plans for monthly honors and more that will shine a light on classroom pursuits of athletes. Her sense of propriety and understanding of others prevents her from criticizing gender equity in the athletic department as it relates to coaches.
There are 10 male coaches at UHH, one female coach and for the second year in succession the most successful program in the athletic department has been the one coached by a woman.
Last year, when there were two women coaches, Peejay Brun’s softball team had the best record, by far. She left at the end of the year for a top assistant’s job at Division I Texas State, but this year, tennis coach Tina McDermott produced the most successful squads, and again, no team coached by a man came close to her record.
When asked about the glaring disparity of male-to-female head coaches in a department supposedly guided by the spirit of Title IX, she responded with historic concern but not criticism.
“It’s been that way a long time,” she said, “it has been the result of hires by different people over a series of years and there are number of issues that come into play on every hiring decision.
“Any situation like that takes time to resolve,” she said.
It will surely require an investment of time at UHH, whose last two head coaching hires were men in their 60s.
Over at UH-Manoa, the athletic director is surrounded by two women administrators, women fill important roles throughout the athletic department and five women are head coaches.
In recent years, Manoa has set a goal to make the student body reflective of the various cultures in Hawaii and it recently hit those marks. The commitment to gender equality is also a serious matter.
We remain confident that in time, that same attention to gender equity in athletics will be a high priority at Hawaii Hilo.
The school certainly has someone now in position to set those kind of goals and see them through.
Contact Bart at barttribuneherald@gmail.com with question and comments
