Summitt had grown up in Clarksville, but since Clarksville was not playing girls’ basketball at the time, her family moved to Henrietta so she would have the opportunity to play on the team at Cheatham County High School.
Among the witnesses chosen to testify on the benefits of the full-court game was the University of Tennessee’s newly appointed women’s basketball coach, Pat Head Summit. In 1976, Victoria Ann Cape, a junior at Oak Ridge High School, filed a federal lawsuit against TSSAA, arguing that the association's insistence on the six-player rules was a violation of her 14th Amendment rights. By 1974, TSSAA sanctioned girls’ track and field, and a year after that golf and cross country.Ĭhange was afoot and upstart girls’ basketball programs were standardizing play on the five-on-five rules, but schools playing by the six-on-six girls’ basketball rules first developed by TSSAA and other state associations in 1952 faced a difficult choice: hold tight to decades of tradition or join the growing multitudes adopting the five-on-five game. Although the landmark legislation which banned sex-based discrimination in federally-funded educational programs makes no mention of sports, Title IX has become synonymous with girls’ equal opportunity to scholastic-based athletic participation.Īs schools began establishing new programs for girls following the passage of Title IX, TSSAA began sanctioning and administering tournaments to follow suit. While the association would add girls’ tennis as a sanctioned sport in 1964, it wasn’t until the enactment of Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments that TSSAA-sanctioned programs for girls would begin to blossom. In fact, Tennessee had conducted its first-ever girls’ basketball state championships way back in the ‘Roaring ’20s’ during a six-year span from 1922-1928 and again resumed those battles for state supremacy in 1958. The Volunteer State, like much of the South, had clung to the antiquated – but still wildly popular – six-on-six, half-court version of basketball. The story of high school sports for girls in Tennessee begins, frankly, much earlier than in many other states – with initial girls’ state championships celebrating their century mark at the same time Title IX marks its Golden Anniversary - but it is one that becomes evermore rich and expressive with each new chapter.Īt the dawn of the revolutionary Title IX era 50 years ago this week, the state of Tennessee already had long conducted high school girls’ basketball competitions – though not an iteration that any of today’s burgeoning athletes might recognize.
0 kommentar(er)
