When University of Chicago Senior Associate Athletics Director for Finance and Internal Operations Rosalie Resch arrived on campus as an undergraduate in 1969, the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) was still two years way from being founded and the landmark Title IX case was three years in the future.
Becoming a College Athlete
“There were a lot of girls who enjoyed playing sports when I was growing up in Minnesota,” she recalled. “We played in a local park, playing against one another under the oversight of the playground supervisor. I loved gym class from the time I was little, and I was always doing some activity like playing 500 in the street.”
There were some girls teams in her high school, but she had no recollection of that. “I worked after school and I was not aware they existed,” I saw a photo of the girls swim team in the yearbook, but there were no records or any mention of how they did or where they competed. You assume everyone’s experience is like yours growing up, but I met women in college who had robust high school experiences. Even pre-Title IX, there were some opportunities for girls depending on where you lived.”
Resch, who had never worn an athletic uniform before getting to college, was excited for any athletic opportunity available. “During orientation, we had a meeting in what was then the ‘women’s gym’ to fulfill a physical education requirement with a skills test. I was sitting next to a woman (who would eventually become one of my roommates) and we were dying for some real activity, being tired of meetings and placement tests. I loved badminton so I went to up to Mary Jean (Mulvaney) and asked if there was a possibility to play in the gym. Meanwhile, the volleyball team was coming into practice after that and they asked us if we wanted to play, so we did. When that season was completed, I played badminton, and then softball in the spring.”
At that time, Resch could never have imagined the role volleyball would have in her life, as she would eventually lead the Maroons’ program as head coach from 1977 through 1997. A three-sport athlete, she excelled in softball, where she remains tied for the program’s all-time batting average lead of .481. “I played softball in the neighborhood and played with the guys. A lot of women in college were three-sport athletes since there were not that many of us who played sports and wanted to make that commitment,” she communicated. “When I pitched, my catcher was Diane Trewin, an Iowa farm girl who grew up playing softball. When she threw down to second base to try to get a runner out, the issue was us getting a fielder to the base in time. Diane blocked everything and made me look like a better pitcher than I was.”
Resch pitching as an undergraduate at UChicago
UChicago and AIAW Playing Days
Without any governing body for women’s sports before 1971, the Maroons would compete against local schools regardless of size, including Northwestern University, Northern Illinois University, and the now defunct George Williams College. “George Williams had one of the strongest athletic programs since it drew a lot of women interested in recreation and physical education. Many of their athletes came from the PE route regardless of what they were majoring in,” she explained. “As it started to evolve, it became a strong PE program, so it was logical for women interested in activities to go there. When high schools were looking for coaches, an English major from George Williams, for example, would be likely to get hired.” Although the school did close its doors, its recreation program continued at Aurora University.
“There was also some real racial tension in the south side of Chicago when I was a student to the degree that many schools wouldn’t come to us to play,” Resch disclosed. “Mary Jean and Pat (Kirby, who coached multiple sports) developed relationships with other educators in the Chicago area so we could go to their campuses to play. They had to work hard to get people to compete against us and eventually come to our campus.”
The AIAW was established in 1971 to provide governance and leadership in the assurance of standards of excellence and educational soundness in women’s intercollegiate athletics. The AIAW replaced the Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics for Women which had been founded in 1967 by what is today the National Association for Girls and Women in Sports.
Resch in her badminton and volleyball uniforms
Resch attended graduate school at Smith College in Massachusetts, but she came back to UChicago in 1975. “In those two years I was gone, the AIAW became quite active. When I returned, there was organized competition where there had not been any and the Midwest AIAW was regional, with competition based on the size of the institution.”
Title IX
Although Title IX was signed while she was an undergraduate student-athlete and just one uear after the AIAW was founded, Resch acknowledged that it was hard to gauge what it would ultimately mean to the college athletics landscape. “It was not really a bill for athletics, but it had real implications for athletics. For the first 40-plus years of Title IX, it was predominantly, though not solely, about athletics,” she remarked.
Signed into law on June 23, 1972, Title IX prohibits sex discrimination in the education programs and activities of entities that receive federal financial assistance. These programs and activities include “all of the operations of … a college, university, or other postsecondary institution, or a public system of higher education.” 20 U.S.C. § 1687(2)(A); see also 45 C.F.R. § 86.2(h). Therefore, Title IX’s nondiscrimination protections apply to student recruitment, admissions, educational programs (including individual courses), research, housing, counseling, financial and employment assistance, health and insurance benefits and health services. The federal agency that provides the federal financial assistance has jurisdiction over Title IX complaints.
One of the other changes that Resch noted around the passage of Title IX was single-sex institutions becoming co-ed, including Dartmouth College in 1972 and Amherst College in 1975. “A lot of things happened outside of athletics as a result of Title IX, but athletics was the world in which we were living,” she stated.
While men had access to the Amos Alonzo Stagg Scholarship at UChicago, women did not have an athletic scholarship opportunity. “The big jump for us was the Dudley Scholarship (named in honor of an early Director of Women’s Athletics) in 1973, which attracted top athletes for the first time,” Resch described. “We received national publicity about the scholarship and it was on the cover of Parade Magazine, which tells you something about where we were in terms of women’s athletics in 1973. Four of our women from that first scholarship class went on to become UChicago Hall-of-Fame inductees.”
L: Noel Bairey, one of first two women to receive a Gertude Dudley Scholarship on the cover of the Sunday Parade Magazine (Sept. 16, 1973); 2nd and 3rd columns: Story written in Parade in that issue; R: Gertrude Dudley, for whom the scholarship was named.
The university gained further national recognition for women’s athletics in 1974 when its women’s basketball program flew into Boston to play in a tournament with Brown University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Radcliffe College. “There were some institutions paying attention to women’s sports, but not on a national level until Title IX,” Resch expressed.
Women’s Sports and Early Women Leaders at UChicago
Shortly after Mulvaney came to UChicago in 1966, she hired Kirby to develop athletic and intramural sports for women as the men’s and women’s departments were separate. Kirby was a high-level softball coach who led the Maroons to state championships in 1977 and 1978, and was also the head coach when the women’s basketball team flew to the Boston tournament.
The impact Mulvaney had on Resch’s career cannot be overstated. “After every year I was in school, it was a question whether I could afford to return the next year. After my sophomore year, I started talking to Mary Jean about my future. She told me to finish my degree at UChicago and she started taking me to meetings outside of athletics, including the American Association of Health and a Physical Education meeting in Chicago,” she recollected.
“Mary Jean always wanted to give students the opportunity to get moving. There were already PE classes, but she wanted to give people the chance to play rec sports to those who just wanted to play, and varsity athletics for those who wanted to compete and win,” Resch pointed out. “She wanted to reach people where they were. Title IX made it possible to reach a higher level with less angst and without riding backwards in a station wagon in rush-hour traffic like we had done in my playing days. At the time I played, we didn’t think about baseball taking a bus and us taking a station wagon. We were so excited to be going to a game in a uniform that we really didn’t think about the fact that we didn’t have a bus or a real field. We were just happy to have what we had that we didn’t think about what we deserved.”
Though Title IX helped provide additional opportunities for women, it was not an easy transition as AIAW gave way to the NCAA in sponsoring women’s sports. Many women were opposed to the NCAA, which began to host women’s championships in the 1981-82 season. “It was a hard time for Mary Jean. A lot of women had negative feelings about the NCAA both in terms of women’s sports and perverting the amateurism side of things,” Resch described. “There were also prominent women who opposed athletic scholarships for women for reasons that have always been there and still exist today. Mary Jean was an outspoken leader and that brought some opposition.”
Resch remembers the excitement when the women’s teams moved from the women’s gym to the fieldhouse. “When the departments merged and Mary Jean became chairperson, she always said if you can create program equity, you will have gender equity,” she said of her mentor/friend, who passed away in 2019 at age 92. “She was one of the first women who headed a joint department and was the first to do so at an institution that sponsored football. Being in that position was controversial and many alumni were not happy, but she succeeded by focusing on the student-athlete experience. Was she aware that women had more challenges? Yes, but she was not going to drop the quality or quantity of our men’s programs.”
The UAA and a New Era of Women Leaders at UChicago
Equity has been a consistent goal at UChicago and throughout the University Athletic Association (UAA). “We are very formulaic in how we budget at UChicago, trying to meet the needs of every program to give the same fundamental experience to all our student-athletes. Obviously, swimmers don’t need football helmets. As long as you create as much of a similar experience as possible, you will be able to move forward,” she explained. “We have done a really good job of moving forward. There were some inequities in terms of full-time and part-time coaches, which we have addressed.”
The UAA was at the forefront of women administrators being part of conference meetings and Senior Woman Administrators being represented on the Delegates Committee. “The UAA helped improve gender recruiting and opportunities across all our institutions because it really did demonstrate what was possible. Both our women’s and men’s programs benefited from seeing other campuses and their facilities,” Resch commented. “The strength we saw across the UAA showed us what we needed to impact the experiences for our student-athletes, both men and women, but for women in a more equitable way. It made such a difference in how we thought about our programs, who we should be competing against, and what that looked like.”
In July 2013, UChicago hired its second woman to serve as Director of Athletics and Physical Education when Erin McDermott took over the helm. “She was someone who articulated the mission, but also our needs. She did an outstanding job of identifying what we need to be competitive,” Resch said of McDermott, who was hired as the Harvard University Director of Athletics in May 2020. “Our staff expanded under her leadership and the expectations she set took us to a different level. She could step into a lot of different environments and explain what we were doing and why we were doing it to faculty and leadership in a very special way.”
Resch then served in the interim role until July 2021 when Angie Torain took over the department’s lead role. “Angie, like Mary Jean and Erin, would be appalled to lessen the quality of anyone’s experience to improve someone else’s experience. Why would you deny any student opportunities?” Resch asked rhetorically. “It is not inconsequential to be a woman leader, but both women and men can be advocates for women’s sports. Gender doesn’t dictate compassion and a sense of fairness.”
Moving Forward
In her five decades as part of University of Chicago athletics, Resch has seen dramatic improvement in women’s athletics and equity issues, but she recognizes there is still work to be done and that not everyone has moved the needle as far as the Maroons and other schools in the UAA.
“I feel good about what we do, but I know those opportunities aren’t always available and that there are still inequities across the board. We also saw a lot of schools deal with Title IX by cutting wrestling, swimming, and/or fencing programs, which was hurting a lot of student-athletes,” she said.
The UAA holds all its men’s and women’s team championships together (apart from single-gender sports like volleyball and wrestling) at the same site, alternating heats in swimming & diving, and track & field, while alternating days for the Association tennis championships. Starting times alternate between men and women in which gender plays first in round robin sports like soccer and basketball, though Resch was discouraged that basketball did not make that change until this past season. “I understood why the women hadn’t fought hard for it before, but the reality in basketball is that JV (junior varsity) or consolation games are played first,” remarked Resch, who sees major inequities in Division I.
“NCAA March Madness in 2021 exposed what has been going on for years in terms of inequities in accommodations between men’s and women’s basketball, which exists in other sports as well. It brought the question, ‘Wait a minute, why is this still happening?’ We are still at that stage sometimes,” she discussed. “The NCAA has done a lot of things to improve championships with heats at swimming & diving and track & field championships. There is still a long way to go.”
One of the things Resch finds most challenging is changing cultural norms, which are often very difficult to overcome. “People talk about whether it is right to sponsor dance programs that are primarily for women, but men are not taking advantage of the programs. Statistically, in the pre-fourth grade level, participation is almost equal between boys and girls,” she reported. “I would like to see more boys participating in dance, but we aren’t yet there as a country. The social acceptance of girls in sports and boys in traditionally female activities is still a problem.”
“We lose a lot of girls in sports too early, which is a problem, though not something college sports can take care of,” she continued. “The social side of being on a team is still sometimes stronger for men and our men’s teams tend to have bigger squads. Women self-select off teams more often.”
What Resch finds most encouraging are the changes and success she has seen for women throughout her career. “There has been movement all along and the UAA has been so important for all our institutions. It set a new standard for how we wanted our athletes to compete at a national level and with comparable institutions,” she summarized. “I feel good about what we do. I would be surprised if our teams felt that another team was getting something they weren’t. I know that is not true across the board in any NCAA division.”