Winners and Losers

Chemistry is the buzz word in today’s wide world of sports competition. We used to speak of morale or esprit de corps, but today it is chemistry we seek. Retired University of Connecticut men’s basketball coach Jim Calhoun called it "the vapor that just sort of hangs over a team."

Team chemistry results when the ingredients (player personality’s) mix well. With an audience always in search of the next version of the legendary 1970 New York Knicks, an iconic five who have become the measuring stick for team chemistry. When mixed well, a combustible calibration of cohesiveness sets off a chain reaction that causes varied personalities to come together in pursuit of a common goal.

Championship teams need to blend the following characteristics of chemistry: A star, a team tool box, the team brain, the team firster, the comic, the maverick and a General. The Red Bud 6 - Diann, Kim, Paula, Deb, Cindy, Meg, Sandy - checked off all the boxes.

Winners hitch a ride with a star, a catalyst who defines purpose through excellence, the one with the Moxy to lead an ordinary bunch to do extraordinary things. A humble coach on the floor who will not fall into the trap of a “me firster” – one who refuses to lose (Diann). Losers grope for a personality.

Winners find a glue guy, the team toolbox, the one who pulls the group - often in the throes of adversity – together, a fox hole buddy. They are the critical cog, the one who plays with reckless abandon but can perform well within the crucible of the big game (Kim). Losers point fingers.

Winners analyze and adapt. They are the brains of the team, the ones able to think on the run with belief not only in the system, but in teammates and coaches, keeping the membership pulling for each other by modeling accountability. (Paula). Losers are swollen by panic and prone to choke.

Winners respect their elders, the team firster, falling in line until it is their turn to shine. They show the confidence beget by talent but avoid the locker room tribulations that often surface on teams with no pecking order (Deb). Losers exasperate class warfare tensions with an itchy attitude, always in need of a scratch.

Winners know how to laugh, the somewhat fallacious comic. The best concoction to cure a noxious team culture is a happy player, the one who is comfortable in their own skin and knows how to bring levity through a sunny disposition when the drag begins to settle, never one to take themselves too seriously (Cindy). Losers pout and mope, pulling down those around them.

Winners think outside the norm, the maverick. They expand the circle of their group’s possibilities, always wanting to know why. They keep the ideas flowing and guard against complacency by questioning the status quo (Meg). Losers fear the unknown.

Winners need a coach, the General. Vision, passion, patience; they get those under their tutelage to share in their commitment. They confront shifting problems with a variety of styles, always staying current, always maintaining distance, but both in and under control (Sandy). They inspire and prod. Losers are led by “sponsors.”

In the fall of 1974, Red Bud volleyball coach Sandy Griffin salivated over the cohesiveness of her roster. She knew she had all the pieces: six girls with size, volleyball skills, athleticism and a gung-ho attitude. They loved being in each other’s company. They loved volleyball. They loved practice. They loved being in the gym. Star player Diann Schrader says if they could have moved their beds into the gym, they would have slept there.

They – The Red Bud 6 - are all doing well, thank you. Paula still cocks her head with that slight tilt, in self-deprecation, and she is still easily approachable, just the way her teammates remember her. Diann still giggles in her timeless way, and Deb still stares to the far away. They are as alive today as they were the magical winter of 1975, as infallible now as then. Professional sports have only superstars – no heroes - and superstars will inevitably let us down. Small town high school heroes do not. Like Peter Pan, at least in our mind’s eye, they never grow old. The Red Bud 6 prospered in the atmosphere of opportunity launched by Title IX. And the town fell in love with them. And so, they were honored in their time as no other team in Red Bud has been, before or since, with a fire engine ride to the biggest party this little town had ever seen.

The Greatest Purist Teacher of the Game of Ball -Ever

It is hard to find much meaningful metaphor to the life of Rick Majerus - nothing like the sage Wizzard of Westwood or the innovative Dean of the Court, or the saintly Coach K. He was cut from his high school team. He was by the age of 30 obese and bald. He was crude and no father would want him to date their daughter.  But if all you want is a guy who could dial up a two-hour clinic on how the game of basketball should be played, he was your guy - perhaps the best pure coach ever. 

Rick Majerus rode into town in 2007 as the new Head Men’s Basketball Coach of St. Louis University. The fifty-nine-year-old hall of famer arrived equipped with a game plan hell bent on staring dead in the eye the most ominous opponent found on anyone’s schedule: time. Majerus was here to race the sunset; a test we all must someday confront - and fail. Six years later he joined the ranks of the vanquished; dead of heart failure, but not before giving the inevitable one hell of a battle.

In 2007, after a five-year self-imposed retirement, Majerus jumped back in the coaching hot seat. He arrived in St. Louis as a walking advertisement for a coronary. The obese coach had seven heart by-pass procedures – one for each of the major food groups, the self-deprecating Majerus liked to joke – before the age of fifty. He talked openly that the rebuilding of the once proud Billiken program would be the final stop on his coaching journey. He was given a five-year contract.

I met Majerus in the fall of 1989, shortly before he took a year-long leave of absence from coaching for his first round of battling heart problems. We had breakfast at a McDonald’s in El Dorado, KS. He was in town to court two marquee talents, who due to academic deficiencies, had landed on the roster of the local team at Butler County Community College. As what I took as somewhat of an afterthought, the newly appointed head coach of the University of Utah Runnin’ Utes asked to visit with me about a 6’8 player I coached at the local high school. 

Majerus never made an offer to my kid. He never even asked to meet him. I think the local JUCO coach was doing me a favor and Majerus had some time to kill. What he needed was immediate help, with the JUCO ranks the most expedient route, even if most of the star quality players found in the dusty small-town outposts of JUCO ball often came with academic, social and sometimes even legal baggage. 

Once Majerus established himself at Utah, he swore off the Junior College quick fix. He never signed a JUCO player at SLU. Still, for a high school coach like me, it was a fun breakfast with a glib and colorful mentor. It was a momentary chance encounter I am sure he held no recollection of, but for me with a career spent coaching in small backwater towns, it was a highlight and sparked in me a personal interest to follow Majerus’ career.

In 1999, Majerus published an autobiography titled “My Life on a Napkin.” It is a quirky tale, much like the coach himself. In one chapter he talks about being a confirmed life-long bachelor, married only to basketball (ball as Majerus always called the sport); in the next chapter he mentions an “ex-wife.” It is classic Majerus, open the door slightly for a peek inside, but never allow for complete immersion. The truth, as he himself states in his book, is that Majerus knew many people, but had few close friends. 

For reasons he never explains, the enigmatic coach was very guarded of his private life away from the hardwood. It is how he died, shrouded in an almost Howard Hughes type cloak of secrecy and rumor. He last spoke with his players the previous March, in the locker room after a NCAA tournament third round loss to Michigan State. In September of 2012 it was announced that Majerus would be out for the year on sick leave. Two weeks before his passing, another statement came from the school’s athletic department informing that the coach was not coming back to lead the Billikens, ever. 

No one in the SLU administration had direct contact with him during his hospital stay. His inter-circle drew in the ranks tight and hunkered down with the coach in an undisclosed California hospital. No one in St. Louis had been given privy to what turned out to be Majerus’ death watch.

In 2007, in the days leading up to his surprising hire by SLU, the Jesuit school’s President, Father Larry Biondi, unexpectedly fired the schools’ at the time head coach, Brad Soderberg. The timing was off the wall, almost two months after the team had completed the year and well into the recruiting season. In fact, Soderberg and all of his assistants were out on the recruiting road when the word came down from the President’ Office that heads had rolled. The response within the city’s sports circles was one of shock. Soderberg was widely respected and most thought he had built a solid base for future success. At the time, I was coaching at another Catholic University in St. Louis and had a good network inside the SLU athletic department. The Athletic Director was left completely out of the loop on this major decision involving the school’s flag ship program and shortly after, she left. So did a number of coaches in other sports within the department. 

The media want after the Jesuit President and the spin the university PR people attempted was lackluster. But Biondi quickly regained the upper hand, dissipating the controversy, by hitting a two out ninth inning walk off home run with the hiring of Majerus.

Rick Majerus grew up in Milwaukee WI, the son of a labor union organizer. In his book, he details how at the age of seven years he would walk the picket line with his dad yelling “scab” to any strike breaker who crossed the line. Majerus never trusted authority and wore his defiance as a badge of honor. His support always lied with the populist. His new boss, Father Biondi, had for two decades run the mid-town SLU campus like his own personal fiefdom. Any subordinate bold enough to state that the Emperor wore no clothes, would not last long on the West Pine campus. Dissent was not tolerated in Biondi Land. 

It was just a matter of time before the two huge personalities would collide. With a five year multi-million dollar a year contract in hand, as Biondi would soon learn, Majerus held all the trump cards, and the coach knew it. In his years at SLU, Majerus was not shy about publicly criticizing and ridiculing his boss and the administrative decrees he disagreed with. 

Everything from Majerus' Pro-Life views to his ridiculing the universities' decision to enter the Atlantic 10 Conference and not the Missouri Valley Conference, Majerus was ready with a newsworthy quote. At times, he seemed to go out of his way to rile Biondi. The local media, who had reported for years, with little university reaction, on Biondi’s heavy-handed rule, was delighted to give the coach a stump to speak from. 

By the second year, Biondi wanted Majerus out. Considering the controversy of his hiring, and the huge, guaranteed salary Majerus had demanded, all Biondi could do was seethe and wait. In an era where big name coaches are routinely given yearly roll over five-to-ten-year contract extensions- to show potential recruits that the coach who they sign to play for has job security- there was never any serious negotiation to extend Majerus contract past the initial five years.

As the only hired hand to ever publicly brace Biondi and live to tell it, Rick Majerus was held to an exalted status by many of the rank and file on the SLU campus. In simple terms, the sharped tongue, sarcastic and insolent Coach told the autocratic power wielding Priest what he had been telling his superiors for his entire career: “kiss my ass.” 

Majerus had five years to get the job done.

A native of Milwaukee, WI and a graduate of Marquette Prep School and Marquette University, Majerus never failed to praise the Jesuit education he received, often commenting on how his sense of social justice was forged by the liberal social policies of the Jesuits priests during the socially chaotic 1960s. 

Even though he was a self-confessed basketball junkie/gym rat, Majerus was never good enough to make his high school team. He satisfied his basketball addiction by competing in local CYC leagues and summer playground pickup games. As a college freshman, he beat the odds as a walk-on to become what he called the 15^th man on a 15-man freshman team. 

The next fall, Marquette Coach Al McGuire told Majerus he was the worst player he had ever seen and cut him. But McGuire threw a lifeline- a bone to a starving dog –telling Majerus he should consider coaching and if would stay on as a “gofer" for the program, and if he graduated, McGuire would have a staff position for him. Three years later, McGuire kept his word.

Majerus cut his coaching teeth as the junior member of one of the games’ most colorful and successful coaching staffs. By the 1970s, McGuire had made Marquette a consistent winner. Using his hometown street connections in New York City to recruit some of the city’s more storied playground legends; McGuire put the Milwaukee school on the short list of top college programs. First Dean “The Dream” Meminger and then Butch Lee -hardnosed, take no prisoners point guards - extensions on the floor of the city toughness McGuire brought to the program, found their way from NYC to Milwaukee.

In the middle of the 1977 season, McGuire announced that at the end of the year he was stepping down from the head coaching position. His team caught fire in March, and despite a lowly resume that contained seven losses that almost keep the Warriors from even making what was then a 48-team bracket; McGuire and his gang of misfits set sail on a magical three week run the climaxed with the winning of the national championship. It was one of the first years that, for TV exposure, the Final Four had gone to a Saturday/Monday format. McGuire was suddenly the darling of the sporting world, his scrappy underdogs having captured the imagination of a nation just beginning its love affair with March Madness. The timing for the switch to a prime time slot for the finals made the ratings soar and McGuire swaggered off into retirement as a coaching legend.

McGuire’s right hand man and longtime assistant was Hank Raymonds, a native of St. Louis and a former Billiken player. Raymonds had played on SLU’s 1948 NIT national championship team, the greatest season in school history. Most, including McGuire, gave Raymonds much of the credit for the success of Marquette under McGuire. When the flighty McGuire caught spring fever on a warm February afternoon he saw better suited for a ride on his motorcycle than a Warrior practice; Raymonds and Majerus conducted practice. Raymonds was a master of the X’s and O’s of the sport. Majerius’ coaching style was heavily influenced by both mentors. He took the flashy moxie and street smarts of the Machiavellian pragmatic McGuire, tempering the cockiness and self-assuredness with the task-oriented work ethic of the steady Raymonds. It made for the perfect training ground for a young coach and Majerus’ pedigree over the years showed the influence of both McGuire and Raymonds.

After 12 years as an assistant to first McGuire and then Raymonds, at age 34, Majerus was promoted to the Warriors head coach position. Perhaps, with a less confrontational personality, he could have spent his entire career at Marquette; literally- in terms of his basketball life - from cradle to grave. But his “dream” job lasted only three years. By the late 1980s, the pipe line from the New York City playground to Milwaukee, WI had dried up. The explosion of cable TV in the earlier 1980s made the created for TV Big East Conference the power in college basketball. Georgetown, St. Johns, Seton Hall, Syracuse and Providence became the nation’s elite programs. There was no longer a reason for the east coast kids to leave home. The Warriors had fallen from the top echelon of college basketball; their coaching job no longer considered a top destination on the coaching ladder. Out of frustration, Majerus resigned.

In a path that would lead him to a year as an assistant in the NBA with the Milwaukee Bucks, two years at Ball State and a very successful decade long run with the Utah Utes, by the time he accepted the SLU job at age 59, Majerus knew the Gateway City would be the trail’s head at the end of his coaching sojourn. Time was now of the essence and Majerus hit the ground running.

Majerus’ tenure at SLU mirrored his coaching career, and in many ways, his life; tantalizingly successful but excruciatingly just short of expectations. He had SLU on the cusp of national top 20 status when health issues in the summer of 2012 drove Majerus into a California hospital. Majerus feel just short of the finish line of his vision for the restoration of the Billikens. It is poetic justice that his last team embodied all the Majerus held to heart on how the game of “ball” should be played. 

In 2012, undersized, under-talented and unheralded, the Bills battled to the school’s first NCAA tournament berth since 1998. It was a team that was forged to success on the first premise in the Majerus coaching creed; work always trumps talent. For their second-round tournament game SLU drew the tremendously talented but under disciplined Memphis Tigers, the ideal foil and a perfect setup for a Majerus ambush. For two glorious hours on the national stage of the Big Dance, Majerus’ team played a near flawless game, totally dominating a befuddled opponent. It was a Rick Majerus coaching clinic. Two days later, SLU slugged it out with a Michigan State team many projected to have the talent to win the national title. It was a battered and bloodied Spartan team that took all of the 40 minutes allotted to them to finally swat aside the pesky Billikens. The national media sang in unison of the coaching genius of Rick Majerus.

Majerus was one of the worst losers I have ever seen. It ate at him to the core. But after the Michigan State loss he was serene. The national praise for the fundamental superiority of his team was heaped from all directions and he was clearly pleased. Majerus had once again cemented his place amongst the coaching elites. He appeared at the post-game press conference, for one of the few times in his life, to be content. His pride was evident and deep felt as he spoke not of himself, but of his players.

One local scribe wrote the next day, “Big Rick is back.” A team returning almost its entire roster for the 2013 season seemed ready for a run to the Final Four, an unthinkable dream when Majerus arrived five years prior. But I didn’t buy it. I could tell by his words at the press conference that Majerus was done, and he knew it. 

The 2012 NCAA Tournament was the last lesson to be taught by the master teacher of the game of “ball” and class was now dismissed. The message I took from Majerus post game talk: “that is all I have to give. If you don’t get it now, you never will.” I told my son, “Majerus is done. I bet he is dead by this time next year.”

Rick Majerus was a complex man. Many in the media couldn’t stand him. He could be condescending at times, totally aloof at others. Majerus knew more about basketball than the combined knowledge of the entire St. Louis University community; and he didn’t hesitate to remind commoners of his superior comprehension of the intricacies of the game. During his five years in St. Louis he did nothing, and I mean nothing, to network or build rapport with area high school coaches. His final two St. Louis rosters contained not one local player, not even a walk-on. He showed little interest in civic development, made few public speeches and seldom lent his name for the good of local causes. He was here to coach basketball; period. In many ways, he stiffed the entire city.

Over the years Majerus went through many assistants and had a large number of players transfers. He was not an easy man to work for or to work with. Majerus could laugh at himself. He told some of the best “fat” jokes around, albeit many of them off color and not suitable for family settings. But deep down, he was an unfulfilled man. In a 2008 Sports Illustrated profile of Majerus, S.L. Price succinctly tagged best the charming, but boorish; the generous but mean-spirited; always enigmatic coach: "There goes the happy coach, back in his element. There goes the saddest man you ever saw."

A Dissenting Vote

Every saga in the fight for fairness needs both a villain and an unsung hero. 

For the saga of the improbable Red Bud volleyball team's march to the state tournament in Charleston, Charles Harter over at the Waterloo Republic filled the role of villain like a dream straight from Central Casting.  I found Charlie, the guy who did the 1974 "who do you think you are," story on the Red Bud girls. He became a lawyer specializing in personal injury lawsuits- an ambulance chaser. 

Just as a plaintiff, Charlie, representing himself over 20 times has sued everyone but God. I did find one time he prevailed and a whole lot of, "judgement for defendant, case dismissed." 

When I asked him if he wanted to tell his side in the book - the hatchet job on these girls he pulled as a reporter for the Waterloo paper, he threatened to sue me. I told him, "Dude, you want to take on the First Amendment on this one, you better find a lawyer with one heck of a lot better batting average than you have." 

This story just gets better and better, but I am saving that for the book.

The role of unsung hero fell to Red Bud former Principal, Thomas Eson, who was willing to fight his own conference to allow his girls a chance. He is now 79 years old and living his retirement years in Edwardsville, Il, with his wife of 60 years, Joyce. He has suffered five strokes, but when I mentioned Charlie and the 1975 state volleyball tournament, he popped alive with a big grin. “Oh yeah, did we get him back,” he says with a laugh. 

With some help from his wife, we put together a timeline of his years in Red Bud. “It was my fifth year in Red Bud (1974), but I was only 31 years old. I had been a principal at 24, two years before I came to Red Bud. At the time they said at 24 I was the youngest principal in the state.”

Thomas Eson 2022

The Illinois High School Association (IHSA) had set the second week of January for the regional volleyball tournaments to be played at 64 sites around the state. The winners would advance to 16 Sectionals, then to 8 Super-sectional battles, with the survivors advancing to a state tournament with a field of 8. There were no classes by size, the best played the best and the winner take all. 

The quarterfinals were to be played in Charleston on January 24, 1975, and the semis and final rounds on January 25. This timeline would require practice to start in October and the regular season and conference games to be contested in November and December. Such a schedule would create conflict with gym usage with boys’ basketball teams. For the 1974-1975 school year, the IHSA would not offer girls basketball.

The 10 team Cahokia Conference, an alliance of which Red Bud was a member, voted to not allow its members to play volleyball in the fall and winter, but to counter with a four-week round robin schedule of matches in April, only between the 10 conference schools. In essence, a nine game, four-week season with no opportunity for statewide advancement. Their reasoning was simple, the boys needed the gym October through March for basketball practice so the girls would have nowhere to practice or play until the gym was cleared in April by the outside (boys) spring sports. 

The Conference also decided that no team could choose both options, either play in the state sanctioned time frame of winter or the April conference slate. It was one or the other. If a school choose to enter the regional tournament and compete for the honor of going to the state tournament, they were to be removed from the conference roster of volleyball teams.

Charlie, in Proxy, 1975

Eson cried foul. He cried long and hard. The story got into the local media and Eson did not back down with his steadfast opinion that the girls were not being treated fairly. As no good deed goes unpunished, for his principled stand, he took the wrath of his colleagues. And one area sportswriter. Charlie accused Eson of showing poor sportsmanship for demanding equality for his girls. 

Eson says he didn’t care. He was used to being the lone wolf at Cahokia Conference principal meetings. “I was young and still fiery, I guess would be the word. The other principals were older, and I felt a lot of the time just wanted to do what was easiest,” he says of the proverbial path of least resistance approach by the majority of his colleagues.

His wife agrees that his young age for a principal in 1974 helped define his style. “He was young, and he was always for the kids first,” she says of his erring on the side of the student. Eson was often the oddball at Cahokia Conference meetings. “We had a lot of “them against me” votes,” he says with a laugh at the memory of his often-lone dissenter status. “But I am glad it worked out how it did for the volleyball girls. It sure got the town excited, that I do remember.”

When the Red Bud 6 needed a provocateur with thick skin, Eson delivered. In October 1974 he was a one-man band, and a one-man band plays all alone. He was both the promoter and the booster his girls needed. He may have been a lost voice, but his stance was a fair one and as most votes of inclusion will in time garner its due, has stance of fairness withstood the test of time. 

Eson was a hands-on, friendly principal who interacted daily and well with the students. He tells me he never saw himself as a disciplinarian. Some in the community felt the reign he maintained at the school were somewhat too loose. By 1975, a problem that had been building for several years was now discussed openly and often in both the town social gathering spots and in the local press; too many RBHS students were now pot heads.  Eson gives a cavalier shrug of his shoulders today, just as he did in 1975, when the issue is raised. I don't press him on the controversy, but his body language seems to tell me there were lots of pot heads in the class of 1975, nationwide, Red Bud High School included. 

In sports, thanks to the saturation of social media, virtue, we are told, can be found in every action, from the benign to the preposterous. It is over hyped. In Eson's case it is not. If he does not take a stand in the fall of 1974, I am not writing this book.

Eson does not strike me as one desiring to become some stuffy sort of a new paradigm for educational courage. I also doubt he has ever been called charismatic. Without prodding, he has little in the way of self-promotion to contribute to this project. His speech is slow and altered. When I do say something that solicits a response it comes back slow and sometimes halting in delivery. 

He says backing his coach and his girls was an easy decision, they were his girls and his coach. “I didn’t think about the outside things, like who would disagree and not support me," he says. "You just do your job, do what is right and enjoy what you're doing. That is how I approached everything that came my way. It is not that hard. We all know what is right, just sometimes it can be pretty darn hard to do what is right.” And easier to roll with the majority. Thankfully for the Red Bud 6, he still had that youthful idealistic mindset to tilt at windmills. Maybe he mellowed as he aged, maybe not. He ignores my inquiry as to such. 

I tell him he is the unsung hero of this story. Without him, there is no story – yet today his personal stand is no more than an occasional recollection in the mind of a small town, a forgotten foot note. But the rippling effect of the lives of six girls he did not have to aid, but did, lives on forever. And maybe in the end -not recollection or recognition but effect - is what really matters. 

To his colleagues he was a pain and bothersome, prickly to their orderly meetings: stubborn, bullying, unpopular and wheedling. But he held the door of opportunity open for his girls and they charged through. In 1974, the Red Bud 6 were told the demeaning offer of passing on district play and a Mickey Mouse little four-week local conference schedule was the best they could get - so girls, take it or leave it. Tom Eson allowed them and their coach to choose the skedaddle option, flipping off the rest of the conference on their way out the door and on the road to Charleston to show Charlie.

Forrest Gump Meets Title IX: If the World Ever Got Fair, She Would Be Ready

Coach Wright

Margie Wright was born in 1952 in Warrensburg, Il, a small farming community with a population of 700 located ten miles of corn fields northwest of Decatur.  When she was 10 years old, she became the first girl to make the cut for her hometown’s Little League baseball program. The league had been for years sponsored by the local fire department and was a mainstay on the small town’s summer schedule. Each of the four teams of 10 or so players were issued a numberless tee shirt of a different color with a "Warrensburg Fire Department" ironed on stencil adorning the front. Her team color was red.

Every kid who ever played Little League baseball knows this rite of passage. You tried that shirt on at least five times the night before, posing and mimicking each time in the mirror, trying for that perfect Juan Marechal leg kick. You would even wake once in the middle of the night, checking to make sure that sucker was still in your bedroom dresser drawer, safe.

Her manager told her dad after the first practice, “We have a problem.” Because she is a girl dad asked? “No,” the coach said, “there is not a boy in this town who can so much as hit a foul ball off her. She is the best 10-year-old pitcher I have ever seen. That might not go over well.”

As she warmed up for her first game, she had the ball literally ripped from her hand. The local Women’s Auxiliary had held an emergency meeting that very evening, across the street from the ballfield in the town’s tidy little city hall building and the head Karen of the day had rushed to the scene of the developing cultural outrage, arriving in just the nick of time. No girls allowed; she told the league organizer. The man approached her dad with the bad news.  Nothing I can do, he said. I am not telling her, said dad, you are. You want to break a little girl’s heart, then you tell her yourself.

Margie sprinted the three blocks from the ball field to her family’s house, threw her red tee shirt, her very first uniform - in the trash. She locked herself in her room and cried for two days. When she emerged, she demanded to know why God had punished her by making her a girl.

In writing a Title IX based tribute book to the improbable story of the 1975 Red Bud, IL High School Volleyball team’s state tournament run, one player, Cindy Guebert, suggested I locate and interview Coach Margie Wright. “She coached three of us on the volleyball team at Eastern Illinois University. She was not much older than us, but she was a great coach,” Cindy said. I found out later she had coached a fourth member of the Red Bud 6 in softball at Illinois State. Was she married; I ask. Cindy says she thinks not. That helps, married names complicate a search.

Sounded like a great segway to my putting a face on Title IX, so I hit the cyber trail. I spend the good part a frustrating day, always one internet campfire behind Coach Wright. There are over 300 Margret Wrights on the Whitepages.com site, alone. I almost, a couple of times, gave up.

I start in Charleston, IL at Eastern Illinois University. The Sports Information Office website has records back to 1975, the first year they had a volleyball team, and a Margie Wright was their coach for the years 1977 and 1978 She was very good at it, with an 85-10 record. But the young intern, when I call, has no idea where she went. A story in her archive says she was from Warrensburg, IL.

1998 National Champs

I estimate she was about five years older than the Red Bud girls I am writing about, so I search and find online the 1970 Warrensburg-Latham, IL High School yearbook. As I click the screen arrow to turn the pages, I catch a break. In the senior class section, I find the coffered image of a Margret Wright. And I uncover a secret so dark I am sure she has lived the last 52 years dreading that cover blowing knock at her door.

At the local city hall, the lady says yes, she knows the family, but both parents have passed but she thinks there are a couple of brothers over around Bloomington, but she is not sure of their names. She knows Margie had gone out to somewhere in California and she had heard, had done well. 

One of my Red Bud 6, Deb Stamm, texts me that she had played softball in 1980 at Illinois State and Coach Wright was her coach.

I search the terms, “Coach Wright softball Illinois State” and my computer screen lights up like the million dollars pull on a Vegas one-armed bandit. Jackpot! She was an All-American player and then a championship coach. I don’t want to get ahead of the story, but she ended up coaching at Fresno State in California and her face is included on any internet Mt. Rushmore like tribute to the sport’s coaches. She was very successful.

I access the Fresno State University Bulldog official athletic department website. I get passed around by a confusing setup menu but finally it is confirmed that according to a Hall of Fame announcement, Wright had retired in 2012 and moved back to “the Chicago area, to work with youth softball.” Hmm, that still covers a lot of territory, but we are making progress and, remember, still I have an ace of scandal in my back pocket.

I tried LinkedIn and discovered a Margie Wright listed as a softball instructor/coach in Aurora, IL. I call the number. It is a Chicago area softball training complex. Been gone from here for years, I am told, try this other club. I get passed on to three other traveling team/personal training coaches until I finally hit land with a call to a Rec Department office in the Chicago suburb of Wheatland. The director not only knows her but has her cell phone number.

I feel like I have been chasing the ghost of Greta Garbo, the reclusive star who just wanted to disappear. I am exhausted but more determined than ever. This is my last hope. This guy in Wheatland is tantalizingly sadistic. “I cannot give you her number, but I will call and leave her a message and see if she calls you back. But I will tell you she has a tight circle, and she normally never calls me back.”

“Oh, she will call me back,” I say in my best gangster croaking whisper, “you tell her I have seen her high school yearbook and I know she was a cheerleader, a cheerleader!!”

Fifteen minutes later I am conversing live with Coach Margie Wright and her story was well worth a full day of traversing the often-cloudy smoke signals of the cyber world.

Margie Wright was the head softball coach at California’s Fresno State University from 1986 to 2012. She coached Fresno State University to 1,457 wins and in 1998 a national championship. Her team was the last softball team from a non-Power 5 Conference to claim the national title. The way “football” money now dictates major college athletics, it could well never happen again.

Coach Wright is the winningest coach of collegiate female athletic teams, ever, in any sport at any level: NCAA, NAIA, JUCO, and in any division of the proceeding, in history. As in EVER. And she played on the National Softball Elite level until she was 44 years of age.

Let that sink in about this one-time Warrensburg-Latham High School cheerleader. And I burned up Wikipedia and surfing the net for a good six hours verifying it all.

1973 All-American

But she had never felt as broken nor as confused as that day in 1962. For as long as she could remember, every neighborhood friend she had was a boy. Together they played baseball every day, all day, all summer, she was just one of the guys. Why did being a girl mean she couldn’t play baseball? At times like this, who could blame a precarious childlike Margie from asking her mother why God had punished her by making her a girl?

Those who loved her said it is just a tomboy phase and it would pass. And it did. Or so the adults thought. She grew into a classy and well-rounded young lady, smart, pretty in a cute way, and popular. Margie was a varsity cheerleader and a homecoming queen attendant, the perfect female offspring of a 1960’s MId-America farm town. Her listed activities, noted in the school yearbook, was longer than the Great Depression.

At her graduation in the spring of 1970, Wright’s parents basked in the wave of compliments for the fine daughter they had raised. She had a promising future as a small-town farmer’s wife, so it seemed. But she had a secret. On the backside of their modest home, she had drawn four circles, each the size of a softball, representing the four corners of a softball home plate. Outside of prying eyes, she spent thousands of hours in that backyard teaching herself the windmill-style of throwing a fast pitch softball. If the world ever got fair, she would be ready.

Decatur, IL was only ten miles from Warrensburg. In the 1960’s Decatur was a thriving community of 80,000. Many locals, Wright’s dad one, worked at the iconic A.E. Staley factory - an agricultural plant. On the weekends, Margie remembers, her dad also moonlighted as a truck driver, for years running a route to Chicago and back. It helped feed a household of seven.

 Decatur has always been a big sports town. Back in 1920 the Staley Company had sponsored a football team led by a young local former New York Yankees major league baseball player named George Halas. Once, in 1919, Babe Ruth, pitching for the Boston Red Sox, struck Halas out. He couldn’t hit a major league curveball and he was released after a cup of coffee big league career. He came home to Decatur and took up his other love, football. His team was known as the Decatur Staleys, sponsored by the agricultural giant. Most of his players worked for Staley. His pigskin team was a charter member in a new circuit called the National Football League. The team never caught on locally. In 1922 Halas changed their name to the Bears and moved up the highway to Chicago.

In 1969, the summer before her senior year of high school, the now 17-year-old Margie Wright heard a rumor that would drastically change her life’s trajectory and the future of women’s college athletics. Illinois State University, an hour away in Normal, was going to start a women’s athletic program, beginning with a basketball team. Now, she had, if she wanted it, a path out of Warrensburg and a chance to start living out her long-repressed dreams. 

“If my friend from my summer softball team, Cheryl Birkhead, had not told me about Illinois State starting a basketball team," says Wright, "I would never have left Warrensburg. I had no plans of attending college. I likely could have ended up marrying and staying in my hometown. I was headed that way. Most girls who graduated with me were married by the time we were 20. And maybe that would have been alright, maybe I would have been happy taking on that life. But I am glad I had a choice, and I am glad I went the way I did.”

There are a lot of women spread throughout the world of today who once fell under the umbrella of the motivating power of Margie Wright who owe Cheryl Birkhead a big thank you. And there are a few administrators who once passed through Fresno State University who rue the day Cheryl opened her big mouth. For them, life would have been so much simpler if Margie had stayed down in Warrensburg, IL.

We don’t have the money, her parents reluctantly told her, to send you to college. So, in the summer of 1970 the recent high school grad drove herself over to Decatur and found a credit union willing to give her a tuition loan. She would figure out the room and board half later. For four years she repeated the process; borrowing more after first paying off as much of the balance as she could. It took her twenty years to pay off the last of those tuition loans, but she notes the interest rate was only 2% and now she had what she needed to live an impacting life beyond central Illinois. She says it was a good deal.

Margie Wright Diamond

The school, Illinois State, let the women have their softball team and left them alone because they asked for little. The University never offered much of any help, either. 

At age 21, eleven years after tossing her red Warrensburg Fire Department little league tee shirt in the trash, she was named the best collegiate softball pitcher in the nation, a First Team All-American. It was 1973, the year after Title IX was passed, but still a few years before it would become an established edict that the federal courts would enforce. Most college and high schools were fighting the law, resisting implementation. Wright was one of the many pawns in a huge political tussle. 

That spring, the do-it- all Wright pitched, hit, and willed her still unfunded Illinois State team to the college softball World Series, held in Omaha, NE.

The 1973 women's college softball World Series was a gathering reflective of the wild west like days of early college women’s athletics, truly a populist celebration of the “I am women hear me roar” activist mantra now sweeping the nation - a mixture of small and large, public and private colleges and universities. There were no divisions, just a pure winner takes all format. 

It was a colorful time, the tournament characters a lost caravan of a couple hundred elite and unappreciated women athletes, following the sun, in search of recognition and respect they could never quite seem to find. While low on funding and recognition the weeklong carnival of competition was awash with the type of Esprit de Corp that only common commitment to an uphill battle can foster, only money can kill - and in time it would.

The 16-team lineup consisted of:  defending national champ Arizona State, Ball State (Indiana), Iowa State, Illinois State, Kansas, Michigan State, Nebraska–Omaha, North Dakota State, Northern Colorado, Northern Iowa, South Carolina, South Dakota State, Southwest Missouri State, Wayne State College (Nebraska), Weber State College (Utah) and Western Illinois.

The ISU Redbirds storming out of the gate, defeated in order Iowa St 2-1, Wayne State 10-0 and Southwest MO State 5-1, to reach the upper bracket final in the double elimination tournament. In their fourth game on the second day of the tournament, they dropped a 9-2 blow out decision to Arizona State. There was no time to lick the wounds.

ISU 1974

Illinois State now faced the daunting task of on the last and championship day, May 20, of winning three consecutive games, the last two over the consensus best team in the land, ASU. If they could pull it off, they would be National Champs. Arizona State only needed to win one of two. But Illinois State in Wright had one stud pitcher itching and ready to go until she dropped. This was her time and the hours of toil throwing alone against the back of a small house back in Warrensburg. IL had prepared her well. No one on this day was going to take the ball from her hand.

Moving down to the lower bracket, after the loss to ASU, the Illinois State Redbirds again faced Southwest MO State, who had battled through to win the loser’s bracket. ISU defeated the Bears for the second time in two days, once again, by a score of 5-1.

Awaiting now was the eras Queen of college softball, the mighty defending national champions Arizona State Sun Devils. Their school sponsored (paid for) their team's equipment and travel expenses, and get this, scholarships. On the other end of this often feudal-like spectrum of 1973 women’s college sports was Illinois State. Margie and her teammates knew the value menu at McDonalds, well. As the winner of the upper division, the Sun Devils, besides being well fed, were also talented, confident, and rested. They had swept their first four games of the World Series by an aggregated score of 19-4.

Didn’t matter to the willful Wright as she and her Redbird teammates almost pulled it off - painfully almost.

Wright twirled a shutout at ASU in the first game of the finals, winning 4-0. The second, the winner take all final, went 16 innings and the Sun Devils finally pushed across the winning run and escaped with a razor thin 4-3 decision. Margie Wright pitched all 30 innings that day.

Did anyone back in Normal/Bloomington notice her heroic effort? Not surprisingly, nope. The next day's local daily paper, The Pantagraph, carried in its Sunday morning biggest edition of the week, a below the cut line 74-word story, pilfered off the AP wire service, on the local college's national runner up finish. The paper did not bother to send to Omaha an in-person reporter.

The Redbirds had already stayed longer, since they kept winning, than they had budgeted for, and the team was out of money. Washing dishes for a meal with the national runner-up trophy resting out in their van was not an option for the second-best team in the nation, so to save the cost of another night’s hotel expense, the Redbirds drove through the night, back to Normal. They grabbed a few hours’ sleep and got on with getting ready for next year. 

The whole team was coming back. ASU had graduated their core. Margie and her offbeat low maintenance band of sisters were laser focused on in 1974 bringing home a national title for their school, even if their school really didn’t care. When you were a female athlete in the early 70's, you learned to thrive on rejection. 

Times were good for Margie Wright. She was happy and content and this one-time cheerleader and homecoming queen attendant had broken away from the limitations of small-town America. 

Then came another kick to her athletic gut. In October, five months after taking second in the nation, the school received a letter from some governmental body with a fancy letterhead called the “The State of Illinois Athletic Commission.” The school, the coach and the ISU players had never heard of this commission. Had no idea who they were or what their rules were. That was about to change.

The State of Illinois Athletic Commission had been recently seated and empowered by the state legislature to deal with this irritating issue of girls playing sports, a nuisance the federal courts kept sticking their nose into, threatening the good old boy status quo that had in their eyes worked so good for so many years. The state of Illinois was doing all it could to meet their sacred obligation to protect girls from the dangers of sweat and competitive pressure. To do otherwise would surely leave any female who partook unable to have children due to the strain on their reproductive system, or so was the claim of the “follow the science” crowd of the day.

Anyway, the letter informed the team that the Commission had established a rule, in place and thus binding, during the previous spring’s World Series, that no female from Illinois could pitch more than 18 innings in one day.  ISU’s pitcher, it had been recently brought to the Commission’s attention, had thrown 30 innings, all in one day. Ignorance of the law, they smugly informed the Redbirds, was no excuse. 

Now, understand this rule only applied to schools from Illinois, so their opponent in the national championship game, Arizona State, was not burdened by such limitations. Hardly seems fair. Shouldn’t your own state be on your side? For Margie it was de Ju Vue. The town Karen, one of your own, again sticking her nose into your business under the pretense of offering you protection you didn’t want, stealing your dream all over again.

No medical explanation how using the shoulder joints to throw a softball would damage a uterus was included in the letter, but a rule is a rule, the team was told. The Redbirds punishment for such a blatant violation was a suspension from post-season play for one year. WHAT?  Forget about a national championship in 1974. Draconian, for sure. But what are you going to do?

Margie Wright quietly that spring graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Physical Education and became Coach Wright. She spent the next three years, the 1974-75, the 1975-76, and the 1976-77 school years coaching softball at Metamora, IL Township High School. The school had an enrollment of 1000 and was in downstate Illinois, just east of Peoria. The softball girls at Metamora High School, the few there were, did not know the difference between a drag bunt and a drag queen, and most didn’t care. But Coach Wright gave it her best shot. It was a bawdy start to her eventual cracker jack career.

I ask did you ever coach basketball and she no, but she did officiate when she was in her 20’s. "But then I got too busy with softball, both playing and coaching. So in the 80's, I quit." I asked, "like officiating area high school games." She said no high school, "but I did do college games."

Almost as a side, she adds, “I officiated the national championship game in both 1979 and 1980. It was so long ago we wore skirts to officiate,” she says with a laugh. “And I have a good story about the 1980 title game,” she says. "I bet you do," I respond, and I bet Dizzy Gillespie can play a little jazz on that trumpet of his, too.

And off we go: “It was first time the women’s basketball finals were televised live nationwide. We were going to be on NBC, and we were all so excited. This was a big indication that all our hard work to make women’s sports relevant was starting to pay off. Louisiana Tech crushed Tennessee. Well, during the game I got too close to the TV announcers table, and I told Pat, ‘You need to settle down,’ and their microphone picked it up, so the whole country heard me."

Pat? "Yeah, Pat Summit, but she wasn’t Summit back then, her maiden name was Head, Pat Head. It was the first time she had a team in the championship game." 

Summit could be cantankerous, she liked to win like a mole liked to dig. "She never let me live it down," Wright continued, "you know, calling her out and the whole country heard it. We were the same age, just kids, I guess. That was so long ago, and she was a good friend.”

The thought crosses my mind to drive to Chicago, buy a box of chocolates, and invite Coach Wright to meet me down at the bus stop, then take a bench seat next to her and just let her talk - Forrest Gump meets Title IX.

The Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) was a grass roots organization that before 1982 and a hostile takeover by the NCAA, ran women's college athletics. They and NBC had scripted a narrative for the 1980 title game. It was for much of the nation their first look at women’s college basketball and the powers who ran the sport wanted to send out to a skeptical nation a wholesome image. 

“We were still fighting back then,” remembers Wright, “the whole issue of female masculinity in elite athletes.” 

The issue of sexuality has always, with elite women's athletics, been the two-ton elephant in the room. And in the early years of Title IX, it certainly played a role in a young coaches' potential for advancement. Donna Lopiano, the 1980 tournament director, once claimed the discrimination of the time against women coaches was conscious and not well hidden. "If you are a woman looking for a coaching job, your chances are best if you are divorced with no children," she candidly stated. "That proves you are not homosexual and have no child to support."

Both NBC and the AIAW leaders wanted the competitors in the title tilt to have the look of femininity, staged or not - light on sweat and elbows and heavy on ponytails and gregarious sportsmanship.

Wright expands on the image conscious production. “We had a meeting before the game with the tournament director, Donna Lopiano (later a major Title IX player as the powerful Women's Athletic Director at the University of Texas) and the TV production crew and they told us we (Wright and her officiating partner Angie Sansivera) under no circumstances were to call a technical foul on anyone, players or coaches.”

Wright knew this was an unusual request, but these were also, she understood, unusual times. In many ways the social ramifications of this breakthrough night, were similar within context to the desegregation of major league baseball.

Branch Rickey, the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers knew that it was paramount to the success of tearing down the evil racial wall of separation of the nation’s pastime, that he carefully and correctly chooses the right man for what would be a test of wills. Jackie Robinson’s ability to maneuver the slippery slope of turning the other cheek while maintaining his dignity as a man is the reason today, Robinson is so revered. Rickey knew if he chose a man with the wrong temperament, it would set back this high-profile battle in the war for civil rights and racial equality, perhaps a generation, or more.

Similarly, the broadcast of the 1980 championship game was what so many in support of this noble cause of equality for female athletes had sacrificed so much for. They, like Robinson and Rickey, had to get it right. “This was a very big deal for all of us who had fought for the right to play; and now we had the nation watching,” Wright states. “The problem for Angie and I were the coaches battling each other in the title game.”

On the Tennessee sideline was a coach, Pat Summit, destined for greatness, driven by an insatiable will to win. The basketball world would learn it time, before the horrible affliction of Alzheimer’s would force her all too early retirement at age 58, that Summit was a coach who would chew through concrete to win. Good luck getting her to, “play nice,” for the TV viewers. Prowling the sideline in front of the other bench was the scowling and legendary official’s antagonist, Leon Barmore.

At a time when women’s college basketball was still dominated by female coaches who had grown up in the era of Girls Athletic Associations and intramural play, Barmore was an exception; a large man with a loud voice and a testosterone fueled personality. What hair spray is to Donald Trump, bluster was to Barmore. When he saw two diminutive 20 something year old female officials (clad in skirts) ready to call the national time game, he smelled blood in the water.

Wright says check the records and you will find Barmore listed as the Louisiana Tech Co-Coach, but it was a façade with a nod to the social correctness of the day. There was a nice diminutive lady named Sonya Hogg that was listed, along with Barmore, as co-coach. “You have to understand the culture for so many years on college campuses,” Wright explains in her best history teacher tone, “that the purpose many in the women’s physical education department believed was to train female physical education teachers for high schools, not to win college basketball games.”

When Hogg organized the Louisiana Tech's first women’s basketball team in 1975, two years before Barmore joined her, she demanded the team’s nickname be changed from the men’s mascot of Bulldogs to "Lady Techsters." Hogg had pragmatic reasoning. In her line of thought, Bulldogs was unfeminine, and she feared the thought that the teams’ female players might be called "bitches" (a referral to a female dogs). She told the local press in a first-year interview that she would insist that her players, “maintain standards and act like ladies off the court.”

In her 11 years alongside Barmore on the Lady Techsters bench, Hogg compiled a record of 307–55 (.848). She then went back to coaching high school. A decade later, she took over the Baylor Bears program and without Barmore spent 6 years in Waco, compiling a rather unremarkable record of 83–91 (.477).  

The very concept of coaching in the pre-Title IX days was considered by some women’s physical education leaders as taboo. There were exceptions, Wright explains, but they were few. “Many times, you would have fights over philosophy within the same department between the older professors who believed in intramurals only and stressing health and hygiene and the younger professors who wanted to coach and promote competition. Believe it or not, some of the fiercest resistance to Title IX, in the early days, at least, came from female professors within the college’s physical education department.”

“Tony (Barmore) had a way about him,” recalls Wright, back to reminiscing on the 1980 final played on the campus of Central Michigan University. “I am searching for the right word,” she says with a quizzical tone. I assumed that “ass hole” was not in her vocabulary, so I thew out the suggestion, “bombastic, maybe?” She lights up, “bombastic, that is perfect,” she says with a laugh. “A great coach,” she rates, “but bombastic,” she agrees.

“From the opening tip, he was all over us,” recalls Wright. “Back then, of course, we worked a two-man crew, so every time we called a foul we would have to rotate (in front of the La. Tech bench, and Barmore), and we took turns hearing it from Tony.”

After several rotations, Wright had heard enough. She informed the red-faced coach that the TV camera crew had orders, if he was demonstrably upset, to immediately switch their feed off him. In addition, she told him the TV announcers were instructed to not comment on any of his normal overtly obnoxious behavior. So, he was wasting a lot of energy, Wright told Barmore, of the futility of putting on a show with no audience. In other words, on this night, all the world would not be his stage.

Also, she told him, her and her partner were not going to be intimidated by his antics. So, she gave him some friendly advice - he might as well sit down. However, she cautioned, if he wanted to continue to flop around like a chicken who had just made the ultimate sacrifice for a Sunday dinner back home on the family farm in Warrensburg, IL, then when he had a stroke, she and her partner Sansevere would respectfully suspend action until his butt could be carted out of the way and then they would resume play, “and we are going to go back to calling the game just the way we are now, but without you here.”

Did he appreciated the moxie of this young (female) official with cojones’ of a size in need of a wheelbarrow to cart around a basketball court? Maybe- because Barmore sat down. “After that, he was fine, and we had a great game. Tech won easily (by 22 points) because they had a better team,” Wright concludes, an assessment she agrees her friend Pat Head Summit would have never admitted to.

After Wright had endured three years of coaching in the Purgatory of high school, she was hired in the summer of 1977 to take over the volleyball program at Eastern Illinois University. The Panthers she inherited had a two-year program history won/loss record of 15-16. The sub-.500 mark had been compiled against such forgettable opposition as Taylor University, Principia College, and Earlham College.

Wright was only a couple years older than the four Red Bud girls she was now coaching, three at Eastern. It was her first college coaching job.

Wright had never played volleyball. She tells me she spent her three-month 1977 summer vacation reading every book she could find on coaching the sport. She must have found some good ones. Over her two years at Eastern, the only two years she coached volleyball before transitioning to softball, her Panthers had a record of 85-10. Big improvement over the 15-16 mark of the two years before Wright’s arrival. By now it was obvious, this lady could coach.

Those Red Bud girls were pretty good, Wright tells me, and wonderful young ladies. True, but the four, Deb, Diann, Kim, and Cindy, say she was a great coach. Almost 45 years later, after coaching tens of thousands, in college and on the many national and Olympic teams she managed; Wright not only remembers each of the Red Bud girls by name but recalls specific traits of each. “Sure, I remember Kim. She was the tall blond and I just loved her laugh. Very infectious.” Yep, that is her. Are you kidding me, Kim wants to know when I told her of Wright sending greetings. “How in the world does she remember me?”  But she admits, “I think of her often." Kim shares even then and that young, Wright had an impacting way about her.

Wright became one of the greatest college coaches ever because, amongst other skills, she cared enough to know and to remember her athletes. That motivates people and she is a motivator who has never accepted “no” from a boss. If it was for the benefit of her athletes, her approach became “let’s talk about this a little bit more.” It is why her whole life she has blown by adversity like it was roadkill.

Wright was inducted into the National Fastpitch Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 2000 and the International Women's Sports Hall of Fame in 2001. She is a member of eleven other halls of fame. She retired from Fresno State at the end of the 2012 season. She then returned to her native Illinois and settled in the Chicago suburbs, immersing herself in player development in the area’s thriving club softball scene. For years, two days a week, in the spring, the now almost 70-year-old legend made a four-hour round-trip drive to help coach her alma mater, Illinois State’s, softball team. She has a couple of sisters back down in the Normal, IL area and she can visit them on the coaching trip to ISU, as well. She has two brothers living nearby in the Chicago area and she can attend her nieces and nephews sporting events. Family is her life, now, she says, and life is good.

"Family has always been very important to me," she says. "When I had the opportunity to leave Illinois State for Fresno, it was the hardest decision I have ever made, because it meant leaving family. My mom (Eva) had breast cancer once and she beat it. But it came back in 1988 and it spread fast, and she passed. That was a tough year. We had a great team (that eventually took runner-up in the nation to UCLA) but I missed a lot of games that year, back home with mom. My dad (Kermit) eventually remarried, and he was always my biggest fan, as a player and as a coach. After he retired, he spent a lot of time with me in Fresno and saw us play often. He passed away in 2007."

Wright notes that it was her mother, when she was not allowed to play baseball at ten years of age, who demanded her dad start a softball team for her and the other girls of the area. She notes her dad spent hours of his limited non-work time and dollars the family really didn't have, to facilitate her dreams. And her mom was supportive every step of the journey.

"I was blessed to have the parents I had."

Coach Wright has spent her adult life working to ensure that young women have opportunities she never had.  She has led a heroic life and impacting life, deserving of the many honors that have been bestowed upon her. With me, she is cordial and good natured. I find numerous internet examples extolling how well liked and popular she was in the Fresno community. Spirited, caring, gracious, intelligent are but a few of the adjective accolades I find in local media reports. She is a nationally respected in demand motivational speaker. I find it easy to see why. Her optimism is contagious. I don't believe she would see the glass as half empty even if you dumped it on her head.

But let me warn you, try to screw with Title IX and she will nail your ass. She will turn you into roadkill, and then to make sure, she will hit reverse and run over you again. When it comes to equality and Title IX, she has no gear but high, no direction but balls out straight ahead. "The Office of Civil Rights sued FSU three times over Title IX issues in the athletic department while I was there," she tells me with a noticeable more serious tone, and the University was found non-compliant each time.

Since its inception in 1972, most Title IX proponents have always held football up as the boogey man. Wright does not like that approach. “It is a question of fairness, not a question of favoritism,” she tells me. “People do not understand that Title IX was meant to lift female sports up, not tear down men or take the popularity away from men’s sports.”

Critics claim that too many women’s sports advocates want to take a Tea Party scorched earth approach and slash spending for men’s sports across the board, beginning with football. It is true that since 1980, when Title IX became by law fully implemented, the number of football scholarships has been reduced from 120 to 105 to 95 to 85. Still, despite the cuts, Wright says 85 is more than football coaches need and skews the balance between the genders. Division II football schools get by with 65 scholarships, she points out.

Administrators who try to manipulate the rules - cook the books to meet ratio tests for compliance without providing funds, are a continued thorn with her. “I was always pressured (at Fresno State) to carry more and more on my softball roster,” she states. “Most years the administration gave me quotas of 28, 29 or 30 players. Now, they didn’t want to give me full scholarship allotments for anywhere near that many, just carry players I really didn’t need but it helped close the Title IX gap with participation data with the men’s programs,” the most often used of a three-prong test of equivalencies colleges can use to show Title IX compliance.

But Wright points out, convincingly, that these scholarship cuts have had no major impact on the product of major college football. In fact, she says, the sport is more popular than ever. “What you find with the cuts is more parity. The top schools can no longer stockpile all the best players.” She claims that parity from Title IX guidelines has made competition within the conferences stronger, not only in football, but in all sports, men, and women.

In 1992, the 5th year of Wright’s tenure at Fresno State, the US Department's' Office of Civil Rights, who now under new President Bill Clinton, oversaw Title IX, chose by random Fresno State for an exhaustive Title IX audit. In the thirteen areas the review covered, FSU was found to be significantly lacking in 11. Wright said she was not surprised. “At the time, we had a number of administrators, both in the Athletic Department and in the President’s office who did not believe women athletes deserved equal support.”

Wright’s main point of contention at Fresno State was over inequal treatment due to disparity in the softball/baseball complex. “It was such an easy comparison to make.” With the two sports, she says, the proverbial apples to apples comparative balance were easy to see, as were the inequities.

“It was not like we didn’t have community support and interest,” she says. The statistics bear out her conclusions. “We were playing at a facility called, ‘The Physical Education Field.’” The venue had seating for under 500. “Even with horrible facilities, for 20 out of my 27 years there as head coach, we led the nation in softball attendance. I am very proud of that because it shows that we sold our program to the community, and we did it the right way.” 

After the federal Office of Civil Rights backed her wish for a facility equal to the men’s baseball team, in 1992, three years later, to great fanfare. the Margie Wright Diamond opened. The venue cost $3.2 million to build. It featured 1,688 permanent seat-back chairs that include 388 box seats, sunken dugouts, lights, concessions stand, restrooms, practice areas, enclosed batting cages, press box and scoreboard. With standing room only, the crowd could swell to over 5,000.

Fresno State set the NCAA record for a single game softball crowd with 5,724 paying fans on March 14, 2000, to watch the Bulldogs take on Arizona. The Dogs also topped the 5,000 marks twice at home versus UCLA in 1996 (5,427, February 24) and 1997 (5,167, February 8). Securing a ticket to a softball game at Fresno State, when Coach Wright had the team rolling, was like trying to get a seat at the Last Supper.

In her 27 years seated at the end of the Fresno dugout bench, Wright’s team captured one NCAA title (1998), three NCAA runner-up finishes (1988, `89, `90), three NCAA third-place finishes (1991, `92, `97) and three NCAA fifth-place finishes (1987, `94, ‘99). Ten of her teams made the journey, as she had as a player, to the NCAA College World Series.

So why did the federal Office of Civil Rights, with her testimaony, feel compelled to sue her own University three times?

There is no ambiguity in the law, she says. “It doesn’t say might, it says must,” she tells me. One of her first requests when she arrived was to have lights installed at the team’s field so that night games could be held. “I had to beg,” she remembers.

It was never easy at Fresno State, she says. But she knew the law, inside and out, and she took every opportunity to push, then demand, what she knew the law intitled her players to. “It was my responsibility to provide for my student-athletes.” She fought and advocated along the long and crooked road to equality, while empowering generations of young women. “I wasn’t here to worry about making friends.” Asking her to dial down her advocacy for Title IX is like asking Dick Vitale to lower his voice.

The problem today, Wright says, is the disparity between the conferences themselves, not the members within the various conferences. “The Mountain West, Fresno State’s conference, for example,” she says, “the conference games are very competitive in almost all sports, both genders.” 

But she points out, due to the incredible amount of money individual conferences negotiate with TV networks, parity between conferences is out of balance. “They negotiate TV contracts as a group and the bigger conferences, the Power 5, as they are called, have the largest population markets, and command the most TV money. The Mountain West cannot compete for football TV money with the SEC or the Big 10. With USC and UCLA going to the Big 10 next year, the whole power structure has shifted again and is now even more concentrated within those two conferences (The SEC and the Big 10). And look what USC and UCLA leaving the PAC 10 does to the rest of those schools. Does Oregon look to leave next, go to the Big 10 or the SEC, and take all their Nike money with them?" 

"Then," the coach points out, "you have Texas and Oklahoma going to the SEC and the Big 8 schools lose even more TV money. Football dictates TV money and the money is just now crazy large. Then you throw in the craziness of the NIL (a major NCAA shift that allows athletes to cash in on endorsements using their name image, and likeness) and it complicates the whole process in a way we have never seen before." 

The NIL is going to exasperate the problem of the rich getting richer, she predicts. "We are going to end up with one or two ‘Super’ conferences and that is not good for college athletics, men or women, revenue, or non-revenue sports. And we are almost there.”

This coaching legend tells me she worries about the future of equality for female athletics. The current crop of female coaches and administrators, she notes, have no skin in the game. They are too young. When you are not handed things, you stay hungrier, she says. You ride packed in a van for six hours, like Wright and her teammates did at ISU way back in the 70s’, or you share a road trip motel room bed with a teammate, after a dollar menu supper, you bond, she becomes your sister. And that is how it was back then.

They, today's players, coaches and administrators of women's sports, didn’t fight the wars, learn to lean on the comradery. They have no idea what it was like at ten years of age to have the ball taken from your hand - the town Karen crush your dreams - simply because God made you a girl. It is hard to fight for something you never had to earn - or never knew you once a long time ago didn’t even have. We can’t go back she says, because she will never forget how it felt.