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Sep. 27--Carol Sims heard stories. So did Barbara Comeaux and Linda Warner.
All three played or coached in various high school sporting events in Southeast Texas over the last 35 years, and they all know about Babe Didrikson Zaharias.
"I remember as a child my mother telling me about her," said Sims, soon to begin her 29th year coaching girls high school basketball, and her 10th at Hardin-Jefferson. "She told me about all the things she did and how she was a great role model for so many girls and women."
Zaharias won Olympic medals in track and field and competed against some of the world's best men's golfers. She is the only woman to make the 36-hole cut at a men's PGA Tour event.
A Port Arthur native who was raised in Beaumont, Zaharias played volleyball, basketball, softball and baseball. She excelled in bowling, tennis, swimming and diving. And she was a world class competitor in track and field events and golf.
If there was a sport being played, Zaharias wanted to be involved, even as cancer later sapped much of her energy.
Today marks the 50th anniversary of her death, yet she continues to live in the memories of those who grew up listening to stories about "The Babe."
"She paved the way for women, and not just in golf, but in basketball, track and so many other sports," said Comeaux, the girls athletic coordinator and volleyball and golf coach at Port Neches-Groves High School.
Tacked to a bulletin board outside Comeaux's office is a wallet-sized photograph of Zaharias.
"I put it there to remind people of who she was," Comeaux said.
Warner recalled visiting the Zaharias Museum just off Interstate 10 with her girls tennis team at Hardin-Jefferson.
"We were on our way back from a tournament and we drove past the museum and the girls asked, 'What's that?'" said Warner, who began coaching in the mid-1960s and is now an activities director at H-J. "I told them it was the museum, so we turned around and went to it."
Each of the three women -- Sims, Comeaux and Warner -- grew up when opportunities for women to participate in interscholastic sporting events at high schools and colleges were limited, and there were no laws making sure they had a chance to do so.
Yet Sims managed to have a Babe-like childhood that blossomed into a record-setting four seasons of playing basketball at Lamar University.
Sims played basketball, volleyball and softball and competed in track and field in high school while growing up in Warren, about 40 miles north of Beaumont. She also was among the first women to earn an athletic scholarship to Lamar.
Title IX brought change
Sims began playing basketball at the university in 1973, one year after Title IX, a law that prohibited discrimination at educational institutions, took effect.
Title IX requires men and women to have the same opportunities at all schools and colleges that receive federal funding -- and that includes athletic opportunities.
Until then, few women had opportunities to participate in athletics at the collegiate level. Sims, who held the Lamar scoring record of 1,571 points by the time she finished playing at the university in 1977, points to Title IX as the single most significant moment in women's sports.
"That changed everything," she said.
Comeaux, who began coaching at PN-G shortly after Title IX took effect, helped several girls earn athletic scholar-ships.
"I remember telling the girls how lucky they were," Comeaux said.
Comeaux said volleyball and tennis were among the first sports for girls at PN-G. She said track and field and golf were added in the early 1970s, then basketball later in the decade, softball in the late 1980s and soccer in the early 1990s.
"They were a little bit ahead of a lot of other schools in terms of giving girls a chance to play," Comeaux said.
Women make gains
In the year Title IX was enacted, girls participating in high school sports increased from 294,015 to 817,073 nation-wide and the ratio of boys to girls in high school sports dropped from 12.5-to-1 to 4.6-to-1, according to the National Federation of High School Associations.
In 2005-2006, more than 2.9 million girls played high school sports, and the ratio of boys to girls stood at 1.4-to-1.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association, which reported 1,045 schools in its membership in 2004-2005, did not sponsor women's athletics until the 1981-1982 academic year, nearly 10 years after Title IX was enacted. Until then, women competed in a separate organization.
By 1981-1982, the ratio of men-to-women in collegiate sports stood at 2.3-to-1. By 2004-2005, the most recent school year for which data is available, that ratio had been cut to 1.3-to-1.
In 1981-82, there were 6,843 men's athletic programs and 4,776 women's programs. In 2004-2005, women's programs outnumbered men's programs 9,074 to 8,135.
Babe set today's standard
Warner said female athletes today are living by the standard set more than a half-century ago by Zaharias. She said girls are more athletic now than ever before.
"The girls are more evolved athletically," said Warner, who grew up playing basketball in Arp, about 180 miles north of Beaumont. "Girls now spend so much time playing sports, just like the boys, and they're playing two or three or more sports."
Coaches acknowledge that women are swifter, stronger and can jump high enough so that the slam dunk in a women's basketball game will soon become routine. Yet Warner believes women and men will never be equally athletic.
"There will be a few women who will be able to match with men, but they won't do it consistently," she said. "I don't think God made us to be that way."
Donna Lopiano, the executive director at the Women's Sports Foundation, said the time for women and men to be playing alongside each other as equals will be two or three generations from now.
"If sports started out as a male and female activity, there would be a much better chance of that now," Lopiano said. "But sports have male roots. Sports were a place where men, like a warrior throwing the javelin spear, showed their dominance."
Co-ed teams on horizon
Lopiano cited mixed doubles tennis and an emergence of co-ed soccer at some universities as a sign of what might be to come.
"(Zaharias) is so significant, and Billie Jean King followed her, because of the exposure she brought to women's sports by competing against men," Lopiano said.
Title IX for Sims, Comeaux, Warner and millions of other women has meant receiving opportunities previous generations never had. Others believe the law restricts men from opportunities in college sports.
"It's an unintended consequence of Title IX," said University of Minnesota gymnastics coach Mike Burns, who has seen the number of schools with men's gymnastics fall from more than 120 to less than 20 over the years. "And it has a harsh effect on a lot of people. But girls are receiving opportunities they might not otherwise get, so that's a good thing."
Men's programs cut
Burns said people need to be reminded that Title IX is an educational amendment, not an athletic amendment. He said people lose sight of the fact that the law was created to prohibit gender discrimination in education, but the attention surrounding the law has carried onto playing fields and courts and into arenas and stadiums.
Hundreds of men's athletic programs for gymnastics, wrestling and track and field have been cut by universities trying to remain in compliance with Title IX regulations.
"Maybe the pendulum has swung too far," said Burns, who is currently training Jasper native Clay Strother for the upcoming World Gymnastics Championships.
LU adding soccer
At Lamar, one women's sport will begin playing next year, and another might follow soon after that. The Cardinals will field a women's soccer team for the first time next season, and the university is expected to begin a softball program sometime after that.
Doing so might allow the school to have enough additional athletic opportunities for women for the ratio of men-to-women among athletes to be equal to the ratio among the general student body should the university add football, as has been long discussed by school officials.
The addition or subtraction of each sport on campuses around the country is done for the sake of equality. With op-portunity, however, comes raised expectations.
Pay scales improving
Sims said she would like to see more equitable pay between male and female athletes. In some sports, that has become a reality.
The men's and women's shares at the U.S. Open tennis tournament are equal, with $1.2 million apiece going to both singles champions.
The men's Professional Golfers Association will offer $77.6 million in prizes over 47 tournaments for an average of $1.65 million per tournament this year.
The LPGA, the women's golf association created in part by Zaharias, will offer $52.8 million in prizes over 36 tournaments for an average of $1.47 million this year. The total amount of prize money in the LPGA has increased by nearly $10 million in the last two years alone.
Comeaux and Sims both said they would like to see more media and fan attention paid to women's sports, yet Sims said one of her lasting sports memories is seeing 10,000 fans in the Montagne Center for a women's basketball NCAA tournament game in 1991.
"I never thought I would see that day, not when I was playing in front of 100 people," said Sims, whose scoring record was broken by Uirannah Jackson, who finished with 1,730 points over four seasons.
Comeaux earns top pay
Warner said she believes men and women's coaches deserve to be paid equally.
"They both work the same number of hours, and women's coaches work just as hard and have as many games as the men, so they should be paid equally," said Warner, who recalls coaching basketball when girls were allowed only to play half-court.
A gap in pay between men and women still exists, but it is shrinking. Tennessee women's basketball coach Pat Summitt became the first female coach to earn more than $1 million in annual salary.
At $70,306.18, Comeaux was the highest paid coach at Port Neches-Groves, making nearly $2,000 more than head football coach Matt Burnett according to records for the 2005-2006 school year provided by the PN-G Independent School District.
The half-court basketball days for girls are long gone. Now coaches wonder if girls today are aware of Zaharias and what she accomplished.
"That's something I'd have to say we've dropped the ball on as coaches," Sims said about teaching girls about Zaharias. "I would say not 50 percent of the girls would know who she was."
Yet Sims, like Comeaux and Warner, will never forget about Zaharias, the woman they heard so much about as young girls.
"There was no one like her," Sims said.
cdabe@beaumontenterprise.com (409) 880-0744
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Copyright (c) 2006, The Beaumont Enterprise, Texas
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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