It's the 50^th anniversary for Title IX this summer and it makes me think of former, ahem, Lady Highlander hooper Beth Cleavenger. 

Educational amendment Title IX was enacted in 1972 and prohibited federally funded educational institutions from discriminating against students or employees based on sex. 

Beth Cleavenger was a basketball player from Stuarts Draft that helped me understand how important this was when I arrived at Radford. She opened my eyes about women's athletics.

A wiry, tough-as-nails competitor, Beth was among eight freshmen on coach Pat Barrett's 1980-81 team, and quite honestly, even with the absolute, amazing brilliance of her classmate Nan Millner, it was Cleavenger who was doing things I had never seen women do on a basketball court.

Cleavenger played like a guy.

This sheltered Salem kid had never seen that before. And I remember, back then, saying I could give no higher compliment. Times change. I still watch a ton of basketball – for business and pleasure – and now I often wish the guys played more like the gals. Their game is more like the basketball I grew up with – yes, below the rim but so much more reliant on team-play and precision.

Anyway, what I thought was a compliment back in the day was my own naïve condescension. Cleavenger, a 5-11 wing forward with guard skills, opened my eyes. She had a textbook jump shot, saw the whole court, fed Millner for an awful lot of Nan's 1,069 points, and was tough defensively and on the boards. I remember her frequently in the passing lane stealing the ball and triggering the Lady Highs' break.

Back in high school, the thing I remember most about the girls in athletics was the terrible bloomers they had to wear in PE class. The varsity basketball uniforms didn't seem a lot better – interchangeable for basketball or volleyball at the time. In fact, when the first "modern day" athletics got underway at Radford College in 1971 with women's hoops, the next year when volleyball started, the volleyball team did borrow the basketball uniforms.

There wouldn't be any men's uniforms at Radford until 1974. Heck, there weren't any men until 1972, and thanks again for that change, Dr. (Donald) Dedmon.

I was rapt at the stories I heard from those early sports years from Barrett, volleyball coach Janell Dobbins and Charlene Curtis. Barrett told me about that first varsity season – the purple-and-white clad team went 10-0 and dreamed of competing in the state tournament in Richmond which included all the women's teams at all the colleges, no distinction in Division I, II or III, back when most women's programs played in the newly-formed AIAW (Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women).

Only problem was Radford had no money left in the budget. They had that one set of uniforms and dined on bag lunches from the cafeteria when they took to the road in a '63 Chevy and a big green station wagon. President Charles Martin finally told Barrett the school would pay for the trip but that was about all Radford could afford at the time. No long-distance phone calls, please.
Before the team left, though, Radford sororities handed Barrett envelopes stuffed with cash – no NCAA violation here; we weren't NCAA yet. When the team arrived in Richmond, Barrett spread the money on a bed and divided it evenly among the team. "That got us through the weekend," she told me years later.

Radford won two games and lost two but started a winning tradition that carried the program through AIAW to NCAA Division II (ranked 13^th in the country in 1983-84, Cleavenger's senior year) and the following year into Division I where Radford was the gold standard in women's basketball in the brand new Big South Conference.

Barrett, a physical education and health professor at Radford, was self-taught as a coach. She was a great player at New London Academy in Forest, Va., and later at Lynchburg College, and a determined competitor who loved building her Radford teams around homegrown Virginia athletes.

One of my favorite Barrett stories demonstrated her competitive desire. In the early 70s, to become a better coach, she attended a Bobby Knight coaching clinic in Indiana to master his man-to-man defensive principles. She was the only woman there among about 300 men's coaches. She never had a losing season at Radford and influenced more lives among her players than we can list here. She was always a teacher first on the court and a great one.

Dobbins, like Barrett, a long-time professor at Radford and also enshrined in the school's athletics Hall of Fame, was cut from a similar plaid cloth. She just won and won, and like Barrett, she didn't care to follow her program into Division I with more recruiting pressure and travel. She retired in 1985, and three coaches followed the next three years before Athletic Director Chuck Taylor talked her into returning. Dobbins won 90 more games the next five years, including three championships and a trip to the 1993 NCAA Tournament.

She wrapped up her career with a school-record 369 wins. Over 150 more than the next closest on the RU list. Nine 20-plus win seasons in 19 years, and two years with 30-or-more. 
It should be mentioned that the flight to Los Angeles to meet powerhouse USC in the NCAA Tournament – Dobbins' last match -- was a far cry from the days of green station wagons and bag lunches.
 
Radford Leading the Way. Again
 
When I was a student, Radford added field hockey and women's soccer in 1981, creating more athletic opportunities for women. Both teams rocketed onto the national scene, each program nationally ranked in those early years. Women's soccer would earn the school's first NCAA Division I postseason appearance in 1985, a year they also won the prestigious WAGS (Washington Area Girls Soccer) Tournament.

Those women's soccer teams of the early 80s competed on equal footing with everyone from the ACC to any soccer program nationwide. When more money entered the equation in a big way at Power Five schools, the playing field changed, but women's soccer is still a major winner to this day with four NCAA appearances the last 12 years under coach Ben Sohrabi and seven total during his tenure.

In field hockey, where our athletes actually wore all the school colors on a tartan kilt and competed in the Colonial Athletic Association back when it was filled with state rivals, there was a family feel that has always been part of the school back to M'Ledge Moffett.

One of my classmates, Laurie Morris (Bell) was a driving force starting the team and an early star, then a very successful coach here and at Northern Illinois. My friend Jeff Woods, the Gil Thorpe of Radford (in his time on staff he coached field hockey, volleyball, softball and baseball) took over. An Olympic caliber athlete – he played and coached on the U.S. men's national team and is simply a gold medal person. He nurtured a program that was perhaps more Radford than any other.

Generations of young ladies were part of he and his wife, Maria's extended family, older sisters and babysitters to their four kids, and proud Highlanders who were crushed when the program was dropped in 2014, a victim of the changing landscape in college athletics still sending ripples through college sports to this day.

Women's lacrosse, already a Big South Conference sport, was added in 2016. It was a bit of a turnabout at Radford where the school was so far ahead of our fellow Big South members in the mid-80s in women's athletics that I was often embarrassed for the other schools. 

First, that's easy for me to say. I was the only full-time assistant sports info director in the league but that's just one example of more money and more attention focused on the women at Radford.

I should also add that the early Radford-Campbell women's basketball rivalry (the Camels got it, too, in women's sports) was as good as it gets in college athletics. I still get sweaty palms just thinking about the great games those two teams played with high stakes and great players and loud gyms. You had to be there. 

And I covered Duke-Maryland men's games the early part of this century, so trust me, I know intense basketball rivalries.
 
Ladies First
 
Life as a mid-major Division I isn't easy, and the money – thus staffing, facilities, resources – are often at a premium. The commitment I saw for women's athletics was exceptional and one I was proud to be part of at my alma mater because I understood Radford's history and our mission. In 1993, Women's Sports & Fitness magazine ranked RU 10^th in the nation in percentage of women's athletes and percentage of the athletic budget spent on them.

Radford was forward-thinking in those regards thanks to our athletic director, Dr. Chuck Taylor, who became an absolute champion for the then-Lady Highlanders and for women in the entire Big South Conference, pushing other schools to be better and do better.

Ironically, though, it was also a time when we stopped running pictures of our athletic staff in home game programs because there were so many men in head coaching and staff positions, and ahem, sports media roles.

I remember showing up after another women's basketball conference championship (RU won eight of the first nine Big South crowns) at the NCAA Tournament first round at Tennessee, the Lady Vols hosting. At the pre-event staff meeting in the offices of the exclusively WOMEN'S athletic department there in Knoxville, our staff arrived – head coach Lubomyr Lichonczak, senior women's administrator Chuck Taylor and sports info contact me. It was not an impressive display of gender equity.

Fortunately, Jackie Clouse was our head athletic trainer and would soon become our senior women's administrator. She was already a role model for so many young women in our department, a consummate professional and an early pioneer as a female head trainer for men's teams, as well as women's.

As for the lack of female coaches, honestly, we couldn't afford top women coaches. They commanded higher salaries than Chuck could pay, and he didn't care about the optics as much as he cared about hiring the best, most experienced coaches he could afford.

I still remember the hackles going up in that huge meeting room that morning at UT, and I don't think it's coincidence they laid a 41-point beating on us a day later as Pat Head Summit made a point. 

To this day, I HATE the song "Rocky Top." 

I remember what Chuck told folks that asked about HIM being senior women's administrator. With a daughter playing sports by this time, there was a lot of sincerity in his answer if not the whole truth: "It's too important a job for anyone else."