Patti Schultz is a physical education teacher at Fountain Hills Middle School. All three of her daughters played sports for Fountain Hills High School, and two of them played collegiately. Schultz was a collegiate swimmer herself and won a California state title with Orange Coast College in 1989.

Thursday, June 23, 2022, was the 50th anniversary of the signing of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. The law states that “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

Schultz started swimming in 1972, but she said Title IX was never really on her mind. Her brother was three years older and also swam, so Schultz just wanted to be competitive with him.

As Schultz got older, she joined more competitive leagues. She stopped swimming for a few years before a friend’s dad got her back into the sport. She swam all through high school and was the only girl to play water polo for her school.

“I don’t think I really knew there were inequalities going on,” Schultz said. “Maybe it was because I was in swimming, and it was a male and female sport. I was trying to think back, and I called [my mom] and said, ‘when I played water polo, was there anything you had to sign from the school?’ She goes, ‘no, they didn’t have a girls team and you signed up but they really made you play JV rather than varsity.’”

Schultz said that her old high school has since added a girls water polo program to the athletic department. When she was in college, Schultz practiced alongside her male teammates and had the same benefits and challenges as them. The school provided transportation and swimsuits, but Schultz wasn’t on scholarship and had to buy her own goggles.

“At that time though, there wasn’t money for swimmers,” Schultz said. “Other programs were getting money, so how they enticed us was giving us priority registration. At that time, to get classes was so difficult. We were in this priority registration group, and we would call on the phone, put in our course numbers and get classes.”

Many colleges offered intramural sport opportunities to women prior to Title IX, but women would have to pay for their own expenses. No athletic scholarships existed for the fewer than 30,000 women who participated in college sports in 1971-72, and women received only 2% of available athletic budgets prior to Title IX’s signing.

Female participation in sports has risen dramatically in the past 50 years. According to the Women’s Sports Foundation, one in 27 girls played sports before Title IX. As of 2016, the number of girls in sport rose to two in five.

Schultz believes that early exposure is one of the best ways to encourage more girls in sports. One of her former students went on to earn a volleyball scholarship, and she came back to tell Schultz if it weren’t for a lesson on volleyball in middle school, she never would have tried out for the high school team.

Another former student and teammate to her daughter Kelsey Shultz, Erika Yost, went on to be named the 2016-17 Gatorade Arizona Girls Soccer Player of the Year and committed to the University of Oklahoma as a high school sophomore. Yost played multiple sports for Fountain Hills, including soccer, cross country, track, volleyball and basketball.

Yost was born in Dallas, Texas, and started playing soccer at the age of four. She moved to Fountain Hills when she was 10 years old and joined a local club soccer team that helped her make friends in the area. Later, she joined the Scottsdale club team SC Del Sol, one of two Arizona club teams that compete in the Elite Clubs National League.

“I would say that three to five years old is the typical age range that most girls who made it to the college level started playing at,” Yost said. “I haven’t met a college player that started just in high school. When I was four, I just played on a rec team that my dad coached, but then I joined a competitive club team when I was seven or eight years old…Without my commitment to soccer outside of school and my parents providing me the opportunity to play club, I don’t think I would’ve gotten the opportunities I had.”

Yost played in showcase events around the country with her club team and college coaches would come watch her club practice in Scottsdale. Oklahoma’s head coach visited one day and was interested in Yost, so she asked for guidance from her club coaches and they helped her set up an official visit in Norman, Okla.

Yost graduated from Oklahoma this past May with a degree in interior design, and her capstone project was a new design idea for the Sooners soccer facility. The University of Oklahoma’s softball team made history this year as well. The Sooners went 59-3 and won the 40th Women’s College World Series (WCWS) Championship. This was the Sooners’ second consecutive title, and sixth championship overall, but this WCWS set a new precedent for women’s sports. Oklahoma’s 7-2 victory over Texas on June 4 became the first WCWS game ever to be live broadcasted on ABC.

“I would agree that there have been major improvements in access to sport, having equal facilities, and increased and improved media representation of women,” Yost said. “I would say one area I think could improve is the marketing of women’s sports. I remember my parents trying to go to every store in town and struggling to be able to find a soccer t-shirt. Marketing women’s sports more could help with bringing more attentions to the games.”

Title IX is not a perfect law. Many inequalities went unnoticed for years after it’s implementation, and some inequalities persist today. Just two years ago, the NCAA faced criticism for facility disparities in the 2020 NCAA basketball tournament. The men’s teams were given dumbbells, barbells and squat machines spread out in a large space to work out with between games, while teams at the women’s tournament were given a single rack of dumbbells to use.

Despite this, Title IX remains of the country’s biggest advancements of civil rights in the last 50 years.

“I think we’ve come a long way in regard to women sports,” Yost said. “There’s always room for improvement, but I’m so thankful to have gotten the opportunity to get an education and play soccer at the college level.”