BookShelf: About the Road to Title IX, and Jesse Diggins

The following is excerpted from Break Point: Two Minnesota Athletes and the Road to Title IX (University of Minnesota Press, 2022) by Sheri Brenden. The book details the story of Peggy Brenden, the author’s sister, and Toni St. Pierre, two high-school athletes who fought for equality in girls’ sports and helped set a legal precedent in schools before Title IX. The following excerpt describes the state of girls’ sports prior to Title IX’s passage and why Sheri Brenden is passionate about this case.

 

In the early 1970s, few girls imagined themselves as athletes, schools barely budgeted for girls’ sports, and state tournaments and college scholarships were intended for boys. The starring roles were always male; females were cast as “adoring fan,” “pretty girlfriend,” or “perky cheerleader.” We all knew the familiar plot line: Boy joins team. Boy encounters and overcomes obstacles. Boy wins championship thanks to courage, hard work, team spirit, and support from coach and community. Everyone loves that story!

“Historically, what it meant to be an athlete was the same thing as what it meant to be male. In contrast, what it meant to be female traditionally was the antithesis of being an athlete,” says Mary Jo Kane, founder of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota. “We were told for generations that the reason that girls and women didn’t play sports is because it was preordained, biologically, physiologically.”

“There was just absolutely no thought that institutions should put any resources into women’s sports,” Kane adds. “In the 1970s, the Minneapolis park board spent more money on boys’ hockey sticks than on the entire girls’ program combined.” Colleges didn’t offer any athletic scholarships to women. “The prevailing attitude was girls aren’t interested in sports. And even if they were, they wouldn’t be any good. Why make the investment? Girls aren’t supposed to play sports.

All that changed on May 1, 1972, when Judge Miles W. Lord issued a federal court decision that opened the door for two Minnesota girls from public schools in St. Cloud and Hopkins, Minnesota to compete on their high school athletic teams. With the help of the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union, Peggy Brenden and Toni St. Pierre — one a tennis player, the other an endurance athlete who ran and skied cross-country — had sought the opportunity to train and compete head to head against other high school athletes. Previously, their schools offered only a smattering of sports options for girls and forbade girls from competing with boys.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota points to the decision as one of its eight most significant cases. Upon appeal, it was upheld by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, establishing a legal precedent that pressed schools across the country to create sports participation opportunities for girls. In addition, the Eighth Circuit panel pointed out that Title IX, a relatively new civil-rights law enacted to protect women’s access to educational opportunities, should be interpreted to include athletics. Even though Title IX doesn’t specifically mention sports, the court declared that interscholastic athletics were an important educational opportunity, and “discrimination in high school athletics constitutes discrimination in education.”

The case unlocked the gates to an arena that had been constructed with only one gender in mind. Girls everywhere who had once stood on the sidelines started to see themselves racing to a finish line, scoring a crucial point, or claiming a victory. My interest in this history is especially keen because it involves my sister. Almost six years older than I am, Peggy Brenden is the benchmark by which I measure my actions. She’s the compass I use to calibrate my path, my possibilities. I’ve had my eye on her since I was born. And because she is my sister, I witnessed her part in this history as it happened on the tennis court, in our house, and at school. I was watching from a front-row seat.

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The following is an excerpt from Brave Enough (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) by Jessie Diggins and Todd Smith. The book recounts Diggins’ journey from Afton, Minnesota to the PyeongChang 2018 Olympic Winter Games, when she helped secure the first Olympic gold medal for cross-country skiing for the United States. In the following excerpt, Diggins describes her path to making the U.S. national team.

 

At the 2011 World Championships, I finally qualified for the heats in the skate sprint (but to be fair, this isn’t as hard as it sounds, because each country can start only four athletes at World Championships and Olympics). Although I finished twenty-ninth in the sprint (what the heck, I somehow beat somebody!) and twenty-eighth in the pursuit, my biggest happy moment was yet to come.

I had been scheduled to fly home to compete at junior nationals the following week, but my results, effort, and potential kept me on the World Championships team, and I was given the chance to anchor the 4 x 5K relay. This was huge for me, because it was the first time that I got the opportunity to draw face paint on everybody! I felt like part of the crew! The team was made up of Kikkan Randall, Holly Brooks, Liz Stephen, and then me as the anchor. We finished in ninth place, but it was the best relay finish for the U.S. women’s team in thirty years. It also marked the first time that I anchored a relay team for the United States. Since that race, I’ve anchored every relay over the past nine years with the exception of being sick once. Even though they put me last simply because the older women could keep us in the race longer, that was the day I began to learn what it meant to carry pressure and take the team across the finish line. It became a valuable learning experience for me. 

Back in the United States, I skied in the 2011 junior national races close to home in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I swept the series, gaining confidence race by race, experimenting with strategy and tactics. It was the perfect complement to racing in the big leagues in Europe. The highlight was winning the relay with my teammates and having so much fun living with this group of skiers.

That spring, I traveled to Sun Valley, the place of my epic rocks-in-the-butt wipeout, for “spring series,” the second part of the U.S. national races, which included a few SuperTour races and the 30K mass start distance national title. It was a classic race, not my strong suit, and my first time racing 30 kilometers. I was in so much pain that I started to cry during the race but refused to give up or back off the pace. Sadie Bjornsen remembers me passing her and that in between gasping, wheezing breaths, I was sobbing. I mean, what the hell? Who cries in a race? I cried the whole way up the final steep hill, somehow powering to the finish line and the podium. Shortly thereafter, I got a call from the national team, and they offered me a spot. 

I had made the national team literally through blood, sweat, and tears.

I still had a college acceptance waiting for me, and I had some lingering doubts about stepping off the traditional path. I called the NMU head coach, Sten Fjeldheim, and hesitantly told him I had been offered a spot on the national team. His reaction stays with me to this day, because of how incredible it was. Instead of trying to persuade me to come race for him and make him look brilliant by winning NCAA titles, he said, “Don’t come here. You have an amazing opportunity to go out and chase down your dreams. You’ve really got something here, and I think you need to see it through. If you ever change your mind, we’ll be here waiting for you, but I don’t think college is the right path for you.” His words really freed me, cutting through any last worries I had and relieving any stress I felt about letting him down by not showing up on his doorstep in September. So I put college indefinitely on hold and dedicated my life to racing for the U.S. national team.