When Carmen Schmitt '97 stepped onto campus as a freshman four years ago, she was surprised tto find that Dartmouth had no varsity women's volleyball team.
What she found instead was a club team unfunded by the College which struggled each year to pay for traveling expenses, uniforms and equipment. The team lacked permanent coaching, and team members were responsible for determining their own competition schedules. "Volleyball is such a popular girls' sport in high school," she said. "I just didn't understand why there wasn't a varsity team offered here."
But Schmitt has witnessed tremendous changes since her freshman year.
This past year she was the captain of the women's varsity volleyball team which has full-time coaching, new equipment and guaranteed practice time in Leede Arena.
Schmitt and her teammates owe much of their progress to Title IX a law established 25 years ago which has greatly increased opportunities for women in intercollegiate athletics.
The word "athletics" is mentioned nowhere in the mandate. But oddly enough, Title IX has catapulted the status of female athletics at American colleges and universities with Dartmouth ranking among the top in compliance with this law.
Coincidentally, as women in sports prepare to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Title IX, Dartmouth is also celebrating its 25th anniversary of coeducation.
Within the relatively short span of time since women began attending Dartmouth and the establishment of Title IX, the College has made great strides in achieving gender equity in athletics, Director of Athletics Dick Jaeger said.
"Title IX is a concept we believed in from the start," Jaeger said. "I think we still have ways to go, but currently we are the glowing model of gender parity in athletics."
Statistics show Dartmouth has had very little trouble meeting the standards of Title IX in recent years.
The College was ranked first among NCAA Division I-AA schools in its ratio of female athletes to the total number of female undergraduates in the student population, according to an analysis by USA Today two months ago.
The Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act report released by the College in October 1996 reported 52.8 percent of the varsity athletes are male and 47.2 percent were female.
The numbers almost exactly match the ratio of male to female undergraduates 52.4 percent of the student population is male and 47.6 percent female.
Title IX regulations mandate that the percentage of female athletes must be within five percentage points of the number of female undergraduates a standard the College more than meets.
Amy Coelho '97, captain of the women's ice hockey team said "we're on par with the men's team.We get the same treatment they do."
Laura Mills '00, pitcher for the women's softball team, said she was "very impressed when I came here, because I think the school treats women athletes amazingly."
Mills said she thinks Title IX has allowed many women to take their athletics to another level.
Jaeger said the College has been working very hard for the past few years to provide equal opportunities for female athletes "without compromising the caliber of the athletic program."
Although the College is currently a model for Title IX equity, achieving this equity over the yeardid not come without struggles.
Dartmouth's history of being an all-male institution until 1972 made achieving gender equity much more difficult than it was elsewhere.
"It was a slow and steady process," Harper said. "But Dartmouth was ready to embrace women in the same way it embraced men just by being aware of interests and by the steady adding of programs."
Harper said the women who participated in athletics during the early years of coeducation came from small private preparatory schools, where they had been exposed to athletics.
"These women probably wanted to continue athletics when they came to the College," she said.
Jaeger said changes in societal attitude towards female athletics have contributed largely to the
increasing participation of women in college athletics, a trend he hopes to see continue.
