For one South Jersey family, Title IX runs deep

When Joan Falato played high school softball the T-shirt jerseys were "cheaply made" and "frilly," the gym uniforms were one-piece rompers and the biggest sporting events always involved the boys, especially the football team.

There also was no such thing as Title IX.

"It wasn't important that a woman was a good pitcher, or a good first basemen, or a good catcher. It wasn't important," Falato, 78, said. "It was just fun."

The Clementon native and a 1952 graduate of Lower Camden County Regional High School, now Overbrook Regional, never could have imagined the changes in uniform, equipment, and even the rules of the game in some circumstances, that her daughters and granddaughters would become accustom to.

"Who even knew that the girls were good because you never saw them," Falato said of her early experiences with athletics. "You just heard about what the boys did."

Title IX is a 1972 landmark legislation that bans sex discrimination in schools, whether it be in academics or athletics.

Thanks to that law, Falato's daughter Dawn Falato Cauley, 50, and granddaughter, Paige Cauley, 22, have benefited through greater access, encouragement, and acceptance for women and girls in sports.

All three generations of women were encouraged early on to participate in sports through their parents and watching their older sisters play.

Falato, one of three sisters, was always competing with her siblings to see who could catch or run the fastest.

"When I had kids, there was no thought in my mind that they wouldn't play sports," Falato said. "I guess because the three of us were so competitive and loved sports so much."

Falato Cauley, four years younger than her sister Sherrie, would keep score at her older sister's games. By the time she was a freshman at Sterling High School in Somerdale, she was on the field hockey, basketball and softball teams, eventually being inducted in the school's athletic Hall of Fame in 1992.

While Falato Cauley in part put her two daughters, Britt, 24, and Paige into sports to keep them out of trouble, she knew her daughters' athletic talents could eventually be an opportunity to help with college.

By the time Paige was deciding which university to attend, she knew that "softball was my in."

A three-year starter at second base at Mercy College in New York, she had previously started her freshman year at Iona College before transferring.

Signed into law, June 23, 1972, Title IX is often misunderstood and misrepresented. Encompassing 10 separate components, including math, science and sexual harassment, the original law did not explicitly focus on women's athletics. But almost 40 years later, the advancements in women's athletics are predominantly what the law is remembered for.

Today more than 186,000 women participate in college athletics, while fewer than 30,000 competed before the law was enacted. According to the Women's Sports Foundation there were over three million female high school athletes for the 2007-2008 academic year, compared with 4.3 million high school male athletes.

"Often people think that if there are 10 women on the tennis team that there should be a male tennis team with 10 men getting scholarships. The law is not about a team-to-team comparison but it is more that there are equal opportunities for girls and boys across all of the teams," Women's Sports Foundation CEO, Kathryn Olson said.

"It is all in the spirit of equality, equal opportunity, and this is really about education for our youth," Olson added.

In a 2003 Gallup poll, 30 percent of Americans acknowledged they had heard nothing about the policy. The year before Jennifer Capriati, a Gold medalist, Grand Slam winner, and former No. 1 ranked women's tennis player admitted to having never heard of Title IX.

But the law is also often viewed as controversial, with some believing it perpetuates reverse discrimination on male athletes. And April 2011 reports by the New York Times demonstrated how institutions can evade the law and still be considered in compliance.

"What would be the ideal situation is that people don't have to think day to day about Title IX because everyone is following the law, the compliance is there, and the focus is on the educational opportunities provided for the girls," Olson said. "We are not in that state."

For the Cauley and Falato families though, Title IX has been an important part of their story, even if they do not claim to know much about it.

"I really don't remember hearing anything about it," Falato Cauley, who was in middle school when the policy was signed into law, said. "I don't ever remember talking about it, or our coaches talking about it."

Just like her parents and grandparents before them, Cauley hopes to continue the pattern of keeping sports all in the family with her own children in the future.

"Because of how much I enjoyed it [sports] and how much it did for me, I want my daughter to have the same thing," Cauley said.

"And I'll be her coach."