6
Friday, October 24.1975
University Daily Kausan
Women coaches pushing changes
At a time when NCAA men's athletic programs across the country having to trim budgets or die, women's intercollegiate athletics are gathering strength nationwide.
Nowhere is this illustrated more graphically than at the University of Kansas, where the addition of salaried coaches, scholarships to women athletes and women interested in playing have given rise to a young yet diversified program.
And yet, to say the program was skeletal
Staff Photo by DON PIERCE
Golf coach Nancy Boozer
instructs daughter Beth
three short years ago is an understatement. Physical education teachers coached the teams in their "spare" time, and administrative leadership was non-existent.
Most of the women's coaching staff today are former competitors in sports events.
Marian Washington, who doubles as the basketball coach, was a two-time All-Star for the U.S. State College and was a member of the United States National Team for three years. This summer, she toured the Soviet Union as a $m$ member of the United States team.
Ken Snow, women's gymnastics coach, was a four-year letterman in that sport at Kansas State, and was the Big Eight champion in floor exercise.
TENNIS COACH TOM Kivisto was a three-year starter on the KU basketball team. He was the co-captain of the squad that finished fourth in the NCAA four-
Jack Igar, volleyball coach, isn't a former competitor. He's a volleyball fanatic. A practicing lawyer who began his coaching career with a local community center's men's team, Igar gravitated to women's team, because he thought it was more exciting.
Washington's career is women's athletics. But the others had varied answers to as whether they would make a career of coaching women's sports.
"Coaching women's athletics has possibilities as a career," Snow said. "But it is a challenge."
Along with his coaching duties, Snow is a local distributor of gymnastics supplies for the United States.
SNOW SAID IF HE continued as a gymnastics coach, he would stay with women's gymnastics because it was a major sport for women but only a minor sport for men. He is also an assistant men's gymnastics coach here and a head coach at Kansas State University.
"Men's gymnastics isn't generating outside interest," Snow said. "It's a minor issue."
Swimming coach Claire McElroy said she would stay in coaching at a college or
Kivisto, a graduate student in architecture, said he was coaching a women's sport because of the challenge it presented to him.
"The pressures of competing are external," he said. "Coaching barriers are internal. I demand from myself now than I did when I was slaving basketball."
Kivisto declined to say whether he would in coaching or pursue a career in architecture.
Kiviste's re-entr into sports as a coach illustrates what Washington said was one of his biggest disappointments.
"Athletics is the basis of my being,"
Gymnastics coach Ken Snow watches performance
Staff Photo by DON PIERCE
Kelly Scott Sports Writer
Washington said. "After you've been competing awhile, you feel the need to get out. But after you're out you feel the need to hang on to it."
WASHINGTON SAID the possibility that women's sports could gain into a big-time market would be unrealistic.
She said she thought many top women's sports administrators who coached part time would return to full-time coaching if there was enough money in it.
If professional women's sports take off, college sports will be under pressure to produce top athletes, she said. If that means a higher value of college coaching jobs will go on.
All the coaches agreed that better coaching was needed in high schools
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Because few high schools have developed
Snow said the gymnasts he had this year were better prepared than last year, and he thought the situation would get better each year.
HE SAID THE COACHING clinics KU gonourised periodically were aimed at
women's sports programs, several coaches said they spent time teaching basic skills when they could have spent it on advanced training.
Many injuries to young women athletes could be avoided, he said, if high school coaches would learn the proper way to condition and train them.
The presence of scholarship players on her teams, Washington said, gave her expectations of them she didn't think were fair.
The coaches said the addition of scholarship players on their teams had changed their approach to coaching and they now have power to recruit they didn't have before.
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