By Jerry Hill
Baylor Bear Insider
Stacey Smith couldn’t help herself and didn’t even try. She “cried like a baby” the first day the $18.1 million Clyde Hart Track and Field Stadium opened in 2014 and the team ran out to the brand-new complex for the first time. “It was just overwhelming,” said Smith, a nine-time All-American who’s in her 21st year on the Baylor track and field staff and first as associate head coach. “I cried because I was so happy for them, and I felt like we had paved the way for them to have this opportunity to have a facility like this. It was just joy, I would say.” Smith knew just how far the program had come since training and competing at the old Hart/Patterson Track & Field Complex, which didn’t even have a locker room or weight room and only had one jumping pit when she came to Baylor in 1995. “I tell them all the time, we didn’t have much, but we did great with what we didn’t have,” said Smith, who became Baylor’s first individual NCAA national champion when she won the 1999 outdoor triple jump. “(Today’s student-athletes) have been blessed. If we had anything close to what they have now with facilities and the resources they have, I feel like we all would have been national champions.”
Baylor Women’s Track & Field – 1982
Fifty years after the passing of the Education Amendments of 1972 that included the game-changing Title IX legislation, each generation has had it better than the last. Title IX states, “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.” In those 50 years, Baylor women’s athletics has gone from an extramural program for physical education majors to non-scholarship intercollegiate athletics to fully-funded programs and the addition of four sports since 1995. The Bears have gone from consistent cellar dwellers that struggled to compete in the old Southwest Conference to national prominence with the women’s programs winning 52 of Baylor’s 92 Big 12 Conference championships, three NCAA national titles in women’s basketball, four Women’s College World Series appearances in softball and seven-consecutive NCATA national championships in acrobatics & tumbling. “Title IX has done a great deal to equal the playing field for women and girls,” said former women’s basketball standout Maggie Davis-Stinnett (1986-91), who was inducted into the Baylor Athletics Hall of Fame in 2001. “I am excited that women and girls have come to be respected as not only women, but athletes who deserve an equal playing field to reach their potential. As a girl from East Waco, I can be a witness to the purpose and benefits of Title IX.”
Baylor Women’s Basketball – Maggie Davis
While the resources were still limited in the 1990s when Smith was in school, they were non-existent in the 1960s when the “Bearettes” played extramurals and were governed by the Division of Girls and Women’s Sports. That was the precursor for the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW). Legendary University of Texas coach Jody Conradt thought her playing days were over when she came to Baylor from Goldthwaite (Texas) in 1959. “In almost all those little Texas towns, girls grew up playing sports, particularly basketball,” said Conradt, who was added to the Baylor Wall of Honor in 2019. “I just assumed that was happening for everybody. It wasn’t until I got to Baylor that I realized that my experience was different from most girls, particularly if they grew up in one of the metropolitan areas.” As a small-town girl just looking for a way to fit in, Jody happened to walk into Rena Marrs McLean Gymnasium one day and saw a group of women playing basketball. When she inquired about how you got involved, the answer was “you had to be a physical education major.” “At Goldthwaite High School, there was no such thing as a physical education teacher. There was a coach and that was it,” she said. After playing for the basketball team as a freshman, when she went to register for classes for the next semester, she had a note that said to go by the physical education desk. Jody couldn’t continue to play on the team if she wasn’t a physical education major. But, coach Olga Fallen told her, “Just sign up now, you can change it later.”
Baylor Women’s Basketball – Coach Olga Fallen
Traveling in individual cars, the team would play in weekend tournaments and get back in time to be in class Monday morning. “That was pretty much the extent of the competition and the opportunities,” Conradt said. “Everybody played in the same tournament, so it didn’t matter if you were the tiniest college in Texas or the biggest. It was just, ‘here’s a tournament, we’re going to play for a couple days. Come and enter.’ But it was great fun for those of us that enjoyed being a part of a team and had some skill.” From that chance introduction to the basketball team, Jody ended up earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Baylor in physical education and began a Hall of Fame coaching career that saw her win 900 games as a head basketball coach and the 1986 NCAA national championship. Conradt, who retired from coaching in 2007, said she never imagined how far the game would come in the 50 years since Title IX. “I just knew how important the experience had been to me and how I valued that as much as anything that I had ever experienced in my life,” she said. “Even all the way back to when I started (coaching), I don’t think about the wins and losses. I think about how many women had an opportunity to do really special things because there were opportunities. That’s what Title IX did. It didn’t say anything about athletics. But I know that less than 10% of the people in medical school and law school at that point in time were women. Now, it’s more than 50%. So, it was a gigantic thing.” While there is evidence of women playing sports at Baylor as far back as 1900, the first true intercollegiate varsity sports were ushered in during the early 1970s. Although the scholarship actually came from Clyde Hart’s track program, Suzie Snider from nearby Robinson High School became Baylor’s first female scholarship student-athlete in 1973, winning the shot put at the AIAW national track meet in ’75.
Suzie Snider
“When Baylor really started to become good, along came Suzie Snider Eppers,” said Conradt, who was coaching at UT Arlington when Baylor brought in Snider Eppers. “She changed the game because she was an incredibly unique athlete. She not only had great skill, but she was tall (6-foot-1) by standards then.” Inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame earlier this year, Snider finished her four-year career at Baylor with a school-record 3,861 points and 2,176 rebounds, marks that will likely never be broken. Coached by Fallen, the BU women made their first AIAW national tournament in 1976 and finished fifth in 1977 with a 33-12 record. In a lot of ways, the amenities and resources at Baylor were less than what Eppers had at Robinson High School. “When I first went to Baylor, we dressed in a (physical education) locker room that had a row of baskets that rolled around. That’s where we kept our stuff,” she said. “Whenever we traveled to a ball game, we traveled in our own cars.” Also part of that 1976-77 women’s basketball team was Paula Young, who came to Baylor from West High School as a walk-on for the basketball and softball programs. Since Paula and her twin sister, Pam, were both in school at the same time, they qualified for financial aid, “and that’s how we got to come here.”
Baylor Women’s Basketball – 1976-77
“I don’t know how it compared back then, but we were a walk-on program,” Paula said. “We were just excited to be able to compete and have an opportunity to play for Baylor.” Like Conradt and Eppers before her, Paula remembers traveling in individual cars, “five or six people per car. . . . Three or four hours was the longest trip, our little caravan following Coach Fallen’s car. I don’t remember eating out at any restaurants or anything. We probably paid for our own food. But again, we were just happy to be able to play.” Playing at the on-campus Minglewood Bowl at the same site where the Baylor Bookstore now sits, they actually used a chalk line for the outfield fence. Moving to the Texas State Little League fields off of University Parks Drive for her junior year, the team played on a grass infield, “where mostly by then, softball was being played on dirt,” Paula said. “We had an advantage when we played at home, a disadvantage when we went away,” she said. “But it was a nice field, a very nice stadium. Probably one of the best in the country at that time.” In 1980, first-year head coach Bob Brock led the softball team to a regional title and the AIAW national tournament in Sacramento, Calif., where the Bears finished 2-2, beating Sacred Heart and Francis Marion and losing to Sacramento State and Oregon State. Brock went on to win three national championships at Texas A&M and over 1,100 games as a head coach.
Baylor Softball – 1980
“We won the regional down at A&M and qualified to go to the national tournament,” said Young, who was named the Texas AIAW Division II player of the year that season. “We didn’t know if Baylor was going to send us or not if we came in second or third, so we went ahead and won it.”
In August 1981, at 24 years old, Paula was hired as the head softball coach at her alma mater. “I was part-time, making $4,500 . . . and had to have a couple other part-time jobs to make ends meet,” she said. A few years later, when she had a high school coaching opportunity that would have paid “a lot more,” Baylor matched the offer, “but you’ll have to do something else.” Paula also took on a role with academic services, working with Blake Burleson and Ed Mooney. One of the toughest days of her life came at the end of the 1988 season when Baylor decided to drop the softball program and add women’s golf.
Baylor Women’s Golf – 1980s
“We were pretty much a walk-on program, and I tried everything to recruit players,” she said. “But leading up to that, we were down to nine players and our catcher got injured and we weren’t able to finish a game at UTSA. I think that’s why they started looking at, ‘Do we really want to fund this program?’ They told me they wanted to compete for a Southwest Conference championship, and back then A&M and Texas Tech were the only ones that had softball teams.” Staying on to start up the women’s golf program, Paula won two team titles in six years “as an imposter.” “I really just administered the golf program, but that allowed me to stay at Baylor, which I feel very fortunate for that chance,” she said. Conversely, when then-athletic director Dick Ellis told her in 1995 that the school was re-instating softball and wanted her to transition back to the sport she loves, that was “the happiest day in my life.” Paula had three winning seasons in the reboot and saw the team move into the mecca of softball facilities, Getterman Stadium, in the spring of 2000. “I told those freshmen when I recruited them, we’re building a new stadium and we’re going to Hawaii,” Paula said. “I remember practicing on the field, we had the cranes working behind us. But mainly, we practiced on city fields in the Waco area. So, we hauled all of our practice equipment over there every day. And when we were finally able to get on the field that spring, that was pretty exciting.” It was Paula who recommended a young coach at LSU named Glenn Moore as her successor. Moore, beginning his 23rd year at Baylor, has a record of 834-424 and has led the Bears to four World Series appearances and a pair of third-place finishes nationally. “He’s a perfect fit for Baylor,” said Young, who is in her 42nd year overall at Baylor and now serves as Assistant AD for Event Management and Facilities. “Once Baylor got the support financially, the athletic staff, all the resources were here to be successful. What parent doesn’t want their daughter to come to Baylor? It’s a great place.” Initially hired as Baylor’s Director of Athletic Accounting in 1995 , Nancy Post was the Senior Woman Administrator for 16 years (2002-18), overseeing the additions of the 10th and 11th women’s sports and witnessing the greatest era of Baylor Athletics. “Back in ’95, I think our total number of employees was around 80,” she said. “And we all officed over at (Floyd Casey Stadium) – every staff, every coaching staff that we had at the time. We were really stacked on top of each other, and it was kind of crazy. And as we added people, we just made more room. You just formed really good relationships with everybody, because you truly were working closely with them.” Along with the addition of women’s golf and the restart of softball, Baylor added women’s soccer in 1995 and hired Randy Waldrum as the first head coach. Already a successful coach at Tulsa, Waldrum went on to win two national championships at Notre Dame and is now in his fifth year at Pitt.
Baylor Women’s Soccer – Cameron Hossack, 1998
“I think (hiring Waldrum) really put Baylor on the map and made people sit up and listen or watch, that Baylor had made the investment and commitment and had the ability to get Randy Waldrum to come to Baylor,” Post said. “People were asking, ‘What’s Randy thinking?’ But he saw an opportunity, just like all the women’s coaches that have come to Baylor. “You look at Baylor. Can you win here? Absolutely. But more importantly, do you have the commitment from the school, do you have the resources, do you have the fanbase? Do you have a school that young women will want to attend, that their families want them to attend? Can you provide that full experience for a young lady? Yes.” Waldrum had immediate success, winning 17 games with a freshman-dominated team in 1996, and then captured the school’s first Big 12 title in any sport when the Bears won the 1998 regular-season title.
Baylor Women’s Soccer – 1998 Big 12 Champions
The late ’90s also saw the women’s track and field program starting to have a national presence, with the 4×400 relay team of Angelique Banket, Alayah Cooper, Yulanda Nelson and Jennifer Jordan winning a national title at the 1998 NCAA Indoor and Smith winning the NCAA outdoor triple jump in 1999 when the team finished an all-time-best tied for fourth. “I really do believe it started with us,” Smith said. “Our class of freshmen came in, and Coach Hart figured, ‘You know what, I think we could make this work with the ladies’ team.’ The 4×4 had always been competitive on the men’s side, but then the 4×4 started being competitive on the women’s side as well, and Coach Hart was like, ‘Oh wait, we may have something here.”’ Almost a decade after the soccer program was started, the Baylor Board of Regents approved equestrian as the school’s 18th intercollegiate sport (and 10th for women) on Sept. 24, 2004, with competition beginning in 2005-06. Baylor grad Ellen White was hired as the head coach in January 2005 and led the Bears to the Hunter Seat national title in 2012 at the National Collegiate Equestrian Association Championship in Waco.
Baylor Equestrian – 2007 VENC Championships
“It’s non-traditional, if you will, but an incredible group of young women,” said Post, who served as the event manager for the NCEA Championship that was hosted by Baylor for 15 years (2007-21) at the Extraco Events Center. “Little-known fact, (I rode horses) in my youth, but there were no opportunities for young women to pursue that in college or have that as a way to go to college. I think that’s what has given me the heart for the sport. It’s an opportunity that so many young women never had.” The overwhelming choice in a survey of Baylor’s female undergraduate students, competitive cheer became the school’s 19th intercollegiate sport in 2009 and began its inaugural season in December 2010. Coached by Karry Forsythe that first year, the team had a pair of All-Americans in Jayme Edwards and Madeline Felio and also won the program’s first individual national championship with freshmen Katie Collier and Madeline French and junior Nicole Allison winning the five-element stunt event. At the end of that first season, Baylor joined Maryland and Fairmont State in changing the sport’s name to acrobatics and tumbling to unite with Oregon, Azusa Pacific and Quinnipiac in the National Collegiate Acrobatics and Tumbling Association. It was at a September 2009 summit in Maryland that Post first met then-Oregon head coach Felecia Mulkey. “That’s where we came together and unified to create – literally create – the sport,” Post said, “because until then, there were no rules of play. There was not a collegiate format established. But the very few of us that sat in that room, when we walked out, we had a sport. A lot of it came from the brain of Felecia Mulkey, and then those of us who were college administrators helped tweak and refine and collaborate to create what it is now.” Five years later, when Baylor needed to find a new head coach, Post made the “bold move” to call Oregon and ask if she could talk to “their coach.”
Baylor Acrobatics & Tumbling – 2016 NCATA Champions
“I never said the name, and she said, ‘Oh yeah, I think (assistant coach Angela Ucci) would be an excellent hire,”’ Nancy said. “And I said, ‘Me, too, I’ve watched her grow, and I think she’s an excellent coach, but I’d like to talk to Felecia.”’ At least from the outside, Mulkey saw a team that had talent with a chance to recruit in Texas and “an administration that believed in the sport, believed where it could go and believed in the opportunities that it offered.” “And they were willing to do what they needed to do to set the standard and be the standard for the sport,” Coach Fee said. “That’s why I came.” After winning the first four NCATA national titles at Oregon, Mulkey is the standard for the sport, winning seven championships in a row since coming to Baylor in 2014. “Obviously, we have had some incredible things that have happened in other sports,” Nancy said. “But, Felecia put that team on her back and instilled in them the belief. That first year, she had recruited no one (to Baylor) because she came in that summer. It was just the training, the discipline and the belief.” Mulkey has also been the driving force behind the sport growing from that original list of six schools to the verge of NCAA championship status with 50 and still growing. “I was probably a little naïve, but I didn’t know what I didn’t know,” she said. “To me, (the growth of the sport) was obviously a no-brainer. And I think that may be why we got this far, because it not happening was just not an option.” Of course, the 2000s also brought one of the greatest turnarounds in NCAA history. Kim Mulkey (no relation) took over a last-place women’s basketball team in 2000 and five years later led the Lady Bears to the first of three national championships with an 84-62 blowout of Michigan State in the final. “Kim went out and pounded the pavement,” said Post, who serves as Baylor’s Associate AD for Financial Management & Reporting. “She was out speaking in the community to the Lion’s Club, Rotary. She had a great way of encouraging people to come see what women’s basketball had to offer, and really created a force, a community, that wanted to be there.”
Baylor Women’s Basketball – 2019 Final Four
Along the way, they set one attendance record after another, winning national championships in 2012 and 2019. Davis-Stinnett, who was part of the radio broadcast team for two years, said that “not only did she change the culture of women’s basketball, we were now a powerhouse in the industry.” “People wanted to come out and watch,” she said. “When I played, we probably had 50 people in the stands, and 25 of those were probably my family.” Baylor has also been the dominant women’s tennis program in the Big 12 under Joey Scrivano, winning a combined 19 regular-season and tournament titles over a 14-year stretch and making it to the national semifinals twice.
Baylor Women’s Tennis – 1979-80 Team
Equestrian, golf and indoor track have also won conference titles, with soccer winning three league titles and making back-to-back Elite Eight appearances under then-coach Paul Jobson. Volleyball joined the party three years ago with coach Ryan McGuyre, sharing the conference championship with Texas and making the program’s first Final Four.
Baylor Volleyball – 2019 Big 12 Champions
But, as Conradt said, it’s more than just the wins and losses. It’s about the increased opportunities that young women have been provided over the last 50 years.
Helen Grant, a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Title IX specialist who has consulted with Baylor for the last 17 years, said she has “witnessed Baylor Athletics’ commitment to women in sports, much more than Title IX compliance.” “It has been a genuine commitment to having equitable services, budgeting and facilities for women’s sports,” Grant said. “A journey that Baylor Athletics has embraced and worked tirelessly to accomplish and maintain equitable treatment.” Baylor’s commitment to enhancing participation opportunities, building state-of-the-art athletic facilities, providing excellent academic, medical and performance training staff, as well as the financial support, “allows women’s programs to operate as and aspire to be champions,” Grant said. “Along with other national honors held by Baylor, a commitment to women in sport, gender equity and Title IX compliance makes Baylor a national leader,” Grant said. Young admits that she never would have come to Baylor “had it not been for the opportunity to play softball.” “Adding other sports – acrobatics & tumbling, equestrian, golf and soccer – to be able to give those young ladies an opportunity to experience Baylor is the biggest thing for me,” she said. “It’s the same thing that happened to me. I’m just so thankful that there’s that opportunity for student-athletes to come here and experience Baylor and the city of Waco and all the great things that are happening here.”
As we celebrate the past, present and future of women’s athletics, we look forward to seeing what the next 50 years brings at Baylor!
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