By Luke Whitehouse
@Lwhitehouse12
As a student, Branwen Smith-King ‘78, G ‘79 was involved in the fight for gender equity at Springfield College. In fact, she helped start the first women’s Track and Field team here. The inequities that existed at Springfield College when she arrived from Bermuda in the mid-1970s, even though Title IX had been passed several years earlier, were glaring. Smith-King talked with The Student about how she and her team went about changing the course of women’s sports and how Title IX still has far to go.
Q: When you came to SC, there was no women’s track team. What was your reaction when you first stepped on campus and learned that?
Smith-King: It was like, “Well, we can sit around and feel sorry for ourselves. But we want the opportunity to compete and be athletes.” That was our driving force. We just wanted to compete, we wanted to train. Growing up in Bermuda, I was used to having a coach, having a fitness gym to go to. I asked, “Where’s the weight room?” They [looked at me] like I had 20 heads. I said, “I have been lifting weights since I was 15 – Olympic lifting.” This is in the early ‘70s, maybe ‘74, ‘75. Women did not go to the weight room [in the United States] then. There were a lot of cultural changes for me, learning how women were treated. But on the flip side, we had professors like Dr. [Diane] Potter. It was a real contrast because they were awesome leaders, awesome coaches and teachers. They were so influential to our generation of student-athletes, that we just said, “Okay, well, they didn’t teach us about Title IX, but we kind of learned about it.”
Q: And how did you go about starting the team? How did the school receive it?
Smith-King: We were more insistent on competing and training and we did things like hold bake sales in the beverage center. And that really kind of set a tone. We thought of ourselves as a team, even though we didn’t have the label. Brian Cox was the men’s coach at the time. He is a wonderful person. And he coached for many, many years and he was somewhat supportive of us. We were able to go on a track with the guys, so that was huge, you know, in the early ‘70s for him to do that. But when we saw the buses or vans going out [for a meet] and we weren’t part of that, it [left] a sour taste. We mentioned it to the administration. The athletic director was not really that receptive, but they listened.
Junior year I think was the most disappointing season, as we had several of us that qualified for nationals. I was ranked third in the nation or something like that. We were all ranked in the top 10 in the country. And Springfield did not enter me in the event. Everybody was ticked off. Then, in my senior year, we became a varsity team. I guess part of it was just persistence. We never got discouraged. We just wanted to support each other.
Q: Title IX has come so far, but what do you think it could still do?
Smith-King: Yes, we’ve come a long way. I think one of my realizations as a coach, before I started coaching, was that this generation of young women are the daughters of my friends, right? So they don’t might not know about Title IX. I made a [point] to explain it to my student-athletes. We didn’t have locker rooms, we didn’t have uniforms, explain to them what Title IX was so that when they graduate and move into the real world they give back in some way. They’ll be real role models for future generations of girls and women in sport and to fight for any inequities that they see in sport.
How do you think we can inform people about Title IX? In high school, we didn’t really talk about Title IX at all.
Smith-King: Well, it starts in schools and teaching young people. I had two daughters, so they kind of know my story. They grew up in the United States. So they can grow up playing sports, they can do anything, but I reminded them it’s education. If it’s educators or high school coaches, parents, communities, they all can teach about Title IX.
Q: How do you think we can inform people about Title IX? In high school, we didn’t really talk about Title IX at all.
Smith-King: Well, it starts in schools and teaching young people. I had two daughters, so they kind of know my story. They grew up in the United States. So they can grow up playing sports, they can do anything, but I reminded them it’s education. If it’s educators or high school coaches, parents, communities, they all can teach about Title IX.
Photo Courtesy Tufts University