Special Edition Fall 2021: The evolution of St. Kate's athletics

Throughout the course of history, women have fought hard for equal rights. One area today where the struggle for equality is still incredibly prevalent is in women’s sports. While women have greater access to athletics than ever before, they unfortunately still often receive less recognition for their achievements, are treated differently than male athletes, and are underfunded and underrepresented in the media in comparison to men’s sports.

With all this in mind, I thought it would be interesting to take a look back at the history of sports at St. Kate’s. After all, the university has only ever had women’s sports, so the recognition of women’s athletics looks a little different at this school compared to the history of other universities.

Let’s go almost all the way back to the beginning of St. Kate’s, to The Wheel’s inaugural edition published on Friday, March 15, 1935. Basketball seemed to be the sport of choice among many students, as there were several articles on tournaments that were being held both between different classes and different departments.

During this time, the Women’s Athletic Association (WAA) organized the campus’s intramurals. The WAA was a larger association that had smaller installments at universities and colleges that organized their own clubs. A Wheel article from 1935 talks about St. Kate’s WAA club organizing a giant Olympics event that occurred annually. Students could compete against each other in nearly every sport and recreational activity under the sun: track, archery, tennis, hiking, ping-pong, handball, hockey, volleyball, basketball, swimming, bowling, badminton, and “kittenball” (which is an old-timey term used in the article to refer to softball).

Fast-forwarding a few years to 1957, an article in The Wheel marked the morphing of the WAA into the Womens’ Recreation Association (WRA). Explaining the name change, the newspaper wrote, “The reason is to encourage more active membership among the student body. Also, it is hoped that students will become aware that it isn’t only for physical education majors and minors, but everyone. The club is not only interested in athletics, but all types of recreation.” From The Wheel’s records, it is unclear exactly when the WRA was disbanded, but the last mention I could find of the club was an article from 1970.

But perhaps the drop-off in the prominence of recreational and intramural sports around this time makes sense as varsity sports stepped forward into the limelight. Varsity sports at St. Kate’s have existed since at least the mid-1960s. An article from December 1964 covers the formation of the “first basketball team in the recent history of the College,” meaning that varsity sports have been around since at least that year, if not before. (An article published in that same edition talks about the results of a swim meet with other schools, but there is no mention of it being the school’s first swim team.)

By 1975, St. Kate’s had four competitive sports programs: basketball, volleyball, tennis, and swimming. An article titled “Change in CSC [College of St. Catherine] sports due to new attitudes” ran in the December 1975 issue of The Wheel, and it included quotes from the assistant basketball coach talking about how women’s sports teams are becoming more focused on winning and being competitive instead of just having fun.

Indeed, around this time, there was a big shift in how women’s sports were viewed and regarded because of the women’s rights movement. In 1971, the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) was formed, an organization similar to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) but for women’s sports. St. Kate’s shot ahead of other universities in terms of its varsity sports offerings for women, and its teams were successful at both the regional and national levels in the mid- to late ‘70s, according to athletic director Eric Stacey. One edition of The Wheel published in November 1976 seems to confirm this: an article covering the volleyball team reveals that they won the state tournament, winning the college “its first championship sports trophy ever.” It also mentions that the team had previously beaten teams from much bigger universities, such as the University of Minnesota, St. Cloud State, and Mankato State.

In 1972, Title IX was passed. Although Title IX also institutionalized equality between genders in other ways, it is mainly renowned nowadays for its requirement that federally funded educational institutions provide support and funding to their women’s and men’s sports teams that is proportional to the number of students at the school. In other words, if the percentage of women and men at a school is split 50-50, then it has to have half men’s teams and half women’s teams.

Although this was a triumph for all fighters for women’s rights in America, it ended up hurting the success and presence of athletics at St. Kate’s. “Title IX forced co-ed schools to dramatically increase spending on women’s sports to match the resources for their men’s teams,” Stacey said. “This was obviously not the case at St. Kate’s and it definitely hurt our teams. This impact was seen heading into the 1980s. During the 1980s and into the 1990s, the number of varsity teams that St. Kate’s offered and the number of student-athletes on those teams had dropped dramatically.”

In fact, the AIAW disbanded in 1983 because it was slowly losing its members and funding to the NCAA, according to AIAW records from the University of Maryland. St. Kate’s joined the NCAA shortly thereafter and started to compete in the MIAC in September 1983. (Although the MIAC was founded in 1920, it did not begin offering women’s leagues until 1982, according to the MIAC’s about page on its website.)

Then, in the mid-1990s, the university significantly increased its funding of athletics because it needed to increase its enrollment, explained Stacey. A portion of this budget was put into the Butler Center, which was first built in 1994.

When Stacey first joined the St. Kate’s athletic community in 1997 as a coach, he said that the school was mainly focused on increasing the number of sports it offered as well as the number of students participating in athletics. Although the teams did not see much success when it came to winning during this time, there was one bright spot: “At the beginning of this rebuilding, increasing roster sizes was the most important piece of our work,” Stacey said. “We still did not have a lot of competitive success during this time, but the strength of our teams did improve. The tennis team qualified for the 2004 NCAA championships which was the first team to do so since 1983.”

Finally, the tennis team won the university’s first MIAC title in 30 years in 2013. Since then, the university’s sports teams have won eight MIAC team championships and have made nine NCAA championship appearances, according to Stacey. Today, around 20% of first-years every year are athletes, marking a significant presence of sports here at St. Kate’s.