Her former players, her current students, describe her as one of those teachers and coaches you remember above the rest, the one who seemed to genuinely hear you or help you as you stumbled through adolescence, encouraging you one minute or rolling their eyes and telling you to cut the crap the next. Nancy Cole is 54 years old, she's been at Centereach High School since it opened in 1970, yet she still talks warmly about how "neat" it was to be a young, just-graduated teacher who was asked to help pick out Centereach' s mascot and school colors.
She's the only female Centereach teacher to whom students have dedicated the yearbook twice. To this day, her physical education office is one of those places kids gravitate to and fill with happy chatter. Inside, Cole has hung a photograph of all 31 field hockey teams she has coached. Similar photos decorate the walls of her den at home.
Over the years, Cole's field hockey teams have won four state titles and churned out an impressive list of 45 college scholarship winners, seven college All-Americans, five high school All-Americans and even an Olympian, Tracey Fuchs.
Yet by the time Cole took medical leave last fall for disc surgery she could no longer put off, she says she had gotten to the point where she wasn't sure if the strange things going on around her at Centereach were a coincidence, a textbook case of harassment, or just proof positive that "I was going crazy," Cole says. She forces a laugh.
But some parents, athletes and colleagues have followed Cole's case since she filed a Title IX complaint with the U.S. Department of Education' s Office of Civil Rights on May 27, 2000, asking that the Middle Country Central School District give Centereach High's girl athletes a team room on par with the boys' facility. And they say they know the answer.
Cole says she has been shunned, punished and provoked. In the 13 months since Cole filed her complaint with the OCR, the issue of the team room is not just about a team room at all, but all it symbolically and pragmatically represents. Cole simply wanted to make sure girls at her school are treated just as well as the boys. But her story also has become a nuanced case study about the feelings that get conjured up when boys and girls, grown men and women, are pushed to decide what constitutes "equality" in this supposed era of enlightenment for everyone involved in sports.
One of the more interesting things about the stark reactions Cole' s case has evoked is you would think there's not much room for interpretation. Cole made one very specific request: to make the girls' 1,040-square-foot team room facility comparable or equal to the 2,929-square-foot facility the boys have enjoyed for 30 years.
Her request required the boys program to give up nothing.
The disparity between the two existing team rooms can be measured in cold, hard facts: square footage, counting showerheads and lockers and so on.
Yet, said parent Lynn Peras, whose daughter Shanna plays for Cole: "It's almost been like, 'OK, you dare to bring this Title IX subject up, you know what? You're gonna pay.' "
Until this school year, Cole was the only female teacher on Centereach' s physical education staff for 18 years, and she often has felt duty- bound to urge the school district administration to treat the girls' athletic program the same as the boys'. Along the way, she would sometimes remind her supervisors they needed to comply with the requirements of Title IX, the 1972 federal law that prohibits gender discrimination at educational institutions receiving federal funds. And the district, once nudged, usually responded in time.
During the 1973-74 school year, Cole was involved in the successful effort to get the district's girls team coaches' pay raised from $264 to $874 a season, same as the boys team coaches made.
In 1980, Cole persuaded Centereach to convert a storage area into a girls "team room" that would be used like the space the boys teams have to dress, shower, store equipment and hold team meetings apart from the regular school locker room.
Beginning in 1996, Cole and then-tennis coach Donna Cooke began a detailed study of the district's athletic department books and successfully lobbied the district to add girls lacrosse, soccer and ninth-grade basketball teams, which it did by 1998.
Cooke, now a Centereach guidance counselor, said, "We felt really good about what we were able to get done."
The Middle Country district currently does a fine job of providing sports participation opportunities for girls and boys in near equal numbers.
For the 2001-02 school year, there will be exactly 31 boys varsity and JV teams and exactly 31 girls varsity and JV teams. Of the district's 1,187 ninth- to 12th-graders who competed on varsity and JV teams in 1999-2000, 679 were boys, 508 were girls.
But as the girls' athletic program grew, Cole began urging the district by the early 1990s to expand and upgrade Centereach's girls team room. It just never got done. Cole and Cooke revisited the issue beginning in 1996. Two years later, there appeared to be progress. In a May 27, 1998, memo to Cole from assistant superintendent Richard Herman, he wrote: "The first priority for the next school year will be the girls team room at CHS."
Again, nothing happened. Again, Cole let it lie.
But when Middle Country called faculty meetings at each district school last April to detail the $32.9-million bond issue the district was putting before voters June 13, 2000, Cole, who is now just a year from taking voluntary retirement, said: "I thought this is the perfect opportunity to bring up the team room again. The difference is just so blatant. I thought if I didn't do this for the girls, nobody would. I had nothing to gain personally. It's just the right thing to do."
Even now, the odd thing is most everyone involved agrees that Cole's request was reasonable.
"It is not an up-to-date, decent facility at this time," said Middle Country assistant superintendent Nan O'Connor-Roys, who replaced Herman in overseeing physical education and athletics.
"It is a very inadequate facility, and far inferior to what the boys have," said Comsewogue athletic director Montgomery Granger, Centereach' s athletic director from 1999-2000.
"If I were a [girls] coach, I would not have been happy with that team room for my kids. It was small; it was cramped," said Centereach football coach Mike Kazaks, who finished a three-year term as the district's Board of Education president last July.
So what explains everything that has happened since? Why did Cole, after writing two more letters to the district administration last spring and getting one reply-a note saying engineers would soon be touring the building- feel her only recourse was to file a Title IX complaint, which she had warned the district she was prepared to do?
And why have so many of the people involved been left with raw feelings?
Why are Cole and others convinced she has been shunned and frozen out by the same Centereach colleagues with whom she used to banter easily? Why was she suddenly summoned to the school's administrative office and told to bring a union representative after a discussion with a guidance counselor about rescheduling a student Cole had for four straight class periods? Why did Middle Country athletic director Tony Perna suddenly bark at Cole, "What do I have to do, write you up for insubordination?" one day last fall when he found Cole's field hockey team practicing in the school's main gym, something she had standing permission to do on rainy days for years?
If Kazaks indeed does support Cole's stance to earn Centereach' s girls equal treatment, why then did he leapfrog the administration last September and, he confirms, fire off a letter critical of Cole to former colleagues at the district Board of Education, unbeknownst to Cole, after he learned Perna might let the field hockey team play its season opener on the football field because the field hockey team's just-resodded turf wasn't quite ready?
A football coach who knows Kazaks' reasoning said Kazaks "just got tired of Nancy getting her way every time she opens her mouth."
Why did Tony Quitoni, Cole's physical education department chairman, a man who contributes to her job evaluations, suddenly start questioning her professionalism in front of her students? "He'd say things that just aren't true: 'You don't even care if they cut class...You don't even know their names,'" Cole recalled. Why would Quitoni, an assistant football coach and boys lacrosse head coach at Centereach, tell two members of the district' s sports booster club at a school open house last fall, "If Nancy doesn't want to be a team player, we won't treat her like one"?
"Tony said that," said booster club president Pat Barbieri, whose daughter Colleen is Centereach's current field hockey star, "then Tony looked right at me and smiled and said, 'This whole Title IX thing. You know.' "
Taken alone, none of the incidents seemed grossly antagonistic. But the more they piled up, the more Cole saw a pattern. And it wore on her.
Middle Country officials declined to allow district personnel to comment for this story except O'Connor-Roys and a district lawyer. They said they were worried Cole would sue. Attempts to reach Perna and Quitoni for comment through the school district were met with this reply from district spokeswoman Judy White: "The Middle Country Central School District has not been found to be out of compliance with Title IX. It is the policy of the Middle Country School District that all personnel matters are kept strictly confidential."
One teacher, who agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity because that teacher lacks tenure, said: "I don't know if the whole thing was meant to intimidate Nancy. But it wouldn't work anyway."
Is speaking out about Cole's case a valid worry?
"Oh, I would not be speaking to you if I didn't have tenure," Centereach's Cooke shot back.
Knowing the above incidents happened-and more-what would you think if you were Nancy Cole or one of her field hockey players last fall on the day Centereach played its biggest regular-season game of the year, a first- place showdown against archrival Ward Melville, and the strangest thing happened...?
Centereach's field sprinkler system, which the grounds crew supposedly turned off for the winter three weeks earlier, suddenly erupted during the game-once in the first half, again at halftime, then once more in the second half, dousing players and halting play each time.
"Do I think it was intentional?" Cole asks now. She breaks into a deep, rumbling laugh and says, "Aw, you know...you really, really hate to think that, but, I mean..."
Another wry laugh.
"What do you think?"
The treatment Cole alleges since filing her Title IX complaint is not uncommon. Others who have filed complaints typically report incidents they interpret as retaliation.
Depending upon whom you talk to, Title IX-the law that Cole and Williams invoked-is one of two things: It's the greatest thing that ever happened to women's athletics, and it has helped powerfully change how society thinks of women and how women think of themselves. Or Title IX has been a bane; it's created a quota system; it's given people a legal avenue to "pit" women against men.
But even the appropriation of the word "fairness" strikes a raw nerve among Title IX supporters. They say the law's intended effects aren't even close to fruition and that the protection Title IX provides is still crucial. The Women's Sports Foundation estimates that approximately 80 percent of high schools and colleges across the country are still not in compliance with Title IX, even though it's been 29 years since the law hit the books. That, women's sports advocates say, is unconscionable.
Barbieri, whose daughter plays for Cole, said: "The thing that gets me is after all Nancy has done for the school, what Nancy was asking for is not just right-it was so little."
Peras, whose daughter Shanna plays on Centereach's field hockey and softball teams, said: "If this were band and not sports, this wouldn' t be allowed to happen."
So why is it still happening?
Many women's sports advocates blame the Office of Civil Rights, which has never-not once in 29 years-withheld federal funds from a school or university found to be in violation of Title IX.
Sometimes, as in Cole's case, there's really no need. When faced with a federal complaint, a district will work with the OCR to reach what' s called "a resolution agreement," as Middle Country did by agreeing last November to renovate the existing girls team room at Centereach. Assistant superintendent O'Connor-Roys says the OCR, after extensive review of the district' s entire athletic program, has so far ordered no changes other than the team room.
Other times, a complainant who is unhappy with the OCR's ruling will feel there is no alternative but the expensive choice of going to court. Cole, who has worked alone and done her own research, meticulously writing out her correspondence by hand, has always preferred trying to work with the school district.
But when people do go to court, the pattern of decisions suggest Title IX is still needed. Plaintiffs are undefeated in more than 50 sports- related Title IX cases in the past eight years, according to the Women's Sports Foundation.
Think about that for a moment: For eight years, the courts have never sided with the defendant in a Title IX case. Yet the Office of Civil Rights has never found cause to withhold funds in a single case that crossed its desk in more than a quarter-century.
"It's ridiculous," said Neena Chawdry of the National Women's Law Center.
It is perhaps indicative of the OCR's attitude, perhaps not, that a reporter's recent calls to OCR spokesman Roger Murphey in Washington, requesting the OCR's ruling on Cole's case, were met with the opening remark, "What is it, a slow news day in New York?" Or a few days later, after a renewed request for the information, an exasperated: "Why are you nitpicking about this? It's late in the day!"
In the six-month wait for the OCR to rule on her case, Cole felt a constant need to remind her colleagues, "What I'm arguing for is for girls; it's not against boys."
Kazaks, who pointed out that his wife and 11-year-old daughter are athletes - "How could anyone say I'm not a supporter of women's sports?" he asked - nonetheless admitted he has felt conflicted. "I had to stick up for my 50. My 50 guys. Our football program is fighting for its own survival."
The debate gained new currency when the Bush Administration took office earlier this year and hinted that it might be time to re-examine Title IX. That came as welcome news to critics who claim the law isn't being used to protect women anymore-it's being used to practice reverse discrimination against men. And that, those critics say, is just not fair.
Title IX critics frequently claim women's gains in sports have come at the expense of men, and they often cite anecdotal evidence: UCLA's highly publicized decision to cut its storied gymnastics and swimming squads; Providence College's decision to drop baseball.
But by any national comprehensive measure -sports participation opportunities, scholarships available, jobs or spending on men's vs. women's athletics-men's complaints about being systematically discriminated against in sports still appear groundless.
In the post-Title IX era, men's sports participation numbers have actually grown even as women's participation has boomed at all levels.
Men still receive more athletic scholarships, they still own most of the coaching and athletic director jobs, they still earn more on average than their female counterparts.
Contrary to the claim that Title IX has led to the wholesale slashing of men's programs, a just-released study on gender equity by the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) shows that though there were more women's teams at the college level by 1998-99 (9,479 to 9,149 for men), male college athletes still outnumbered the women (232,000 to 163,000).
The same federal government study also found that from 1981-99, men's college teams actually increased by 36 teams, while women gained 3, 784 teams of their own.
All of which means there is no Title IX-related carnage of men' s teams going on. Not at the college level.
And not at Centereach, which will add two middle school football teams as well as a districtwide girls gymnastics team for the 2001-02 school year.
So why do supporters of men's sports continue to feel threatened or unpersuaded even when the statistics are presented to them? What are coaches such as Quitoni or Kazaks really reacting to?
Laurie Priest, the athletic director at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, has an educated guess. Priest had the rare job of enforcing Title IX in reverse at her previous job at Marymount College in Virginia when Marymount went from an all- women's institution to coed. Priest says although she made every detail of the brand-new men's program exactly the same as the women's, right down to buying new jockstraps for the men when the women got new sports bras, some of her men's coaches kept complaining: "That's just not fair! That's just not fair!"
"And well, I have to tell you, I was genuinely confused," Priest says. "I mean, everything was exactly the same. Then I finally realized this was it: When there is a level playing field, men in athletics are not used to it. They are used to being on the absolute top rung of the ladder. What they see as 'discrimination' is simply equal opportunity being given to women. What else could it be?"
Or what could explain the converse? How could Nancy Cole, more than a decade into her effort to get a better girls team room, look at the $185,000 renovation plan that Middle Country officials came up with by last August to satisfy the OCR-it calls for a gutting of the existing room, the installation of new flooring, lights, more lockers, shower stalls and new sinks, plus a smarter, more efficient reconfiguration of the original space-and unhappily tell school officials, "That is just not good enough."
Academics have a term for it.
It's called "contested terrain."
In many ways, Cole's case is a classic example of how the nature of Title IX complaints has changed.
Whereas women once fought mostly for the right to play and largely contented themselves with that, more Title IX cases now assert that discrimination is in the details-everything from uniforms to equipment; access to facilities, travel, top-flight coaching and booster-club spending, even which team gets the thrill of playing in prime time on Friday night or outdoors, under the lights.
"Treatment claims are what they're called," says Chawdry of the National Women's Law Center. "Generally, we're seeing much more of them cropping up. And we're seeing more cases, period, at the elementary and high school level. I think what it shows is people are more aware of their rights now. Parents are getting savvier. Kids themselves are standing up for things."
Since Cole filed her complaint, some players' parents offered to organize a public show of support for Cole, too, if that's what she wanted. She declined.
Eight or nine field hockey players-including Shanna Peras and Colleen Barbieri-have been moved enough by Cole's stand or the apparent shift they saw in her treatment at school to write English class assignments and their college application essays on Title IX.
Mary Jo Kane, a University of Minnesota professor who studies sports sociology issues, says demands for equal treatment often play out differently at the high school vs. college level because "resources are often more scarce. And whenever resources are a factor, boys tend to take priority status.
"Despite the fact that there has been an enormous cultural shift brought on by Title IX," Kane says, "the cultural sense is still that boys own sports, it's sort of their birthright. It's taken for granted. Whereas girls and women continue to have to earn that right.
"I think it goes back, too, to what is your baseline of comparison? If it's before Title IX, then yes, there has been an enormous cultural shift. It used to be that the question was, 'Should girls and women play sports?' I don't think we'll ever go back to that question anymore. The question now is what will it look like? It's contested terrain."
Where the contest often gets played out is Title IX.
"For women, it offers enormous hope. For men, it represents an enormous threat," Kane said.
Cole tried to defuse her situation before filing her formal complaint by sending a tongue-in-cheek memo to the Middle Country administration, suggesting that the Centereach girls and boys simply swap team rooms for the next 30 years. She attached a blurb from USA Today about a high school in Sperry, Okla., that satisfied a similar Title IX complaint by agreeing to let the football team use the locker room each fall and clear out in the spring when the district's girls move in.
For some students, seeing Cole's case unfold has been an epiphany.
"You could see the attitude towards her from some of the other coaches. If she had to go to them to ask for something, they'd try to talk to her as little as possible," says field hockey co-captain Barbieri, who will play for national power Maryland next year. "Some boys and coaches at school said Ms. Cole was 'brainwashing' us. But my brother played sports ... the difference [in the way girls and boys athletes are treated] is something that's been bothering me for years. I didn't think it was fair. But before I used to just think, it's going to happen no matter what. Girls are never going to get anything. Now I've seen it only takes one person. Things can change...Even if some people don't like you or try to stop you."
Last November, six months after Cole filed her complaint, the OCR reached its resolution agreement that ordered the Middle Country school district to "ensure that female and male athletes at Centereach High School are provided with equivalent locker room facilities (including team locker rooms) ... the size and number of lockers (with allowances for differences in numbers of athletes)."
Even though the two rooms will remain vastly different, the OCR approved the plan Middle Country submitted by its Dec. 29 deadline and ordered the district to submit receipts for the completed work by July 31 of this year.
O'Connor-Roys, the district assistant superintendent, says Middle Country intended to use money from the $32.5-million bond issue and renovate the girls team room months before Cole filed her papers with the OCR.
"It had nothing to do with [Cole's Title IX] complaint," O'Connor- Roys says.
But Granger, who left the Centereach athletic director's job the same month the bond issue passed, says, "They can say whatever they want, but I never was sure it [the renovation] was a done deal. If that were true, why didn't they say, 'Hey, Nancy. Guess what? We're going to do this' when she told them she was prepared to file?
"It was just talk. You don't want to make promises before the budget vote. Fine. But Nancy had been asking for this for years. You could look at those two team rooms and say, 'Yep. We've got a problem. Gotta fix it.' It was a no-brainer. A complete no-brainer. After Middle Country hired me [two years earlier], I suggested to them that we do a Title IX self-audit. And they were like, 'Go away, little person. You're encouraging us to get ourselves in trouble?' I said, 'Not in trouble. I'm talking about putting a plan in place to meet the spirit and letter of the law.'
"To my mind, the plan they are talking about now doesn't achieve that."
Some renovations have already been done. When finished, the girls team room will be significantly upgraded but still nearly three times smaller.
The boys team room will still have more lockers (191 to 69), more showers, and far more space (approximately 1,889 square feet more for the boys). The boys teams and coaches also will continue to enjoy amenities their female counterparts have never had, including an athletic trainer's room, a coach's office with a telephone and shower, and a separate "varsity" room within the main team room.
Middle Country refused to allow a Newsday reporter or photographer to visit the school and view the existing facilities, again citing the fear of litigation. The room dimensions and some details listed above come from an architectural rendering of the Centereach boys locker room that was obtained by Newsday. The renovation plan for the girls team room was provided by O'Connor-Roys, who said it was the same one the district submitted to satisfy the OCR.
Murphey, the OCR spokesman, says, "We're satisfied with the district' s plan ... and the renovations."
Even if Cole is not. "The new room will be nicer but the biggest problem, which they still didn't address, is the lack of space," Cole says. She estimates that for the upcoming fall season, Centereach will have 150 boys and 150 girls playing on the nine varsity and JV teams based on last year' s numbers.
Lamar Daniel, a consultant on Title IX and gender equity who worked 20 years as an OCR branch manager and investigator, finds the OCR's ruling puzzling.
"Given there are not three times the number of boy athletes to girls athletes there, I think that [the space difference] should've been taken into consideration," said Daniels, who is not involved in this case. "I think it's absolutely incumbent on OCR to address the space issue. It's very difficult for me to give you anything completely definitive...not having the same information as the OCR. No law says the square footage has to be equal. However, the district does have to provide facilities for both girls and boys that are 'equal or equal in effect.'
"But I think the OCR might've goofed in this one."
Cole returned to school in late April after a five-month leave to recover from disc surgery. Since then, she's felt gratified that she and her colleagues seem able to coexist again without much incident. She has been asked frequently if she would file her Title IX complaint again, knowing what she knows now, and she admits there were times she has wondered. But in the end, Cole says, the answer she always lands upon is, "Yes. Yes, I would do it again."
Cole was a four-sport athlete at Long Island's Northport High, and she says she might've played sports herself after she got to Ithaca College in 1965 if the women's sports programs back then weren't such an afterthought- too many practice weeks for too few games. She says once she got to college, she became more preoccupied with other issues that were playing out on college campuses at the time: the Vietnam War protests, the civil-rights movement, the changes that feminists were demanding. "I'm an old hippie deep down," Cole jokes.
Asked what she took away from those years and Cole grows serious: "I learned that it only takes one person to make a difference. To effect change."
Among all the things that have been said about her, it's revealing that it is Quitoni's months-old comment about Cole not being a "team player" -something Cole learned of just a few weeks ago - that cuts her the most.
Centereach has quite literally been her life's work.
Though Cole has coached at prestigious national team camps and Olympic Festivals and she's had plenty of college coaching offers, Centereach has always been the place Cole has returned to.
"I just felt I could do more here," she shrugs.
The corroborating evidence is all around her. Lucille "Buzz" Fuchs, whose four daughters played field hockey for Cole, still raves about the program and the closeness her daughters formed through sports, the way field hockey has taken her and her husband around the world to watch their girls play. Fuchs' daughter Tracey, a two-time Olympian and captain of the U.S. team since 1988, calls Cole "an incredible influence on everyone that's played for her. I think you mold yourself as a person on what you take, what you learn, from good people. And Nancy is one of the best."
Sports today are indeed contested terrain. And there are likely to be more Title IX-related fights before there are fewer. Today's young female athletes have grown up knowing nothing but Title IX. And they've been raised by the first generation of mothers who feel competent to coach their daughters, women who themselves have experienced the firsthand thrill of scoring a goal or seeing a well-hit softball clear a faraway fence or building bonds with teammates that last a lifetime-the same things that have launched men and boys into rhapsodies about sports for years.
At least on that, most everyone can agree. Playing sports makes people happy.
Now, nearly 30 years since the passage of Title IX, Granger is among those who sigh and say, "By now, compliance should be as natural as slipping on a baseball glove."
And what happens when it's not? Cole breaks into that rumbling laugh of hers and answers the question one more time, just for good measure: "Yes, I would file a complaint again. Absolutely."
Source: Newsday article by Johnette Howard first published on June 17, 2001. Reprinted by permission.