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Thursday, June 18, 2015
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com SPORTS
By TED JANES
Daily Sports Writer
It was mid-morning, and Sheryl
Szady turned on the television in
her Oklahoma City hotel. Footage
of the Michigan baseball coach,
Erik Bakich, was replaying from an
earlier press conference.
In the days before, the Michigan
baseball team, notable underdogs,
had won its first Big Ten Tourna-
ment under Bakich’s watch but
had fallen short in the Louisville
Regional of the NCAA Tourna-
ment.
Szady tuned in as Bakich’s
speech reemphasized one of his
goals for the program.
“Look at softball’s success,”
Szady recalls Bakich saying. “Look
at Hutch, what she does with her
players. There’s no reason that
baseball can’t be just that good.”
Accentuating the success of
Michigan softball coach Carol
Hutchins, “Hutch” to those who
know her, is something Bakich has
done since day one. When then-
Athletic Director Dave Brandon
hired him to take over the base-
ball team in 2012, he addressed the
media in a similar fashion.
“We’ve got to catch Hutch,”
Bakich said in his inaugural press
conference. “Hutch has set the bar.
The softball program gives me tre-
mendous optimism of what base-
ball can do here, and not just do it
once in a while, but do it on a con-
sistent level. She is someone I’ve
enjoyed meeting, and I’m looking
forward to spending time with and
picking her brain on exactly how
she does it.”
If chasing softball was Bakich’s
plan, then he had another accom-
plishment to pursue on Sunday
evening of May 31. After the Car-
dinals halted the baseball team’s
Cinderella run, another Michigan
team was on the brink of rising to
exceptional heights.
All eyes turned to Oklahoma
City, where the softball team — a
trailblazer for Wolverine athlet-
ics — took down LSU that same
day. The victory against the Tigers
merited a spot in the National
Championship.
Baseball, in Bakich’s eyes, was
laying down the groundwork
to reach softball’s prominence,
a group that for the last three
decades has been one of Michi-
gan’s most consistent. A team
that, when both compete on the
same day, draws more fans to the
bleachers because Hutchins, who
has more wins than any other
coach in the University’s his-
tory, built the program into one
of Michigan’s greatest. And when
the Wolverines came so close to
capturing their second National
Championship, the Great Lakes
State watched more than any-
where else in the country.
Baseball didn’t garner the spot-
light, so Bakich was right. The
baseball team needed to, and still
must, catch up to softball. Right
now, the women of the Wilpon
Complex bear the torch, and the
men lag behind.
And Sheryl Szady was elated,
because 40 years ago, when she
suited up for Michigan’s first varsity
women’s basketball and field hockey
teams, the paradigm couldn’t have
looked more different.
“I was in my hotel room going,
‘Yes, finally! They’re striving to be
what we are.’ ”
***
Foraging through the Michi-
gan archives, one would be hard-
pressed to find the names Liz
Eagan and Sheryl Szady. The for-
mer only appears once, and the lat-
ter just twice.
The
pair,
longtime
friends,
began their athletic careers in 1973
playing for Michigan field hockey’s
“Team One,” and even though their
statistics are virtually impossible
to dig up, the foundation they tilled
for future female athletes at Michi-
gan was exceptional.
Szady and Eagan were given
the opportunity to play collegiate
sports, at the varsity level, because
of the enactment and implemen-
tation of Title IX. The law is a
portion of the United States Edu-
cation Amendments of 1972 that
declares
that
no person, on
the basis of sex,
can be excluded
from
an
edu-
cational
pro-
gram. Title IX,
which
applies
to far more than
athletics,
was
passed in 1972, but the guidelines
for compliance in terms collegiate
sports were not immediately laid
out.
After the law was passed, Szady
and her future basketball team-
mate Linda Laird began to cam-
paign for the actual creation of
women’s varsity teams. At first,
the University was remiss, ignor-
ing their requests.
The athletic director at the
time, Don Canham, was outward-
ly unsupportive. Szady remem-
bers Canham challenging her and
Laird. He said, “Who will you
play? We have no money to trav-
el.” At the time, while their teams
remained at the club level, Szady
and Eagan were chipping in to pay
for their own coaches.
Otherwise, they were staffed by
volunteers. The expenses of travel
for women’s sports were beyond
them.
In April of 1973, the University
had yet to create women’s varsity
teams despite Title IX’s passage
nearly a year before, so Szady and
Laird went to the University’s
Board of Regents to campaign.
Canham wasn’t thrilled, but
Szady and Laird finally got the
answer they wanted.
“Yes, we’re going to start this
program,” then-University Presi-
dent Robben Wright Fleming, also
an ex-officio member of the board,
told Szady and Laird.
At last it had been pronounced,
signed and sealed, the dawn of
women’s
var-
sity
sports
at
Michigan
had
begun. But the
journey to top, to
the place Szady
wanted to reach,
would take time.
“We
always
dreamed to be
equal or have the same benefits and
opportunities as the men,” Szady
said.
But by the way things seemed
in the mid-70’s, catching up to the
benefits the men were afforded
seemed centuries away. Women’s
athletics at Michigan then weren’t
characterized by what was avail-
able to them, but by what wasn’t.
Over 40 years later, Eagan and
Szady remember the first season,
when the field hockey team played
at Michigan Stadium.
There was no athletic training,
no stretching, no pregame music,
no meals or anything of that mat-
ter. At halftime, they didn’t go
into the locker rooms at the Big
House.
DELANEY RYAN/Daily
Former Michigan athletes Sheryl Szady and Liz Eagan reconnected and reflected on their time as Wolverines at the WCWS.
A new ‘catching up’: Women’s
athletics continuing to grow
“We have
always dreamed
to be equal.”
See CATCHING, Page 10