LaMorinda Sports Weekly featured an article on Title IX in 2002, portions of which are reprinted here.Â
It was people like Scott Brown, who was a longtime girls' basketball coach at Campolindo and is now an assistant basketball coach at Acalanes, who saw firsthand the walls that deterred and prevented girls from participating in sports and wanted to do something about it. When Brown was coaching fifth- and sixth-grade boys' flag football, the parents of Kim Bachman asked if she could play on the team. "I agreed to let her come out and she turned out to be the best player on the team," Brown said. "They then asked if she could play on my basketball teams in the 1970s and I never looked back. I thought I was the best coach ever because we never lost a game. However, when Kim left, I realized she had a lot to do with it."
Soon people began to realize that Title IX would be a valuable tool that could be used for sports. "The opportunities for girls were still limited," Brown said. "What turned out to be the key in getting the girls fully involved in sports was the work of the parents. When they were told that there were not enough girls to play on the school teams, the parents showed that there was. It was amazing how dogged the administrators were in putting up roadblocks to the girls that wanted to participate in sports."
Bachman's inclusion on the teams was not met with unanimous acceptance. "There was a big `to-do' about my playing on the boys' team, but I was not made aware of it until later," Bachman said. "My mom (De Etta) told me some of the parents weren't happy about my being on the team though my teammates were never a problem. My mom was huge in getting stuff going for girls. She got the Walnut Creek Youth Association to get the girls' sports programs started with flag football, softball, and basketball. Scott Brown was huge for me," Bachman said. "He was the first person that gave me a chance and was responsible for my basketball career."
De Etta was incessant in her effort to increase the access to sports for Bachman and the other girls at Las Lomas. "I camped out at the high school and was always told they were working on it," DeEtta said. "I told them that if they didn't do something, Kim was going to play on the boys' teams and you won't like that very much and when she started her freshman year in 1974, they had their first girls' basketball team." "That's when I realized what Title IX came to mean," Kim said.
Bachman would go on to earn a basketball scholarship at the University of San Francisco and was on her way to making the U.S. Olympic team before a knee injury forced her to drop out of the tryouts. In seeing the programs at high schools today, she couldn't help but be impressed. "I look now, and it is so amazing what they have now for girls," Bachman said.
Bachman's two daughters, both who swam and one who played lacrosse, did not seem to appreciate what their mother went through. "It's so far removed for them," Bachman said. "I don't know how much the kids know what it was like then and how much different it is now though they do know what I went through."
"Sports was my whole life," Kim Bachman said. "I learned how to work together on a team, finding discipline, and utilizing the adrenalin I got from competing. My whole life has been doing stuff in male-dominated fields, starting with playing sports. From 1987 to 1996, I worked for the California Highway Patrol and discovered that my experience in competing head-to-head with boys growing up facilitated the transition to working in law enforcement. I had to work twice as hard to be able to feel equal with my male peers and my playing sports helped me get through the police academy (LaMorindaSportsWeekly)."
