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not support paying for more competition between schools. So, we decided as a fac- ulty to ask if we could start developing a varsity program." At the time, women made up about one- third of the 15,940 students registered at University Park. The faculty drew up a proposal for nine varsity sports, and Adams took it to her supervisor, Ernie McCoy, who had dual responsibilities as dean of the College of Health and Physical Education and director of athletics. He was enthusiastic. They gained the approval of the popular NCAA faculty representative, Sam Wheery, and then met with university president Eric Walker. "The only change that was made," Adams recalled with a chuckle, "was at the request of Eric Walker. He said, 'Please, do me a favor and do not call it varsity or inter- collegiate. Call it extramural because too many of the staff might be opposed to competition for women but they won't know what extramural is.' And that's how it all started." Walker was correct in his assessment, because a large minority of the women's faculty did not want varsity status. "They said they didn't want to make the same mistakes the men had made," Durant said. Two of the facets of the varsity proposal were that the club advisor would serve as the first coach, and the only varsity teams would be those requested by the students. "Training for sports in high school had not developed and spread into the colleges, and it was not easy to find a qualified woman coach or someone with specialized training. So we went with whatever we had," Durant said. "At first, the women's faculty set the rules, and some were a bit bizarre," Adams recalled. "We could have no more than two contests in one week, and then if you had two contests you could not have any the next week. It was strange." Neither woman could remember when the extramural teams morphed into the public's consciousness as varsity entities comparable to the men, but it was a slow process. For years, the school yearbook, La Vie, categorized the women's program under "Recreation," separate from men's sports. The 1966 edition of La Vie referred to the "women's extramural program, financed by the College of Health and Physical Ed- ucation" and noted that it included "nine extramural sports." A year later, the year- book first used the term "varsity" but still classified women's sports as recreation separate from the men's fall, winter and spring sports sections. The treatment of women's sports as inferior was endemic to the sports culture of the time and was based on the NCAA's strong resistance to including them in its purview. There also was large faction of women professors who wanted nothing to do with varsity sports or the NCAA. "Many faculty women thought organized intercollegiate sports competition was not in the best interests of women nor appropriate in higher education," Adams said. "But a lot of us realized how impor- tant sports were to our student women and their college experience. We also saw the need for giving women the same op- portunities as men." In 1967, the NCAA formed a committee to study "the feasibility of the development and supervision of women intercollegiate athletics." Academics are familiar with studies of this type and know that they are often used as stalling tactics. Faculty women such as Durant and Adams weren't going to wait. Since the chauvinistic NCAA didn't want to accept women's sports, the nation's female phys- ical education professors made their own move that same year and organized a group to guide and control intercollegiate com- petition. It was called the Commission of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (CIAW) and also had regional divisions such as the ECIAW that included Penn State. By 1970 – the last year of its exis- tence – the CIAW was holding national championship tournaments in five sports. Needing to expand women's intercol- legiate sports further than the CIAW was capable of doing, the women professors replaced the CIAW in 1971 with a stronger organization called the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women. At the start, 275 institutions were members of the AIAW. With Title IX providing the impetus, the organization's membership and prestige flourished. When it went out of existence in 1982 after women's sports were finally absorbed into the NCAA, 972 institutions were members. One of the leaders of both organization was another Penn State professor, Lucille Magnusson, who was the last president of the CIAW and as such became the first past president of the AIAW. "There were a lot of people who worked very hard to make the AIAW what it was," Magnusson said. "We went from almost nothing to become something, and it was all manned by volunteers, professional physical education educators who were doing this on the side." The Penn State women involved with the AIAW received an extra boost from Robert Scannell, who succeeded McCoy as dean of the redesignated Penn State College of Health, Physical Education and Recreation in 1970, and the new athletics director, Ed Czekaj, who served under him. "I made probably my most dramatic de- cision in 1971 to give scholarships or grants-in-aid to women," Scannell said. "It was controversial within our faculty. We didn't give full scholarships at the time. But because we were ahead of all the schools of our type in giving scholar- ships, the partial scholarships had an im- pact. If we were recruiting against a school that offered to pay for the books of a stu- dent, we might offer to pay half of the tuition, and that usually helped us get that student." When some rival colleges began giving full scholarships a few years later, Scannell agreed with Durant, Adams and Magnus- son to do the same. But with limited funds, full scholarships were limited and were used to attract special talents. Either tennis player Joy McManus in the fall of 1976 or gymnast Ann Carr a year later received the first full scholarship, but the records are not clear. Carr was a super talent who won the Broderick Award in 1977 and '78 as the outstanding woman athlete in her sport. Four other Penn State women received Broderick Awards during the AIAW's ex- istence: Kathy Mills in cross country (1977) and track (1978), Jeannie Fissinger in field

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