Prep Review / Julie Cart : La Quinta Girls Program Has Gained Equal Footing

As recently as five years ago, Patricia Sperry said, if she had taken a girls basketball team on the court at La Quinta High School and demanded equal practice time, the laughter would have echoed all the way to the home economics lab.

“At the time, the men’s coaches would probably have told me to go home,” she said. “They would have said, ‘Bag it, lady.’ ”

Now the girls athletic director at La Quinta, Sperry can smile at past skirmishes. The battle, at La Quinta at least, is won. The only opposition Aztec girls teams face these days comes from other Garden Grove League teams vainly trying to put a dent in the school’s dominance of girls sports in Orange County.

Thus far this season La Quinta’s girls teams have won Southern Section championships in tennis and soccer and reached the final in basketball. Five members of the cross-country team made all-league.

The scouting report on the spring sports is no less devastating. The track team annually dominates the league and the softball team, according to the enthusiastic Sperry, “is going to bring home our third CIF banner.”

As if to testify to the transformation in girls athletics at La Quinta, Sperry proudly noted that next week’s open house at the school has been named “Lady Aztec Night.” Five years ago that would have meant a salute to the school’s cheerleaders.

What La Quinta has come to symbolize is the strength of the county’s girls programs--programs that have slowly climbed to a place of equal footing with the boys.

In terms of participation, many girls programs outdraw the boys. In terms of attendance, the pep support groups alone for a typical boys basketball game would outnumber the fans at most girls games.

Girls aren’t interested in recognition, Sperry says. But, they admit, every one-paragraph result printed receives prominent display on locker room bulletin boards.

“It’s getting better,” Sperry said. “I try to be positive. We tried to generate enthusiasm to have a pep rally to send the girls basketball team to the finals. It’s just not the same. If one of the guys teams had won a CIF championship, this school would be coming apart at the seams. But we are patient.”

The now-defunct Title IX may have opened the gym doors for high school girls programs, but once their feet were in, the door kept slamming. Social change creeps along at its own pace.

“When I first started it was a struggle, it was a big fight,” La Quinta tennis Coach Floreen Fricioni said. Fricioni has coached both the badminton and tennis teams to two CIF titles. Her tennis teams have won more than 10 Garden Grove League titles.

“What the other coaches didn’t realize was that it was our turn to have a place in athletics,” Fricioni said. “Now, it is working well. I don’t think we see the division at our school that people see on other campuses. For one thing, the boys and girls tennis teams here are close. We have them play in a mixed league in the summer. There is a rapport between the boys and girls. I like it that way. The girls can call up the guys and say, ‘Let’s go hit,’ and the guys can do the same.”

It appears that once the co-educational aspects of other high school endeavors found their way to athletics (starting with co-ed physical education classes), the gulf between boy and girl athletes began to close.

“The athletes here seem to team up,” Sperry said. “A boy on the baseball team may have a girlfriend who is on the hockey team. That’s healthy. It has also brought out the boys to the girls games. I think the boys have a lot more respect for what the girls have done. The girls have earned the respect.

“When our softball team went to CIF, we noticed that almost half the players on the team were student leaders. We are getting this caliber of student and it helps. It’s the image they (the girls) have projected. We have no stigma here about girls being jocks.”

La Quinta is lucky. And successful. Sperry has combined the philosophy of hard work and discipline to forge a winning tradition. She calls the success “self perpetuating.”

“I think a lot of our success has to do with our P.E. classes,” she said. “We run an instructional program here. We have three really good P.E. teachers who have positive attitudes. We look for kids with ability and promise.

“I want our kids to be the best they can be. We stress discipline. We demand that the teams represent the school at all times. It used to be that administrators would say, ‘I’d rather have a guy coach a girls team because they will make you work harder.’ That used to be true. But we know girls can work as hard as boys. And, now we have women coaches who have come through the college ranks as scholarship athletes. They know what it takes.”

Fricioni agrees.

“These girls are achievers,” she said. “They want to work hard. Tennis practice is over at 5:30, but I’m out there at 7 p.m., they say, ‘let’s hit some more.’ We are very proud of the team and the whole program at La Quinta.”