It Was End of an Error

Cheryl Weaver’s mother has the genes.

Whether she had the game is lost to history.

“In college, I was on the pompom squad,” Sheila Weaver said.

Her daughter is a three-time All-American, a powerful 6-foot-2 volleyball player whose Long Beach State team was 33-0 before losing to Stanford in front of 10,000 fans in the NCAA championship match in December.

Sheila Weaver was watching--as she so often has.

An acclaimed coach, Sheila Weaver has mentored two national high school volleyball players of the year, three junior national team players and sent athletes on to Stanford, Long Beach, California and Duke, to name a few.

As a player--zilch.

“I’m 52, so it’s prior to Title IX in terms of opportunities,” Sheila Weaver said.

“I was a good athlete. We’d have races at recess and I’d beat everybody. But when I went to college, we didn’t have any women’s teams.”

Decades later, that’s difficult to imagine.

As some 1,500 ceremonies across the nation commemorate today’s 16th National Girls and Women in Sports Day, this also marks the 30th anniversary of Title IX--the landmark 1972 federal legislation that mandated gender-equity in education, spurring opportunities for women in sports.

Though noncompliance with Title IX remains widespread, the transformation is unfathomable for those who weren’t there in the beginning.

“I just can’t imagine not being able to do what you have a gift for, not even being able to get a scholarship,” said Cheryl Weaver, born in 1980.

“It’s just hard to believe.”

In 1972, only one in 27 girls participated in sports. The most recent study cites one in 21/2.

No one needs to cite a scientific sample if they witnessed the 1996 Atlanta Olympics--the Olympics of Mia Hamm, Lisa Leslie and Dot Richardson.

But until the daughters of such women as those and other trailblazers such as Ann Meyers Drysdale--the first woman to receive an athletic scholarship to UCLA--become athletes in their own right, there still will be a Title IX generation gap.

Brian Gimmillaro, Weaver’s coach at Long Beach State, sees it in recruiting.

“I go into homes and the moms look at me like, ‘Where were you 20 years ago?’” he said.

Sheila Weaver came from an athletic family.

One brother, Bob Florence, went to Nevada Las Vegas and played basketball for Jerry Tarkanian his senior year in 1974. Another brother, Bill Florence, played football at Louisville. Both had a brief flirtation with the pros.

Sheila had no such opportunities, and precious few even at Des Moines Technical High in Iowa.

“We had pompom teams, drill teams. They had football, track, basketball,” she said. “There was a teacher who was into golf, and they started a golf team and asked if any girls wanted to play golf, so I did--not that I had played a whole lot of golf.”

At Drake, the pompom squad and intramural sports were the options for women. So Sheila cheered for the Drake basketball team that went to the 1969 Final Four and lost to UCLA--though the pompom squad didn’t get to accompany the men to Louisville because of the cost.

Women’s teams simply weren’t an option.

“I think there was more of an acceptance that that’s the way it was,” she said. “There wasn’t a whole lot of questioning why it was different.

“For me, it didn’t come down to, ‘Let’s protest,’ nothing like that. But I think once the law was in place, things changed.”

They haven’t changed entirely.

Sheila Weaver is still working to see that they do.

After graduating from Drake with a major in physical education in 1971 and earning a master’s in the field from Kent, Weaver became a coach and physical education teacher.

While teaching at the Sidwell Friends School in Washington--best known as Chelsea Clinton’s school during her White House years--Weaver founded the D.C. Juniors Volleyball Club, a club team primarily for African American girls from Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia.

“In club volleyball, to see a team of black girls, all 6 feet tall and from the East Coast, that’s unusual,” she said.

Cheryl and former Stanford player Paula McNamee were only two of the many players from that group to go on to earn scholarships. So did Alisha Weaver, the older daughter of Sheila and Booker Weaver. (Alisha played at Clark Atlanta University in Georgia.) Other alumni went on to Duke, Temple, George Washington, Howard and Macalester College.

In 1995, Sheila Weaver founded a nonprofit organization called the Academic and Athletic Alliance, a group that aims to help girls from disadvantaged backgrounds pursue sports and scholarship opportunities (www.academicandathleticalliance.com).

She’s also working on a Web site to link women’s college coaches with prospective recruits.

Two years ago, Sheila Weaver was honored by the Women’s Sports Foundation as the 2000 Private School Coach of the Year for the District of Columbia.

This year, she is working at the Archer School for Girls in Los Angeles after leaving Sidwell Friends to watch Cheryl play.

After all, it’s something Sheila never experienced.

“She didn’t put any pressure on me,” said Cheryl, preparing to join the U.S. national team in training at Colorado Springs, Colo. “But she said, ‘Make the most of your God-given talents and your opportunities, because I didn’t get to.’”