A recipe for success

They put a green trailer on a patch of lawn beside the gymnasium. That was Judith Holland’s office when she arrived at UCLA in 1975 as the director of women’s athletics.

Men’s basketball had won a slew of national championships and the football team was on its way to the Rose Bowl. All the women got was that trailer, a few part-time coaches and a budget of $268,000 that would barely cover laundry costs by today’s standards.

“It was a little rough,” Holland recalls. “We had a lot of growing pains.”

So the former sports administrator took particular satisfaction that one of her teams -- women’s water polo -- gave UCLA its unprecedented 100th NCAA championship by winning a title on Sunday.

“I know a lot of people wanted men’s basketball to win that 100th,” she says. “I was kind of rooting for the women.”

Consider that the UCLA women’s teams -- starting from scratch, so far behind the men -- have contributed 30 titles in the last 25 years. They put the Bruins into the history books by outpacing the men, 10 titles to three, in the last five years.

“UCLA has been at the forefront of putting the emphasis on sports for females,” said Ray Schneider, who studies college athletics as an associate professor of sports management at Bowling Green. “They are one of the few programs that has expected all of their teams to excel.”

This philosophy has translated into 10 titles in softball and five each in water polo, gymnastics and track and field. Volleyball has won three, golf two.

“I just look now and think ... it’s amazing,” former basketball player Michele Kort said.

Kort showed up on campus in 1968 -- “The prehistoric era,” she said -- only a year after the athletic department had officially added women’s basketball.

Now a senior editor for Ms. Magazine, she recalls being handed a stretchy nylon uniform and riding to away games in university station wagons.

“Big, clunky things,” she said. “I remember they didn’t have power steering because I had to drive one back from a game in Riverside one night in the tule fog.”

The men’s basketball team was in the midst of its heyday, winning championships under the legendary John Wooden. Kort recalls the women’s team was coached by Shirbey Johnson, who was also the track coach and athletic director.

“She wasn’t really a basketball person,” Kort said. “But she cooked us great soul food.”

Things began to improve for the UCLA women, and thousands of other women’s programs across the nation, with the passage of Title IX legislation in 1972. Suddenly, federal law called for athletic departments to provide gender equity in sport.

At UCLA, that meant scholarships and a new star in Ann Meyers (now Ann Meyers Drysdale). The younger sister of David, a standout on the men’s basketball team, Meyers led UCLA to the 1978 national title in the pre-NCAA days of the Assn. for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women.

The Bruin women were on the national map.

“When you’re that young, you don’t know the importance of it,” said Meyers, now general manager of the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury. “You’re just doing what you love.”

By then, Holland had replaced Johnson as athletic director and had made a critical decision. Given her limited budget, she chose to stick with part-time coaches, pouring as much money as possible into scholarships.

“We wanted to get a lot of great athletes,” she said. “That would really get us going.”

Over the next two decades, UCLA attracted enough top athletes to fill a Hall of Fame.

Olympians such as Evelyn Ashford, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Florence Griffith-Joyner and Gail Devers in track. Sue Enquist, Dot Richardson and Lisa Fernandez in softball. Denise Curry in basketball and Holly McPeak in volleyball.

From 1971 to 1981, UCLA women won nine national championships under the auspices of the AIAW. Toward the end of that stretch, Holland -- a former AIAW president -- lobbied for the UCLA women to join the NCAA.

The switch took place during the 1981-82 school year and, since that time, the women’s teams have excelled equally with the men, each winning 30 national titles.

Not that everything has gone perfectly.

The women still find themselves receiving significantly less money. In the late 1990s, the California chapter of the National Organization for Women filed a complaint against UCLA and USC, claiming that neither school had satisfied Title IX standards.

UCLA responded by adding women’s rowing, bringing the current total of women’s teams to 12.

“They’re probably not the best in the country,” said Linda Joplin, chair of the athletic equity committee for NOW’s state chapter. “But they’re not the worst.”

At the very least, winning is one indicator that a school is committed to gender equity, Joplin said. UCLA ranks behind only Stanford in women’s titles.

“The reason [UCLA] has won those championships is because they have treated those sports as important as men’s basketball and football,” said Schneider of Bowling Green.

Which makes Holland think back to the days of working out of a green trailer.

Since leaving the school in 1995, she has kept track of her women’s teams, watching as they led UCLA toward 100 championships with titles in gymnastics and golf, softball and water polo.

“First thing I read every day is the sports page to see how they are doing,” she said. “It’s kind of nice, in my opinion.”

david.wharton@latimes.com

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Title 30

UCLA women were responsible for 30 of its 100 NCAA titles. The softball team led the way with 10, which is just behind men’s volleyball (19), men’s tennis (16) and men’s basketball (11) in the overall count:

Softball (10)

1982

1984

1985

1988

1989

1990

1992

1999

2003

2004

--

Golf (2)

1991

2004

--

Gymnastics (5)

1997

2000

2001

2003

2004

--

Volleyball (3)

1984

1990

1991

--

Outdoor Track & Field (3)

1982

1983

2004

--

Indoor Track & Field (2)

2000

2001

--

Water Polo (5)

2001

2003

2005

2006

2007

--

Source: UCLA