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Athletic Director Dee Kohlemeier of Hoover High School in Glendale, Calif., holds a minority view: "Girls sports are boring. I can watch a gym class for boys that has better skills than a varsity girls basketball team." Officials at New York's Madison Square Garden disagree. After a 1977 women's college basketball doubleheader drew 12,000 fans—who were treated to Montclair State's Carol Blazejouski's 52-point performance —Garden planners started to work on a women's tournament and similar bookings. Said one official: "We are in business to make a profit. If it helps women's sports, so much the better. But the bottom line is the bottom line—we can make money on women's basketball."
With success come all the pressures that long have been part of men's sports. The new emphasis on winning—and luring customers through the turnstiles—has produced a familiar syndrome of corruption. College recruiters, though technically barred from sweet-talking hot prospects, have nonetheless found ways to hound young, often unsophisticated athletes. Tales of under-the-table payments and inducements—a new car or postschool job—have begun to circulate. The A.I.A.W. has no full-time enforcement unit to oversee violations, subscribing instead to the credo that conscience is more powerful than compulsion. "We are built upon self-policing," says Joan Hult, head of the A.I.A.W.'S Ethics and Eligibility Committee.
However lofty that principle, it is difficult to maintain when large investments—in scholarship money, facilities, travel expenses and television revenues—are at stake. Already basketball coaches are luring transfer students to their campuses with no fear of penalty: the A.I.A.W., unlike the N.C.A.A., does not require transfer athletes to sit out a season. A 5-ft. 10-in. forward with a good fadeaway jumper can, and increasingly does, play musical colleges. Michigan Athletic Director Donald Canham watches from the sidelines and notes: "The women had a golden opportunity to establish an athletic program with the men's mistakes as a guide. I think women will regret the change. They now have almost an exact copy of men's sports—with all of the mistakes."
Women may well retort that the men should clean up their act, but it would be a tragedy if women cannot avoid mistakes and exploit the opportunity that lies before them. The revolution in women's athletics is a full, running tide, bringing with it a sea change—not just in activities, but in attitudes as well. Of sport and its role in preparing both sexes for adult life, Harvard Sociologist David Riesman says: "The road to the board room leads through the locker room." He explains that American business has been "socialized" by sport. "Teamwork provides us with a kind of social cement: loyalty, brotherhood, persistence." Riesman is one of a group of scholars who believe women have had trouble rising to high managerial positions in part because they never learned the lessons taught so well by competitive sports.