Common Sentences

Here's To The Pre-Title IX Class of Female Athletes

https://reader.sl.nj.com/creegans-overtime-goal-sends-morristown-to-mct-final/content.html Photo by Mile Djordjiovski, for NJ.com

On May 8, the Newark Star Ledger’s Matt Bove wrote of a critical moment in Morristown High’s 11-10 overtime defeat of Mendham High School, in a Morris County Girl’s Lacrosse Tournament semi-final:

To force overtime, Morristown goalie Eloise Downes had the save of the game. Coming from behind the dot sprinting back to the cage, she made an outstanding save on an airborne ball with just seconds remaining to prevent what would have been the game-winning goal for Mendham.

Mile Djordjiovski captured Downes’ heroic save with a stunning photo. I imagine that the Morristown goalie’s family and friends have been sharing that picture widely, and that Eloise Downes will keep a copy somewhere nearby for many years to come.

In looking at that photo I couldn’t help thinking about an event that happened the same day as Eloise’s save. In South Orange, New Jersey, a 1969 graduate of Columbia High School entered the Columbia Athletic Hall of Fame. She received the Pete Cross Award as a person who especially embodied the spirit of Columbia High athletics. This was Patty Masin, a dear family friend of nearly sixty years.

Patty comes from a sports-crazy family. When Philip Roth wrote American Pastoral and needed to pattern his protagonist “Swede” Lvov’s early years after a legendary Weequahic High School athlete of the ‘40s, he chose Patty’s dad, Swede Masin. Patty’s big brother Bobby captained three sports at Columbia and played football at Delaware. Patty recalls learning, one day in first grade, that schoolchildren could purchase a season’s ticket for Columbia home football games. First thing next morning she handed her teacher the money. From kindergarten through high school graduation, Patty spent scores of hours rooting for Columbia athletic teams.

The last three of those years she wore a red and black uniform and led cheers at Columbia football and basketball games. She told the audience the other night that she loved cheerleading, and that she loved phys ed class. For those of us who know her, that’s not surprising, for Patty is one of those people who takes delight in living, in being physically active, in teamwork, in friendships.

And Patty gracefully alluded to the fact that she was a pre-Title IX female athlete. Cheerleading and phys ed represented two of the few avenues open to Patty and to other Columbia High female students who loved to play sports. Until the ‘70s, the high school offered no varsity interscholastic athletic program for the 50% of its student body who identified as female.

In inducting Patty, the hall of fame committee recognized a person who’d gone on to a distinguished career as a physical educator and coach in Elizabeth, New Jersey, whose good cheer, emotional intelligence, wisdom and sense of humor has made her scores of friends and admirers, and whose devotion to Columbia High and Columbia athletics has lasted since the middle 1950s.

It also inducted Patty as a representative for decades of athletically-gifted young women who attended Columbia High but never got a chance to compete in their school colors.

When we think about the female athletes since then who have had the chance to perform, at Columbia and elsewhere, it gives us pause, doesn’t it? We wish we knew the great female athletes who, pre-1972, never got the chance to compete, and how a different set of rules would have enhanced their lives and, for those of us who enjoy watching sports and the people who compete, our own.

So thank goodness for Title IX. Would that it had come much, much earlier, so that Patty and all of the Patty Masins across our country had gotten their chance. But thank goodness that it eventually came.

And thank goodness for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for the now-endangered Voting Rights Act of 1965. Thank goodness for the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, for the 1968 Fair Housing Act, for Loving v. Virginia, for US v. Windsor, for Obergefell v. Hodges, for Bostock v. Clayton County, tardy though they all may have been. Thank goodness for our imperfect nation. In its not uncommon periods of fearfulness, it has closed people out from voting, from jobs, from neighborhoods, from education, from organized athletics. But it has proved, again and again, capable of self-correction when it pays heed to its better angels.

Those better angels appear thin on the ground these days. American citizens are still denied equal political, economic, residential, educational, and yes, increasingly, athletic access, the full fruits of American citizenship.

Those who came before us figured out how to correct wrongs of this stripe without the nation imploding. And so must we.

(photo courtesy of Patty Masin)

Patty Masin, Columbia Cougar cheerleader. In those days, Columbia won about two games a year. Patty is the relentlessly positive cheerleader, left foreground.

Notes:

Matt Bove, “Creegan’s overtime goal sends Morristown to MCT final.” Newark Star Ledger, 8 May, 2026.