Title IX at 50: Readers have their say on who should have made our list — including former Northern Illinois AD Cary Groth

As part of the Tribune’s coverage of the 50th anniversary of Title IX, we asked for ideas of women who made an impact on Chicago-area sports history.

In June, the Tribune published profiles of 50 women throughout sports and 20 women in sports media who were notable for their accomplishments on and off the field. But we wanted to hear from readers about who they thought deserved attention for their work in girls and women’s sports.

Here are some of their ideas.

• In narrowing the scope of the project to the Chicago area — aside from a few exceptional Illinois athletes — we cut out some notable women from universities in the region, including Notre Dame basketball coach Muffet McGraw, Illinois State basketball coach Jill Hutchison and several key University of Illinois administrators.

But one we perhaps should have included — especially given her roots at Rich East High School and the scope of her impact — was former Northern Illinois athletic director Cary Groth. She played basketball and tennis at NIU, coached women’s tennis there and was an administrator before rising to become athletic director in 1994, one of three female ADs at an institution with NCAA Division I-A football at the time.

Groth was NIU’s AD for 10 years before becoming athletic director at Nevada, and she recently was elected to the Mid-American Conference Hall of Fame. She’s on the faculty at Nevada’s College of Business and founded The Pictor Group, a college sports consulting firm.

• Other suggestions from universities outside the Chicago area included Pat McKinzie-Lechault, a Sterling, Ill., native who earned Illinois State’s first women’s basketball scholarship in 1978. She went on to play professionally in the short-lived Women’s Professional Basketball League and in Europe and is an author who has written about Title IX.
• Rockford’s Deb Patterson, who went to Rockford College, was the Kansas State women’s basketball coach from 1996-2014. Her teams made nine NCAA Tournaments and she twice was named the Big 12 coach of the year. She’s now the director of player personnel and program analytics at Washington State.

• Mary Terwilliger was a track athlete who went to NIU in the 1930s. She was an AAU star sprinter and made two Olympic Trials. She was a peer of Chicago sprinter Tidye Pickett, whose compelling story the Tribune told in 2016.
• Sandra Bucha was among the early fighters for girls opportunities in Illinois high school sports.

A talented swimmer, Bucha trained with the boys team under Hinsdale Central coach Don Watson but wanted to compete with them in meets. In the months before Title IX was signed into law, she filed a lawsuit against the Illinois High School Association to push for girls to be allowed to compete with boys in non-contact sports. The suit was unsuccessful, but the IHSA’s implementation of girls swimming was not far behind.

Bucha went on to become an accomplished marathon swimmer who was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame.

• Only a few of the hundreds of worthy Illinois high school coaches received recognition in our profiles, but longtime Chicago-area sportswriter Jack McCarthy believes former Mother McAuley volleyball coach Nancy Pedersen merited mention.

Pedersen retired in 2004 with nine state titles and a career record of 789-110.

• Women who worked in sports business or charities were not a big part of our profiles, unless they worked for one of the Chicago professional teams, like the Blackhawks’ Jaime Faulkner and the Bears’ Karen Murphy.

So there’s probably many we could add, but two suggestions were Lisa (Meyers) Strasman and Barb Lazarus.

Strasman grew up playing hockey in Skokie and went on to play at Yale and internationally. She now is the president and COO of Next College Student Athlete (NCSA), a Chicago-based recruiting organization that connects high school athletes with college coaches.

Lazarus is the founder of Game On! Sports 4 Girls, which helps promote healthy lifestyles for girls through sports and fitness via summer camps and school-year programs.

• A couple of readers wrote to share their experiences of fighting for their place in sports, including former Morton West student Barbara Lukes Collins.

Collins said she covered a boys indoor track meet for her high school newspaper in 1965. She had to fight to have the article included on the sports page, and her adviser was going to publish it without her byline because she was a girl.

After she insisted on a byline, it was published under the name B. Lukes. Collins was irritated her first name was omitted but still takes pride in the fact she was the first girl to cover a sports event for the paper. She went on to study journalism and has written two books on horticulture.

Here’s to all of these women who fought for their places in sports — and the millions more.