Celebrating Title IX: Sporting sisterhood

The fitting finale for our “Celebrating Title IX” story series had to be about a true sporting sisterhood.

Growing up in Eagle at the turning point of women’s athletics, Valerie, Tammie and Marcie Smith were at the center of local prep athletics for over a decade. Their family’s athletic ethos embodies the spirit of the pivotal 1972 legislation and sports as a whole: girls can play hard, play together and be tough.

The story of their careers and lives prove sports matter — for men and for women.

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Growing up

A volleyball bounces off the roof of George and Betty Smith’s 900-square foot home at 323 Capitol Street in Eagle. After helping with dishes, the three Smith children sprint outside to start a game.

“We always had a ball in our hands,” remembered Tammie, the most likely culprit of bumping a volley to herself off the house. The precocious middle child graduated in 1979 after leading Eagle Valley High School to the first Colorado state volleyball tournament in 1975 — and the next three years as well.

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“We played after dinner every night,” recalled Valerie, EVHS class of 1977, and the eldest in the sporting sisterhood.

“After dishes, we’d go to the yard and we would play. It wasn’t work, it was play.”

George instilled a love of sports in his daughters, organizing flag football games in the street, hitting grounders or shooting baskets.

“I think a lot of people would say that he wanted us to be boys, but you know you get what you get and you don’t throw a fit,” said Valerie. “We just had fun playing all the time.”

“We were basically boys for him,” added Marcie, the youngest of the three, who graduated in 1984 and would take the reins from Tammie to lead the Devils to a second-place finish at the 1981 state volleyball championship.

Cousins Gina and Kent Wilson often walked from their home across the alley to fill out the roster for backyard game du jour. Kent became a star basketball player and Gina played with Tammie on the state volleyball teams in the late ’70s.

“It was just a family, close-ties, Eagle — a small town, get outside and play kind of thing,” remembered Marcie.

Betty would hop in during family badminton matches, but eschewed the more ‘aggressive’ sports, preferring to cheer, ‘get it! get it! get it!’ to her daughters as they’d dash by at full speed, jubilantly lost in the purest form of play — sweating, striving and stretching as their father gently and lovingly pushed them.

“He was never overbearing,” Marcie said of her dad.

“It was very positive; there was no push. They let us enjoy it. That was good. … But, we were very competitive.”

It was competition, though, in the most Latin sense of the word’s root, “competere,” which means “to strive together.”

“We just played well together,” remembered Tammie, who doesn’t recall too many tempers inappropriately flaring. “We challenged each other kind of the way our dad challenged us — in a good way.”

When his girls were very little, George would hang a dollar bill at the top of a door jamb, provoking spontaneous high jump competitions with his challenge, “If you can grab it, you can keep it.”

Hours would pass as the girls would run and jump for the money.

“If we got close, he’d inch it up higher. If we ever got it, then he’d say you have to catch it with your teeth. So, he was always just pushing the envelope just a little bit; pushing you to try harder,” described Tammie.

“He made it fun so that you wanted to do it.”

George instilled a passion for play and also taught his daughters to win and lose with dignity and respect.

“I think their thing was that you win graciously and show good sportsmanship,” said Valerie of her parents’ philosophy. She pointed out how Tammie won the league sportsmanship award, voted on by officials.

“We never like losing, but it happens — you do lose — so you just try harder the next time,” the oldest summarized.

From the time the girls were young, George brought his daughters from their unstructured backyard sanctuary to the big city to watch all kinds of state tournaments. It wasn’t done out of a crooked desire to groom his children into child prodigies. He exposed his kids to the highest level because somehow he knew they’d grow saucer-eyed absorbing the contagious energy from their McNichols Arena seats.

“Just that whole aura — I remember George Washington and Manual High School coming out to warm up and you’re just going, ‘Look!'” recalled Tammie, who said they would sit for hours and watch every class play every game.

“It was just amazing, so yeah it was always a goal to play at state.”

In 1975, Colorado would give her and thousands of other girls the chance to do just that.

Title IX timing

“Each of us had a completely different experience because of Title IX,” explained Valerie, who witnessed the evolution of women’s sports in the middle of her high school career.

In 1973, a year after Title IX was passed, Mary Bowman spearheaded the Girls Athletic Association.

“She set up a program where girls would meet one night a week and practice and she would teach us these different sports — soccer, basketball, volleyball — and then she would arrange for us to play Basalt or Carbondale,” said Valerie.

There were six games per year.

“Those contests meant the world to us,” stated Valerie, who remembers gyms full of 40-50 girls, split up into as many teams as possible for maximum participation, all “playing hard and loving it.”

In 1974, Bowman added flag football and more schools joined.

“We just became so ecstatic,” exclaimed Valerie with a pep in her voice suggesting she would love to go deep on a corner fly route right now.

“We weren’t playing a lot, but we were playing, and that’s all we cared about.”

Bowman was an instrumental figure, not only in the community, but in the sisters’ individual lives as well.

The physical education teacher first approached Tammie in eighth grade about joining the volleyball team. The summer before her ninth grade year, Bowman brought the team to UNC-Greeley for a volleyball gamp, where Tammy would meet her eventual college coach, a friend of Bowman’s, for the first time.

“She just was such an advocate for girls sports, especially for my older two sisters,” said Marcie.

“She was intelligent and athletic and she just really helped get girls athletics at Eagle Valley — she pretty much made it what it was. She was a force. She was pivotal for that high school and girls sports.”

“She had the biggest influence on my career,” Tammie added of Bowman, who retired from her position as the University of Utah’s senior associate athletics director for student-athlete support services and senior woman administrator in 2014.

In Val’s junior year, Colorado sanctioned a girls basketball and volleyball state tournament for the first time. At that point, she had been cheerleading for years, and all her friends were there. Title IX’s timing certainly impacted her decision to remain on the sidelines of the boys games instead of joining her freshman sister on Bowman’s volleyball team, a choice that “dismayed” George.

One day, he was in the high school gym fixing the scoreboard for work when Valerie’s PE class came in to play basketball. Valerie and her teammate, Jill Philips, were like Stockton and Malone.

“I’d get the rebound and outlet pass to her and she passed to me and I did a left-handed layup and it would go in,” Valerie remembered.

“I was kind of showing off, too, you know because I wanted him to see.”

She sat down for dinner expecting compliments. “He was furious,” she laughed. “He said, ‘I don’t understand why you’re not going out for sports.’ It was a hard decision.”

The culture surrounding girls sports was at least partly to blame.

“It was that weird transition time in athletics,” said Valerie, her tone growing contemplative.

“Nowadays I don’t think there would be any kind of decision for a girl who was a decent athlete — she would definitely go out for sports. But for me it was a tough decision — right or wrong.”

Though she acknowledges that, had she been born a few years later, she may have gravitated towards a sport, she is content reflecting on the role she played for her sisters.

“I think my biggest role was as a cheerleader — cheering them on,” she said, noting that she knew better than to try and usurp Tammie in the talent hierarchy.

“Tammie is a true natural athlete in every sense of the word. She was so far ahead of her time in her ability to dribble a ball, shoot, run an offense. She just stood out because she played ball, I’m not going to say like a guy but she did. She played ball like the guys did.”

Any sport she tried — from winning the Flight Days Eagle Open doubles tennis tournament without playing a game in her life to bowling 200s at will, Tammy was prodigious.

“So, I knew better than to try and compete,” admitted her older sister.

“She was far and away the more superb athlete. But my role, and I enjoyed it, was going to their ball games and cheering with my parents and being like ‘oh that’s my sister’ just being so proud of both of them.”

Tammie tried to recruit her sister, but in the end understood her decision.

“It just drove me nuts,” she said.

“She was fast and she could jump and she was tall. You could just see the talent there, but, at that time, people didn’t recognize really, girls sports. Everybody wanted to be a cheerleader. … I understood what she wanted to do and the cheerleaders were good.”

Janice Starr sponsored and coached the school’s cheerleaders to a state spirit contest state title.

“We kind of made cheerleading athletic, too, if you know what I mean,” she said.

At Mesa College, Valerie walked onto the volleyball team after never having played a set in high school. By her second year, she was a scholarship athlete and captain. George finally got to see her play.

“I treasured and enjoyed that so much,” she said, the warmth fully returning to our voice over the phone.

“I had an opportunity to play finally, and I didn’t have to choose anything.” 

For Marcie and Tammie’s careers, the timing of Title IX worked out in their favor. Tammie would earn a full ride to Cleveland State to play volleyball — she received numerous basketball offers at small schools across Kansas and Texas — and was able to walk onto the DI school’s softball team, a squad formed so the school could move towards compliance.

“The timing for me was perfect,” she said. By her second year, she was named captain of the Cleveland State team.

“Title IX helped open up that opportunity for me because they were now able to offer more full-ride scholarships for women in college because they needed to get that equality there.”

During high school, Tammie moved from one season to the next.

“We never really had to specialize in one sport,” she said, adding modern prep sports, where athletes are pressured to focus on a singular activity, may have discouraged her. A core group of girls would play in volleyball and basketball camps in the summer and transition seamlessly from each season during the school year.

“I wish we would have had tennis or golf back then, but I think it’s wonderful they offer that now and so many other sports,” Tammie reflected. “It gives so many more female athletes chances to play and hopefully get scholarships and pay for college, too.”

Marcie, who “was always trying to keep up with Tam,” started for Eagle Valley’s volleyball team as a freshman as Susan Scott took over coaching duties. Before that, however, she was just a sixth-grader playing against the boys.

“That’s what I remember as far as the disparity as far as girls not having access to the sports,” she said of the early ’70s, vividly recalling being guarded by Mark Johnson in a game covered by the Eagle Valley Enterprise.

In 1981, Marcie, still an underclassman, was playing a leading role on an Eagle Valley girls volleyball team with state aspirations. Their season almost came to a crumbling halt in the district tournament in Craig, a memory which stuck out for Marcie.

Trailing 14-9 to the Debeque Dragons, the Devils went on to win 16-14 in overtime to qualify for state.

“It was crazy how we came back. Then we all jumped in the pool — I remember that,” she laughed.

“That was the grit that came through — it was fun to be a part of.” 

At the state tournament, Marcie fondly recalled being inspired during the practice sessions at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs.

“All the Olympians had their vertical jumps marked on the wall,” she said of her mesmerization.

After walking out to the Olympic march, the team beat the three-time defending champions, Limon, in the semifinals. They lost in the title game.

“I remember the championship against Fowler,” she said. “Getting beat on that one was tough.” She paused.

“You know … you’re second place.”

Lifechanging legislation

The impact of Title IX was life-changing for all three girls.

Tammie, who called her decision to accept a DI athletic scholarship “the best decision” she ever made, left the familiar small-town mountain surroundings for downtown Cleveland in large part because she knew she’d get to see the world.

“I looked at the schedule and saw all the Big East and Big 10 schools,” she remembered.

“So, that was a big driver for me. I would not have seen parts of the U.S. that I got to see traveling and playing at those locations. We went to Florida, Georgetown, the Naval Academy, we came to Colorado and played. It was just a great experience and I wouldn’t have been able to go there if I hadn’t gotten that scholarship.”

At a tournament in Georgetown, she brushed up against greatness when her team entered the arena to practice just as the men’s basketball squad was finishing. A lifelong college basketball fan, she was giddy when Patrick Ewing and John Thompson towered by.

“Oh my god, oh my god! That’s John Thompson and Patrick Ewing!” she yelled at her teammates.

“And they were like, ‘Who’s that?’ I still think about that.”

Another tall basketball icon, Manute Bol, was recruited to Cleveland State during Tammy’s tenure there. Though he wound up lacking the academic credentials to attend, the 7-foot-7 Sudanese-American center spent a summer at the school and became friends with Tammie, who can boast that she taped the NBA player’s ankles.

“He was very, very funny,” Tammie said of Bol.

After graduation, Tammie was back in Eagle when she got a call from Bol inviting her and a guest to the Philadelphia Sixers game in Denver that night. She called up Marcie, then a college student at UNC-Greeley, and the sisters met at the arena and picked up tickets at will call. Bol also left a note, “meet me at the place I told you were staying after the game.”

Marcie and Tammie walked to the downtown Marriot and met Bol and teammate Jeff Ruland, who said, “We want to take you to dinner.”

Waiting for a cab, Bol demonstrated his unique sense of humor.

“This old, old cab pulls up and he goes to the driver and says, ‘what is this thing? A 1936?” Tammie recollected.

Inside the cab, the driver inquired of his name. “He didn’t speak very good English,” Tammie said.

“He goes: Georgie. Georgie Washington. And the cab driver goes ‘oh my goodness.’”

At dinner, another restaurant patron asked the skinny giant if he played basketball, a question the shot-blocking specimen undoubtedly addressed in public constantly.

Bol replied, “No. Golf’s my game.”

“So, that was his sense of humor,” Tammie laughed.

For Val, sports was always about people and pleasure.

“For me, sports was always about fun and friendship and of course trying to win …and being active,” she said.

“You know, just getting a good sweat on and running your hardest. And you get to be 63 and you still want to do that when you’re my age, but you know better! I can’t sprint to first base anymore, but I want to!”

She did for a while, playing for Beasley’s Super Food’s softball team from age 20 until 38 with the same group of women. Her family filled several roster spots, with Tammie at shortstop, Valerie at first, Marcie in leftfield, cousin Gina at second base and Gina’s sister-in-law at third.

“It was just a good core group of people that got along, enjoyed traveling to tournaments and playing. It was a good time,” remembered Tammie.

For Tammie, the lasting imprint of a life in sports is the knowledge that one can be “comfortable being uncomfortable” and confident to work through trials and tribulations.

“How you get to self-confidence is by that adversity and working through things,” she said.

“Learning teamwork and independence — sports teach you so many things, just how it correlates to life. You have to learn to work hard, but even then you might not get what you want, and you have to deal with that. It just helps you become better with life and dealing with things.”

For Marcie, Title IX has symbolized a move away from pigeonholing women to fit a particular mold. “You can be fit, you can be healthy and you can have a competitive edge and it’s still pretty,” she said.

Sports has given her “the strength to overcome any obstacle.”

“I love it when women bring their daughters up that way,” she said.

“It’s not about the outside. (Sports) does a lot on the inside, too as far as perseverance and toughness. ‘Pretty’ won’t get you that far … but if you’ve got that inner strength — that’s what it does for women.”

Another lesson for Marcie goes back to that 1981 district deficit.

“If you’re down 14-9 and coming back from that sort of deficit — it kind of correlates into life, too. Never giving up and trying to get from point A to point B and learning along the way — working with other people and solving problems in sports and life,” she said.

She attributes her grit to her dad.

“Just getting tough — we didn’t have a ton growing up, but we were tough,” she said. “We didn’t let the rough patches dictate our futures.”

As far as equality between men and women, Marcie sees room for improvement, but is happy with the progress that has been made.

“We’ve made up some ground since the ’70s, but there are still disparities,” she said.

“I hope it continues to improve, but there’s still a gap for sure. I’m not sure what the answer is, but I’m just happy that it’s commonplace now for girls to be able to compete.”

Passing the baton

Today, Tammie lives in Grand Junction, where she retired from CDOT 11 years ago. Marcie stayed in the valley for 20 years before moving to Telluride and then Oregon two years ago, where she has two kids. Regan, 27, enjoyed a stellar volleyball career and Kaden, 23 also loves the sport and plays “very well” in men’s leagues in the Portland area.

She’s passed along much of her philosophy of sport she got from her parents. “It teaches them about life,” she said. “About losing and winning — and how to get to the winning and if you don’t win, so be it.”

She’s still an avid sports fan, too, traveling to the big stage events just like her father used to do with her as a little girl. She will attend one of the sessions at the IAAF world track and field championships at Hayward Field this month, the first outdoor world championship on American soil.

“We’ll get to see long jump and hurdles and discus and hurdles. It will be a hoot — I’m looking forward to that,” she stated.

Valerie ended up in Carbondale where her two sons were three-sport athletes. Her and her husband have “many fond memories” from watching football, basketball and baseball games.

George passed away in 2014, but Betty lives in Grand Junction. All along, she’s supported her daughters and lovingly “forced” them to be best friends. “She still says, ‘if you girls ever start fighting (when I’m gone), I’m going to come back and haunt you,” Tammie laughs.

Though she was not college-educated herself, the Eagle Valley valedictorian set an expectation for her three daughters to go to college.

“Education was the most important thing,” said Valerie. “It wasn’t ‘if’ you go to college it was ‘when’ you go to college.” 

All three girls received physical education degrees and ended up coaching. Valerie and Tammie at Eagle Valley High School and Marcie in Basalt.

“We still like to get together and golf,” said Tammie. “It’s a very close family and I credit that a lot to my mom.” 

The moment she landed on ‘mom,’ Tammie’s voice cracked ever so slightly.

“She was the one who provided the structure to our family,” she continued. “When we were in high school, she would wait until we were all home from practice to have dinner. She’d have it ready so we could just sit down together and have dinner. That’s carried forward.”

Before hopping on the phone for the interview, Tammie had been hosting a college teammate, further evidence of the lifelong impact sports has had on her life. They spent the previous day hiking and shared memories of seeing Bol traipse across the Cleveland State campus for the first time. Nearby is where her sister, at what is now Colorado Mesa University, was fortunate to have a college career as well, her athletic prime spanning the gap of Title IX’s reach.

When Valerie reflects on the importance of sports for girls, it’s about “the idea of being strong and competitive.”

“I just think it’s so important, whether you’re male or female, to feel strong and healthy and to have a competitive urge, but not making it all about winning,” she said.

“Striving to win of course, but winning graciously, losing graciously … but mostly how you feel about yourself and your teammates. The friendships, the fun, the laughter — it’s just so much fun to be a part of a team.”

Thankfully, over the past 50 years, the door to sports has been opened wide for many girls to do just that.