“It seems so simple to say that people should have equal access to all the things that we can give you in schools,” Blair, now Karen Troianello and an editor at the Yakima Herald-Republic, said in a compelling story by Larry Stone in today's Seattle Times. It took eight years, but the case was won in 1987. While Title IX set the table for women’s collegiate athletics to fly, it was Blair v Washington State University in 1979 that supercharged the endeavor. And track athlete Karen Blair of Bellingham - by virtue of her name coming first in alphabetical order - was the leader of 39 female athletes who sued WSU for equal treatment in athletics. Sue Durrant, who coached Cougar women's basketball for 19 seasons and volleyball for 12 in a 40-year career at WSU that began in 1962, led the charge for 11 WSU women’s coaches. So seven years after Title IX’s passage, WSU’s women’s coaches and athletes took what would turn out to be historic action. But while Title IX went into effect across the nation in 1972, not all institutions, including WSU, extended the equality to athletics.įacilities, uniforms and transportation for women’s sports in those days were second rate, and the few scholarships they were allocated didn’t appear until the late ‘70s. TODAY MARKS THE 50th anniversary of the passage of Title IX, the civil rights law prohibiting gender-based discrimination in any school or any other education program that receives funding from the federal government.
Sue Durrant earned a spot on Pullman's Walk of Fame here in 2019, and was inducted into the WSU Athletics Hall in 2017.
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