Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, Rosie Casals knew by the time she was a teenager that she wanted to become a professional tennis player.

It was the 1960s and women had few opportunities to play sports in college, with just 15% of all collegiate athletes being female. A woman receiving an athletic scholarship for college was not even a part of the equation.  

Casals had a lower-class upbringing and wasn’t sure she’d even have the opportunity to attend college. Since there was no path for her to play tennis there, her focus was somehow to make it as a pro.

“We could never even aspire to think that we could get into college for being good in a sport,” said Casals, who resides in Palm Desert. “Women didn’t think that way because we weren’t allowed to think that way.”

Casals remembers that boys often had opportunities to use athletics as a way into college but for a long time the girls “walked a step behind.”

Though Casals was one of the top amateur players in the country, without college tennis as an option, she knew she would need a big break to play professionally. She got that when she was befriended by Billie Jean King and the two began playing doubles together in 1965. 

Casals was 17 at the time. A year later, Casals won the first of her five doubles titles at Wimbledon. The English Grand Slam event opened the field up to amateurs in 1968, to begin the Open Era of tennis, which provided further opportunities for women in the sport.

Casals, who ultimately became a two-time inductee of the International Tennis Hall of Fame, was on the ground floor of monumental change in women's tennis and beyond. 

More:Title IX and its impact should be part of a high school athlete's education

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On June 23, 1972, Congress passed landmark legislation called Title IX, which gave women an equal opportunity as men in educational settings. A popular offshoot of that was the opportunities it provided for women in college sports, and was summed up with 37 powerful words: 

"No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."

It’s now been 50 years since that legislation opened doors for women to blaze trails and to have Hall of Fame careers on and off the court. The law has transformed women’s amateur athletics and has provided an avenue for women to pursue professional sports as a career in a way that was not available to Casals and the women who grew up in her generation and earlier.

“It’s really an educational amendment,” King said in a recent interview with The Desert Sun. “Everybody thinks it’s women’s sports, but it’s really an educational amendment. ... When they passed those 37 words about any school public or private — high school college or university — receiving federal funds, for the first time it has to spend it equally among the boys and the girls. It was fantastic.”

King believes that Title IX is the reason we now have women's sports, even if the legislation initially was not about women in sports. A year after Title IX became law, King famously defeated Bobby Riggs in the three-set Battle of the Sexes tennis exhibition inside the Houston Astrodome. The match was watched on television by more than 90 million. 

Part of her motivation in the match, King said, was to maintain momentum for Title IX and to help bring about social change and equality for women at a time when women were not authorized to get a credit card in their own name.

"I wanted to change the hearts and minds of the country," King said, "to believe in Title IX, to believe women deserve equality."

Now, 44% of all collegiate athletes are women, compared to 15% prior to Title IX, according to research by Women's Sports Foundation (WSF), a nonprofit founded by King. 

“For our generation,” Casals said, “there was no such thing as, ‘How can we get to the next step in getting an education and pursuing a sport for women?’ It just didn’t exist, so you didn’t think that way.

“I think we were a catalyst to get that going for women,” she added.

Two years after Title IX went into effect, Ann Meyers Drysdale became the first woman to receive an athletic scholarship to a four-year school when she signed to play basketball at UCLA. 

It happened a year after Casals, King and seven other women broke away from the governing body in professional tennis to host the first all-women’s tennis tournament. 

While at UCLA, Meyers Drysdale recorded a rare quadruple-double, with 20 points, 14 rebounds, 10 assists and 10 steals, and became the first female basketball player to earn All-American honors each of her four years.

The one-time Rancho Mirage resident said her timing was fortunate.

“I feel very lucky to have come along when I did,” said Meyers Drysdale, who played seven different sports in high school. “I didn't know what I was going to be and being a high schooler I didn't know what Title IX was hardly. But the good lord put me in the right place at the right time.”

According to the CIF Southern Section, the largest governing body for high school sports in Southern California, participation in girls’ sports has increased tenfold since 1968, when 35,019 girls competed as part of the interscholastic sports program initiated in Southern California prior to Title IX. That number increased to 86,492 immediately after Title IX went into effect and the number has risen to 354,126 as of the 2019-20 school year.

The CIF-SS began holding girls’ section championships in track & field in 1974, golf in 1977, volleyball in 1978, basketball in 1981 and cross country in 1987. But it did not begin championships for other girls’ sports until 11 years ago.

“I think, probably, Title IX has helped suburban white girls the most,” King said. “In the next 50 years, we really have to concentrate on (helping) more and more girls of color. We’ve got to make sure that we take care of girls with disabilities and keep developing that area. We have to help the LGBT community, especially trans athletes. I’m very big on inclusion, so I want everyone to have a chance to play, but I also want it to be fair.”

As of 2016, female-to-male ratios for enrollment, athletic participation and resource allocation for NCAA Division I schools were still not meeting the standard for equality. According to data provided by the NCAA, and published by FiveThirtyEight, for every male attending Division I colleges, there are 1.13 females attending. But for every male participating in athletics, 0.88 females participate and for every athletic scholarship given to males, 0.88 were given to females.

The data also showed that women receive half of the total athletic expenses that men do, and 0.46 of the recruiting expenditures, 0.43 of the head coaching salaries and 0.39 of the assistant coaching salaries of the men’s sports.

Many American women have nonetheless benefitted from how Title IX has changed the landscape of collegiate athletics. Professional tennis player Desire Krawczyk, a Rancho Mirage native who developed her game at Arizona State University, won three Grand Slam titles in mixed doubles in 2021 and as of June 22 is the 12th-ranked doubles player in the world. 

Casals believes that fewer female athletes, at least in tennis, are ready for the professional game than in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, so having an avenue to attend and play college athletics is as vital as ever, she said.

She pointed to American Danielle Collins, the eighth-ranked player in the world, who attended the University of Virginia before becoming an elite player known around the world. Collins, 28, turned pro in 2016 and has reached the quarterfinals at Roland Garros and the finals at the Australian Open. 

“I think the opportunities that women need to have,” Casals said, “in order to go professional — the basketball players, the soccer players — they need to have more opportunities, more visibility, public relations, marketing.”

Despite the advances since Title IX became law five decades ago, many believe more progress still needs to be made. 

A USA Today investigation showed that several major universities are padding the numbers of women participating, the scholarships they've received and the overall scholarship money they've been given, to avoid providing equality to women's sports. 

Data analysis of universities with Division I football programs showed that those 107 schools collectively added more than 3,600 additional participation “opportunities” for female athletes in the 2018-19 academic year without adding a single new women’s team.

Some of the ways those numbers are manipulated include double or triple-counting athletes that play multiple sports. For example, an athlete that is a cross country runner, a distance runner on the indoor track team and a distance runner on the outdoor track team was being counted as three scholarship opportunities when only one scholarship was being used. 

Schools can also count male practice players in their report to the federal government but must omit them from their report to the NCAA. The difference between the reports can reveal the presence of such players, which serve an important role but are not women and do not play in competitions.

“The struggles are still there. We know that colleges and universities, even 50 years later, so many are not in compliance with Title IX,” Meyers Drysdale said. “And it’s still very difficult for a lot of these coaches and athletic directors and athletes to continue to come up against this discrimination. Because it's not just about sports, it’s about so much more.”

Another area where Title IX is falling short in high schools and colleges is in the coaching ranks. In fact, Meyers Drysdale said the numbers have gone backward.

“Before Title IX, about 80% of the coaching jobs in high school and women’s college sports were held by women. Since Title IX, it’s less than 48%,” said Meyers Drysdale, who is currently the vice president of the Phoenix Mercury and a color analyst for Phoenix Suns broadcasts. “And AAU teams and summer club teams it’s more like 97% male.”

The actual number is even lower, as currently around 41% of high school and college women's sports teams are coached by women, according to WSF.

That notion holds true in the desert. Using girls’ basketball as an example, only two of the 14 desert high school varsity teams had female head coaches: La Quinta's Electra Viveros and Palm Desert’s Dani Oswood. 

“To think that, in some ways, we’re going backward after so many years,” Casals said, “Things can change so quickly. Women are still not getting what they deserve.”

Just 14% of all collegiate athletes are women of color, according to the NCAA Race and Gender Demographics database for 2020-21. By contrast, white women make up 30%. That's one area where Title IX has been a success. 

Just as troubling to Meyers Drysdale is that as we celebrate 50 years of progress, she points to where such progress can all be taken away. 

“I know in the past," Meyers Drysdale said, “there have been politicians that wanted to do away with it, and now with Roe v. Wade on the books, don't be surprised down the road if certain presidents in certain political situations may want to get rid of it.”

Currently, 32% of all colleges and universities in the U.S. are presided over by a woman, according to WSF research. Just 15% of athletic directors at the Division I level are women. The number increases slightly to 21% at Division II schools and to 32% at Division III schools. 

Those are the individuals making the decisions about women's sports at colleges throughout the country, and King said that WSF's research shows that not all are compliant with Title IX. 

“That’s why it’s so important for women to be in positions of power," King said. 

Casals laments that only this year did the U.S. women’s national soccer team begin receiving pay equal to the men’s national soccer team. She said that change has been slow in so many respects and even regressive in ways because most sports are still run by men who don’t want it to change.

Whether we see more progress in women’s sports over the next 50 years, Casals said, is anyone’s guess.

“The culture has to be changed,” Casals said. "We still have a lot of work to do.”

Andrew John covers sports for The Desert Sun and the USA Today Network. Email him at andrew.john@desertsun.com and find him on Twitter at @Andrew_L_John.

Shad Powers is a sports columnist at The Desert Sun and the USA Today Network . Email him at shad.powers@desertsun.com.