Kit Saunders-Nordeen built a revolution. Doug Moe chronicles it in his new book.
A new book about a women’s sports pioneer at the University of Wisconsin offers an important and overlooked story of the school’s athletic department that adds crucial context for anyone whose idea of Badgers sports history is limited to Alan “The Horse” Ameche and “Badger” Bob Johnson.
An early chapter in The Right Thing to Do: Kit Saunders-Nordeen and the Rise of Women’s Intercollegiate Athletics at Wisconsin and Beyond, by Madison journalist and author Doug Moe (released by Milwaukee’s Henschel Haus Publishing last month), details how women athletes had to sneak around the UW campus if they wanted to compete in sports.
It’s not just that women athletes at the UW in the 1960s and 1970s had inferior facilities and smaller budgets than their male counterparts. They were not allowed to participate in contests in which the score was kept.
A group of women who organized a weekly pick-up basketball game in the mid-1960s at Lathrop Hall, home of the women’s physical education department, were getting sick of playing against each other and decided to write a letter to a coach at Northern Illinois University, asking if she’d like to bring her team to Madison. Her reply: “Game on.”
A faculty member unlocked Lathrop for the contest, unbeknownst to Lolas Halverson, director of the women’s physical education department. The Northern Illinois athletes had uniforms, while the Wisconsin team wore “navy shorts and white blouses with numbers pinned on.” Nevertheless, the Wisconsin team won “quite soundly” and word of the accomplishment spread around campus.
“[Halverson] found out we had done this. We were all called into her office and read the riot act. I think she probably wanted to kick us out of the university,” says Nancy Page in the book. Page would go on to become a Hall of Fame coach of field hockey, softball and tennis at UW-Stevens Point.
Halverson followed the lead of Blanche Trilling, director of the department from 1912-1946, who favored participation over competition when it came to women and sports, an outlook that had women participating in “play days,” a frustrating situation for athletes who wanted to play to win.
“Trilling wanted a girl in every sport and a sport for every girl,” says Moe. “But elite competition, she thought, would be detrimental.”
It was against that backdrop that Saunders-Nordeen, a New Jersey native, studied physical education as a UW graduate student in the mid-1960s. She also spent her time pushing to form teams, unsanctioned by the university, in 11 sports that competed against other schools. As the Vietnam War was pushing college students to become more politically active, Saunders-Nordeen and her contemporaries were quietly — and perhaps unintentionally — building their own revolution.
Saunders-Nordeen was playing field hockey in Madison with women like Page, who built a career in athletics, and Becky Sisley, who went on to develop the women’s athletics program at the University of Oregon.
Moe’s book details Saunders-Nordeen’s rise at UW, from coordinator of women’s club sports to women’s athletic director in 1974, even as she completed her doctoral thesis. Again and again, she refused to accept the status quo. Publicly, she was diplomatic and cheerful — a recurring theme in her letters and interviews is the fun she had — but she was effective in getting her way with the men running the school and athletic department.
Meanwhile, Title IX passed Congress and was signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1972. The measure changed everything for women’s athletics, even if it took several years to implement. Moe’s book chronicles the slow adoption of the federal legislation around the country as Saunders-Nordeen simultaneously worked to simply get access to locker rooms and laundry services for women athletes in Madison.
“I remember after [Title IX passed] trying to explain it to the athletic board. I’d really learned about it and what it stood for — what we were going to have to do. People had refused to act because they didn’t have enough information,” says Saunders-Nordeen in an interview quoted in the book. “The women who had become versed in it were trying to tell them [various administrators] what it was. And they were saying, ‘This can’t be.’”
And because she was driven to compete, Saunders-Nordeen did more than just create opportunities, she built successful programs throughout the 1980s. The Badgers won, particularly in cross country and track, but also in soccer and volleyball. And she built a culture of respect for women athletes that didn’t exist in other programs that struggled to adopt Title IX reforms.
Marija Pientka, an All-American tennis player for the Badgers in the early 1990s who considers herself a “Title IX baby,” was drawn to the environment created by Saunders-Nordeen’s work without knowing about it directly at the time.
“When I went on my recruiting trip, I could just see and feel that there was a different vibe here for women’s athletics,” says Pientka, now a UW senior associate athletic director with a resume that qualifies her to be a head AD. “I think that speaks to all the work that Kit did.”
Saunders-Nordeen died on Jan. 1, 2021, at age 80.
Moe says the book has been warmly received, with some readers pledging to give it to not just their daughters, but their sons and brothers. With his 2005 book, Lords of the Ring: The Triumph and Tragedy of College Boxing’s Greatest Team, this book fills in essential gaps in the history of sports at the UW.
