February 8, 2007
Generation IX: Documentary follows UW women athletes, beneficiaries of Title IX
They’ve won the national championship, met President George W. Bush and played top teams in China. Now the UW women’s volleyball team has a new starring role — in a documentary slated for airing Feb. 15 on KCTS-9.
Generation IX, a documentary by local journalists and volleyball enthusiasts Jack and Leslie Hamann, follows the UW team as representatives of the first generation of women to grow up taking for granted the opportunities opened up by Title IX.
Officially known as Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the law states, “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 education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” Although the statute doesn’t mention sports, in practice Title IX is known mostly for guaranteeing equal access to sports programs for women.
In her interview on the documentary, the UW’s head of women’s athletics, Marie Tuite, sums up the changing attitudes by saying that Title IX and women athletes were tolerated in the 70s, accepted in the 80s, embraced in the 90s and celebrated today.
Indeed, to see Generation IX is to recognize that’s true. For a school to send one of its women’s teams to China (where the cameras follow them in the documentary) for a series of exhibition games prior to Title IX would have been unheard of. Trish Bostrom, a UW tennis player in pre-Title IX days, appears on the program to tell how few resources she and her teammates had; they had to use their own equipment and stay with relatives in their school days.
Jack Hamann, who formerly worked for CNN and has produced 12 documentaries, says this one is near and dear to his heart. Wife Leslie played volleyball at UCLA and is now head volleyball coach at Garfield High School. The two were early supporters of UW volleyball Coach Jim McLaughlin’s volleyball camps for high school teams.
“Garfield was one of only three teams to come the first year we had the camps, and they’ve been supporters ever since,” McLaughlin says. “Now we have 44 teams coming and always have to turn people away.”
McLaughlin is featured in the documentary, along with three of his players — Courtney Thompson, Christal Morrison and Jill Collymore. Yet, when first approached about the idea of a documentary, he was negative.
“When he first asked me, I said no way,” McLaughlin says of Hamann. “I didn’t want outsiders in our team meetings and all that.” But Hamann didn’t give up. When the PAC-10 season was ending and the team was invited to play in China, he asked again.
“He said look, you’ve coached both women and men and you say it’s the same, but lots of other people say differently. We want to track you and see what you’re doing,” McLaughlin says. “So I said okay, you can do it.”
McLaughlin is referring to the fact that he is the only coach to have won a national volleyball championship with both a men’s and a women’s team. He took his men’s team at USC to the nationals in 1990; the Husky women won in 2005.
“When I went over to the women’s team, people said don’t do it, you don’t know anything about coaching women, you’ll fail,” McLaughlin says.
Hamann goes further. Seattle, he says, already had an established volleyball community when McLaughlin arrived six years ago, and the prevailing belief was that there is a girl’s way to play the game and a boy’s way. “Jim said there is no difference, and he was laughed at,” Hamann says.
But with his success, McLaughlin has had the last laugh. And he still says there is no difference in the men’s and the women’s game. “The game is the game. The laws of learning are the same. The movement, the eye work, it’s all the same. There are subtle differences in the way I coach women, but people who say women can’t do this or that — they’re wrong.”
One look at the volleyball matches captured in the documentary tells you that no one is “playing like a girl,” as the taunt used to go. These women are quick, strong and extremely competitive. The subtle differences come in the way McLaughlin communicates with them. Male athletes, he says, might listen to him talk about mistakes that were made and think, “Oh, he’s talking about that knucklehead over there — not about me.” But when he talks to female athletes in the same way, they all think he’s talking about them.
McLaughlin has learned to circumvent this kind of personalizing by making it all about statistics. In the documentary, the viewer sees the team statistician toting up every play in practice as well as in games. As one of the players puts it, “If your numbers aren’t there, you know you’re not going to start.”
The women say they like this objective system, because nobody can say, “Oh, it’s because he likes her better.”
Hamann says he chose the three athletes to focus on in the documentary because they were all passionate about the game as well as articulate and self aware. Thompson and Morrison, he says, present an interesting contrast because Thompson, who is unusually short for a volleyball player, did not initially attract college recruiters’ attention, whereas Morrison, who is 6 feet 1, did. But Thompson made up in hard work what she lacked in physical gifts and Morrison has continued to play despite many injuries. Collymore is unusual in that she is an African American in a white-dominated game and she is also a gifted musician who was performing with symphony orchestras at the age of 9.
The mothers of all three girls also have a chance to speak in the documentary, telling what it’s been like for them to raise daughters who are gifted athletes.
Which is one of the purposes Hamann had in mind for the program — to show people what it’s like for the modern woman athlete. Despite a lot of lip service, he says, few people know much about women’s sports. With Title IX, “We opened the door but we closed our eyes.”
Generation IX will be broadcast from 8 to 9 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 15 and repeated from 1 to 2 a.m. Monday, Feb. 19 on KCTS. From there it will be offered to other public TV stations nationwide.
