High achiever: Krause on the Skidmore campus today

Emma Dodge Hanson

In the summer before her freshman year at Duke, Hogshead-Makar qualified for the 1980 Olympics, but did not get to compete because of the U.S. boycott to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The delay didn’t prove detrimental. When she graduated at the ripe old age of twenty-four, with a degree in political science and a certificate in women’s studies, Hogshead-Makar had shattered nearly every university record for women’s swimming and hadn’t lost a single race in a dual meet. In the process, her Olympic dreams were realized—the summer between her sophomore and junior years, she blazed ahead of her fellow competitors to win three gold medals and one silver at the 1984 games in Los Angeles.

It was in Los Angeles that Hogshead-Makar learned about a legislative force that had helped pave the way for her success. Things had gone so smoothly for her from an early age that she wasn’t attuned to the struggles of other female athletes; then Donna DeVerona, a member of the 1960 U.S. Olympic swim team, spoke to Hogshead-Makar and her U.S. teammates, both male and female, about the evolution and timeline of Title IX. DeVerona, co-founder in 1972 of the Women’s Sports Foundation advocacy group, shared details about the repeated—and repeatedly rejected—challenges from politicians such as U.S. Senator Jesse Helms, who proposed that Title IX be struck down altogether. But DeVerona also sounded a cautionary alarm. Only months before, a landmark Supreme Court decision, Grove City v. Bell, effectively ended Title IX’s applicability to athletics.

Title IX is in jeopardy, DeVerona told the swimmers. As athletes, you have an obligation to speak up about this. “That was my light-bulb moment about Title IX,” recalls Hogshead-Makar. “I used my access to the media as a new Olympic champion to talk about the importance of the law, and its impact on my life and athletic career.” The following summer, between her junior and senior year at Duke, she interned with the Women’s Sports Foundation, and ultimately served as its president and on its board of trustees. (The Grove City v. Bell decision would be overturned, in 1988, when Congress overrode a veto by President Ronald Reagan to pass the Civil Rights Restoration Act. Educational institutions receiving any type of federal financial assistance, whether direct or indirect, were once again bound by Title IX legislation.)

Hogshead-Makar went on to earn her law degree from Georgetown University in 1997. She has focused on gender-equity issues, particularly as they apply to sports and Title IX, and has testified before Congress on related issues. She teaches courses at FCSL on torts and sports law and provides detailed rebuttals to Title IX critics who misinterpret the legal complexities of the law. She’s taken on 60 Minutes and columnist George Will, among others.

Krause taking a shot during 1980 match against Maryland

Photo courtesy Barbara Krause

“Women still lag behind men,” she says. “In Division I colleges, women represent 53 percent of the student body, receive only 41 percent of the participation opportunities, 43 percent of the total athletic scholarship dollars, 32 percent of the recruiting dollars, and 36 percent of operating budgets.”

In the late ’70s and early ’80s, with the steady legal wrangling over Title IX as backdrop, Debbie Leonard was struggling to put together a Duke women’s basketball team that could compete with neighboring public institutions such as North Carolina State and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

When she was approached in 1977 by athletics director Carl James ’52 to become Duke’s first full-time women’s basketball coach, Leonard was entertaining another job offer to coach at Andrews High School in High Point, North Carolina. Even though the high-school post offered a higher annual salary—$9,000 compared with Duke’s $8,100—Leonard says she didn’t think twice about taking the Duke offer. “Carl promised me the best-dressed, best-fed, best-equipped team in the Atlantic Coast Conference,” she says. James explained to her that he wanted to bring the women’s team up from Division II to play in the more competitive Division I and was committed to making sure that the program received the resources and institutional support it needed to do so.

Within weeks of accepting the post, Leonard read in the newspaper that James had resigned. Tom Butters, who had come to Duke in 1967 to coach baseball and oversee special events, was promoted to athletics director. The scholarships and facilities and assistance that Leonard had been promised were put on indefinite hold.

Told that her office would be on East Campus, but determined to be in Cameron, Leonard befriended the housekeeping staff there, who told her about a cramped, unused closet. The space became her office. She, her players, and volunteer assistants were responsible for sweeping up Cameron after practice, hauling bleachers out and back for games, and changing tires on the team vans that they drove themselves to away games. In her first season, the Lady Devils were 1-19, including a devastating 117-47 loss at home to Maryland, which concluded with the Terrapin players running sprints because they didn’t get enough of a workout during the game.

By the time Leonard resigned fifteen years later, she had compiled an overall record of 213-189, with an ACC record of 69-119. As former Duke sports information director John Roth ’80 notes in The Encyclopedia of Duke Basketball, Leonard “led the program to many noteworthy achievements, including its first national ranking, its first 20-win season, its first invitation to the NCAA tournament, and a 100 percent graduation rate.... Nine of her teams were .500 or better, and all but three had winning records at home. In short, Leonard did about as much as she could, given the level of support that existed for her sport at the time.”

Sports writer Barry Jacobs ’72 is more blunt. “Duke was late to the table,” he wrote in a newspaper column last year. “State schools such as Maryland, North Carolina, and N.C. State quickly embraced women’s basketball, while the private university for years treated women’s sports more as a burden imposed by Title IX … than as an integral part of a balanced athletic program.” When Leonard left Duke in 1992, the year the men’s varsity team won its second NCAA national championship, her salary was $41,000.

Butters, who retired in 1998, says that his decisions to fund this or that athletic team were never guided by outside forces or pressures. “I did what I thought was right for the university,” he says. “It was either a case of spending all our resources on what the ‘public’ wanted or trying to provide programming excellence by focusing on opportunities where we had a chance to be excellent. Some people wanted me to put all our money in football, for example, and I disagreed.”

Duke was not alone in dragging its feet on Title IX compliance, nor did it intend to do so, according to Chris Kennedy Ph.D. ’79, senior associate director of athletics and an adjunct assistant professor of English, whose career at Duke and in collegiate athletics roughly coincides with the evolution of the law. Kennedy notes that in the early years following the law’s passage, there was confusion and uncertainty about how to measure compliance.