Over 50 years on from Title IX, coach that helped bring women’s sports to Antigo High School reflects

ANTIGO — When Sandy Waltzer began coaching softball and basketball at Antigo High School in 1976, results from her teams’ games appeared on the newspaper’s obituary page.

This lack of recognition for women’s sports wasn’t uncommon at the time: Title IX, the landmark legislation that prohibited sex-based discrimination in education programs, had only been enacted four years earlier in 1972.

Soon though, the team was in the newspaper’s regular sports section. One reason — in the case of the softball team, at least — may have been that they were winning.

There were fewer high school girls teams to contend with in Waltzer’s first girls softball season in 1976, but still: they beat high school teams from Omro and Beaver Dam. Then, just a breath from the state tournament, they met Racine Case.

“They were a huge school,” remembered Waltzer. “It was kind of funny because they had metal spikes — they could still wear them that year. But I told my kids not to buy metal, because they were going to be changed the next year, and then they’d have shoes that they couldn’t wear. They were clicking along on the sidewalk and our kids would be all nervous, whispering, ‘Look at them — they’ve got metal spike…’ But we ended up beating Racine Case and we ended up going to the very first state tournament.”

In the first game of the state tournament, Waltzer’s girls conceded a run in the ninth inning and fell 9-8 to another behemoth, Madison West. But with the softball team’s success, the girl’s sports program at Antigo High clearly had hit the ground running.

It kept running. In both 1979 and 1981, the softball team made return trips to state. Three basketball players Waltzer coached eventually graduated and played for division one universities, including future Wisconsin Badger Kris Hallisy, who, nearly as soon as girls were allowed to join the Letterwinner’s Club, was elected the club’s president. Waltzer referred to the incident as “a real shakeup.”

Though Waltzer said no serious vitriol was directed at she or her players in those years, there were other such shakeups, including when, several years into her tenure, she asked to be paid the same amount as the men’s coaches.

“The money was not equal in the beginning,” Waltzer said. “I went to the board after a few years wanting to get the same salary and one men’s coach was not happy with me. He said, ‘You don’t have any pressure. I do.’ But it went through, and I got it.”

Similarly, Mickey Reimer, who was a freshman on that first Antigo High softball team in 1976, sensed no pervasive hard feelings from those in the community about the change to the status quo, and even suggested it was something of a natural transition, given that she and many of her friends had already been extremely active in sports.

“I think they were excited for us,” Reimer said. “For the summers prior to it, us girls lived at the ball diamond. Growing up, we had what they called Teen League. It was probably just seven or eight teams of girls and we’d play among each other. When it became our freshman year, it was very exciting to know we had something to continue instead of just not playing softball anymore. It was my favorite thing to do. I grew up as a tomboy. It was just second nature. I wasn’t playing barbies. I was in the backyard with the boys, and so softball was just something I grew up with.”

Chris Young Kamke, on those same softball teams with Reimer, said the same, and went on to suggest that the camaraderie she came to feel through so many practices with teammates — as well as the discipline Waltzer demanded during them — bettered her personally.

“We were close,” Kamke said. “I think that’s what, especially with softball, made a world of difference. We all stuck up for each other. We cared about each other. We had some star athletes, but we worked as a team. As far as working as a team like that, it can take you places later in life.”

This notion that participating seriously in sports could fundamentally help girls occurred not only to the players themselves, according to Waltzer.

“The head of the English department at Antigo High School at the time came up to me after the first few years of women’s sports and said, ‘I can tell the difference in the confidence of the females in my classes. When they get up to give a presentation or something, they just have a lot more confidence than they did before they had this.’ Coming from this person, it was pretty big,” she said.

Others had similar realizations.

“The very first year we went down to Madison, we had to play at 9 a.m. in the morning, so we went down the night before,” Walzter said. “We were eating breakfast Saturday morning. They had their Antigo uniforms on, so everyone knew why they were there. This very distinguished, well-dressed lady came up to me and asked if I was in charge of these girls. She said, ‘I’m a state assembly woman. I was not a proponent of Title IX, but my mind has now been changed after seeing these young ladies and how they conduct themselves.’ I thought that was profound.”

Most profound to Waltzer and the girls she coached, though, may have been the memories they made together.

There was the typical high school goofiness on bus rides to games. Games on shoddy fields with trees in the outfields, or, like one in Bayfield, Wis., angled almost frighteningly downward toward Lake Superior. Even everyday moments at practices, such as a certain mishap Reimer was involved in early one spring.

“There used to be a brass ball on the top of the flag pole at the old high school. We were playing catch out in front of the school when the snow was not melting yet, and Mickey knocked that sucker off of there,” Waltzer laughed. “The principal and the athletic director used to sit there by the windows on the third floor and they’d watch us. I thought, ‘Oh, shoot — I’m going to get chewed out for taking the ball off the flag pole.’ You know what they told me? They said, ‘You know, this team really has talent!’”

Reimer, along with several other of Waltzer’s standout players, attended a banquet roughly five years ago for Waltzer when she was inducted into the Wisconsin Fastpitch Softball Coaches Association Hall of Fame. She said she appreciated Waltzer for helping bring girls sports to Antigo High School, as well as, of course, the friends she made playing them.

“You looked forward to it at the end of the day to go to practice. We went through the sports all four years and we always stayed friends. It was just life — it was great,” Reimer said. “The other girls, when we’re all home, sometimes we’ll call her up and we’ll all go out to dinner or something. She lost her husband many, many years ago and never had children. So she kind of adopted us girls, and we were all just kind of a big family.”