Title IX pioneer: How a Shore coaching legend helped change the game for female athletes

HOLMDEL – As Nancy Williams held the young goat named “Coach” in her honor, a unique tribute bestowed on her by several former Shore Regional athletes, the scene at Oak Hill Farms was a timely reminder of how the current popularity of women’s sports would not have been possible without the pioneers.

While the moniker GOAT-Greatest Of All Time gets thrown around a lot these days, Williams' 839 field hockey wins, to go with 13 state championships, was tops in the nation when she retired in 2014. And there can’t be many with 2,000 wins across all sports over 44 years, including 536 in three decades coaching girls’ basketball.

But it was Williams’ intense advocacy when it came to Title IX rights for girls’ sports that puts her over the top. She is the GOAT.  And at a time when Caitlin Clark’s 3-pointers from the logo are all the rage, the lives impacted by Williams over the decades helped lay the foundation of success the current generation of female athletes is basking in.

“The fact that I had a coach like her I truly believe is a huge part of my story, because she had expectations for us,” said Heddy Sams Pierson, who went on to play field hockey at Rutgers. “And she fought for us to get us the same things the boys had.”

It was not long after Title IX mandated equal treatment for female athletes in 1972 that Williams, in the early stages of her career, realized how difficult the battle would be.

“I had an athletic director say to me, ‘I know what the law says but I’ll never believe you deserve it because you’re not as good as the boys.’ He said it was a fade. It should be club sports,” Williams recalled.

Now Williams, like much of the country, has been watching in awe as WNBA games sell out arenas in the aftermath of a stirring women’s college basketball season, the latest step in what has been a decades-long fight for equality in athletics.

“I am absolutely fascinated by the effect that Caitlin Clark has had,” Williams said. “Fascinated and I think it’s awesome. Whatever it takes to draw attention to how good women’s athletics are. Now there are guys wearing her jersey. I have my entire family watching women’s basketball.”

More: Shore high school sports top prospects for 2024-25: 70 field hockey players

Fighting the good fight

Rich and Carla Bushey, who purchased Oak Hill Farms in 2019, and their daughter, Alex, walked the small group from the renovated barn, now a retail store and the centerpiece of the six-acre property, out onto the neatly manicured farm, where the chickens, alpaca and others, including a peacock, looked on, with a group of goats holding court in the center of it all.

Williams, now 75, never thought of herself as groundbreaking. On this day, she was as interested in the animals as she was her place in history.

But in many ways, her career timeline coincides with the metamorphosis of women’s sports, playing an important role at the grassroots level with her actions on and off the field.

In 1996 she filed a complaint with the Civil Rights office of the U.S. Department of Education, which sided with Williams in saying the Shore Regional girls and boys coaches should be compensated equally, with the department also suggesting girls were entitled to cheerleaders, marching bands and lighted fields.

She did it again in May 1999, filing a complaint with the department that argued the boys athletic fields were better maintained than the girls’ fields.

That summer, she watched as the USWNT won the World Cup in a dramatic shootout, pushing women’s sports to the forefront. But it wasn’t until 2022 that a lawsuit settlement with U.S. Soccer ensured equal pay and millions of dollars in compensation for the women’s team.

“Without Title IX you wouldn’t be watching any of these women,” Williams said. “Because all the money would be going into the men’s programs. For many years men’s sports that have been sponsored by corporations and put on TV. Now all of the sudden Caitlin Clark gets a $30 million contract with Nike. That is unheard of, so it is coming. But you can never take it for granted because if we don’t stay on it and support women’s athletics, someone will come in and pull the rug out.”

Williams graduated from Shore Regional in 1966, returning four years four years later from Trenton State, now the College of New Jersey, to begin her teaching career as a 22-year-old.

More than a half-century later, she loves what she’s seeing on television and locally, where she’s a big fan of Monmouth University women’s basketball.

“I love that fire and that competitive desire, because so many times people try to squash the aggressive competitiveness of females, and that shouldn’t be done,” she said.

Changing lives

While the impact Williams had on the big picture of women’s sports is palpable, the impact she had on lives locally continues to ripple through communities.

“When I was looking to get a job in New York City, they saw I was an athlete, that I played at a Division 1 school at Rutgers,” Sams Pierson said. “She opened that pathway to me. I was a freshman in high school, I had never played field hockey. I had no idea what kind of opportunities there were.

“Her influence and her oversight set a path. She’s a tough cookie, and some people didn’t have this experience. But the impact she’s had, the number athletes she sent off to college, Division 1, Division 2, Division 3, it’s significant. And then you look at those same people and look at what they became post-college and the careers they had and people they are. She identified with each of us what our capabilities were.”

Having settled comfortably into retirement, Williams enjoys her 53 nieces and nephews - she was one of eight kids – playing golf, riding her bike and traveling.

“I miss watching the kids play. The actual gameday coaching, and that was my competitive juices,” she said. “But the time commitment? I did it right. I put my heart and soul into it in the summers, I went from sport to sport. That’s a lot. Now, for the first time I have my own schedule and I can do what I want.”

Nancy Williams has certainly earned it. And as she continues to live her life away from the playing field, her legacy as one of the true GOATs of women’s athletics shouldn’t be forgotten in an era when so many women are benefitting from it.

Stephen Edelson is a USA TODAY NETWORK New Jersey sports columnist who has been covering athletics in the state and at the Jersey Shore for over 35 years. Contact him at: @SteveEdelsonAPP; sedelson@gannettnj. com.

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Title IX pioneer: How a Shore coaching legend helped change the game for female athletes