JUSTIN TIME

By: centraljersey.com
Most people won’t think twice when they see the schedule for Tuesday’s double-header with the West Windsor-Plainsboro North boys and girls basketball teams hosting rival WW-P South.
Dorothy Raffel Klotz can’t stop thinking about it.
The Knight and Pirate girls will play at 5:30 p.m. and their boys counterparts will follow at 7:30 p.m. She wants schedule-makers to flip the start times. Not only is she the mother of a player on both the varsity teams, she is concerned with the message that the start times send.
"The girls play at the same time as the JV boys," Klotz said. "What does that say? When the North and South teams play, the girls are always scheduled at 5:30. The boys are always scheduled at 7:30. Why? They want the parents to be home for the boys game.
"You send the message that your game is less important, people don’t want to watch you play. It impacts people’s perception when you tell them that."
Klotz wants equal opportunity for the girls to be at the marquee time, just as she tried to fight for the chance to play Biddy Basketball with the boys in State College, Pa. in 1971. It wasn’t allowed, with organizers suggesting that she was more prone to injury, and even going so far as to worry that it would affect her ability to have children later in life.
Three years later, when she was denied the chance to play on a junior high boys team, Klotz became a 14-year-old plaintiff in a class-action suit filed by the Women’s Equity Action League in 1974. The suit charged the Health Education and Welfare department of the United States government with failing to enforce Title IX. The suit dragged on for more than a decade.
Said Klotz: "Did I ever see anything good about it? No, not until I saw my daughter play."
Change is hard, and being at the forefront of it wasn’t easy for her.
"Any time that you stand up to things that most people don’t agree with what you’re doing," Klotz said, "people don’t respond well to it. Gym teachers were saying I’d have to take showers with the boys. It was a very hostile environment. It wasn’t like you walked in the gym and were accepted. You were made fun of. You were asked to leave. It was painful, but I wanted to play basketball."
Klotz’s husband, Steve, didn’t know the extent of the battle that Klotz went through until PBS interviewed her for a special on it.
"For 15 years, I didn’t speak about it," Klotz said. "It still makes me angry. It was painful."
Klotz, who has been a Fordham University professor for more than 20 years, went on to play for a pretty good State College team. She was named MVP of the Tri-Valley League. In 1978 she got the opportunity to play for the gold-medal winning East squad at the U.S. Olympic Festival. She went on to play just her freshman year at Indiana University, but made the most of it. She was an Intercollegiate Athletics for Women All-Region selection in 1980. In the regular season, she averaged 15.1 points and 4.4 rebounds per game. She shot 80 percent from the foul line and had 42 steals.
"I had two supportive parents that tried to do everything they could to get me to play," Klotz recalled. "It wasn’t til high school that I could play on the girls team. It was substandard. The girls practiced in the morning, the boys in the afternoon."
Klotz acknowledges that her daughter has more opportunities than she did, some that are taken for granted nowadays.
"I marvel when I look at how things have changed," Klotz said. "It’s wonderful."
But Klotz also still sees inequalities everywhere. In recreation leagues, girls are given a half-court to play on while their same-age counterparts enjoy a full court. Girls games are scheduled at times that working parents find hard to attend while boys are given prime-time starting times. There are still more fathers than mothers coaching their children, even though there are plenty of mothers who grew up playing the game. And her daughter, though she’s better than some boys, is still picked last in pick-up games.
"These things go on today," Klotz said. "People have to speak up. Not only does the pendulum swing in the positive direction, it can swing in the negative direction. You can’t let that pendulum swing back.
"It’s not the popular thing to say, but it’s still the right thing to do."