Iowa sports legend Christine Grant empowered generations of women

Former Hawkeye basketball participant Jaimie Printy Brandt speaks Sunday throughout a celebration of life for Christine Grant at Carver-Hawkeye Area in Iowa Metropolis. Brandt is a instructor at Grant Elementary in North Liberty, named for the late director of girls’s athletics on the UI. (Nick Rohlman/The Gazette)

IOWA CITY — Within the fall of 1974, Karen “Z” Zamora was strolling by an open subject by the Iowa Memorial Union, watching faculty ladies play subject hockey, when the coach shocked her by calling out in a Scottish brogue, “You wish to go?”

Zamora did gave it a go. Her first apply was a Wednesday and three days later, she performed with the College of Iowa subject hockey crew in opposition to the College of Northern Iowa.

“It actually sort of saved my life,” Zamora, 67, of Tiffin, stated of the years enjoying subject hockey for Christine Grant, who coached earlier than changing into director of girls’s athletics at Iowa for 27 years. “I wasn’t on the suitable street in life. She gave me a scholarship that fall. It saved me at school.”

Practically 50 years later, Grant equally impressed Emily Deuell, 23, of Poquoson, Va., when Grant met with the 2021-2022 UI Area Hockey crew from hospice on the Hen Home in Iowa Metropolis.

“She was speaking about all of the change we might have an effect on. How robust she felt we have been,” Deuell stated.

As bagpipes performed on the finish of Sunday’s celebration of life on the UI’s Carver-Hawkeye Area for Grant, who died Dec. 31 at age 85, Deuell considered how Grant and her friends in girls’s athletics laid the muse for Deuell and her teammates.

Christine Grant

“It was clear the final 5 years enjoying subject hockey wouldn’t have been attainable with out all of the arduous work she did over her 80 years,” Deuell stated.

Greater than 300 individuals gathered on the area to have a good time Grant’s life and legacy. The group included former gamers, coaches she employed over a quarter-century and athletic directors from across the nation.

Attendees look on Sunday throughout a celebration of life for Christine Grant at Carver-Hawkeye Area in Iowa Metropolis. (Nick Rohlman/The Gazette)

Audio system — all girls — talked about how far girls’s sports activities had come. Early UI girls’s groups needed to share uniforms with different sports activities and performed in makeshift areas.

“Our residence subject was that garden in entrance of the scholar union,” stated Judith Davidson, Iowa subject hockey coach from 1978 to 1988. “The week earlier than Homecoming, the scholars held a bash-the-car occasion there and we needed to transfer our apply website.”

Former Iowa Area Hockey Coach Judith Davidson speaks Sunday throughout a celebration of life for Christine Grant at Carver-Hawkeye Area in Iowa Metropolis. Grant was a Scottish born American athlete and an athletic director on the College of Iowa identified for her pioneering contributions to Title IX and ladies’s athletics. (Nick Rohlman/The Gazette)

Former Iowa Ladies’s Sports activities Data Director Liz Ullman speaks Sunday throughout a celebration of life for Christine Grant at Carver-Hawkeye Area in Iowa Metropolis. (Nick Rohlman/The Gazette)

Then Grant allowed the sector hockey crew to apply in Kinnick Stadium or the indoor apply facility, which had synthetic turf, generally utilized in subject hockey, Davidson stated. The college additionally allotted cash for scholarships.

“Not will women and girls be content material for sitting on the sidelines, both of the enjoying subject or society,” Davidson stated. “We are going to by no means return.”

Lark Birdsong, Iowa girls’s basketball coach from 1974 to 1979, talked about Grant’s childhood in Bo’ness, Scotland, the place she performed sports activities, together with subject hockey, together with her brothers and neighborhood boys.

Grant moved to Canada in 1961, the place she helped develop the primary nationwide girls’s subject hockey crew and the Canadian Area Hockey Affiliation. She got here to the UI in 1968 to proceed her training, receiving her doctoral diploma in sports activities administration in 1974.

Combating for gender fairness, Grant used her expertise as a orator, a researcher and as a diplomat.

Usually sporting an impeccable pantsuit, she spoke to principally males — athletics directors, members of Congress — in regards to the want for Title IX, groundbreaking federal laws in 1972 that made it unlawful to discriminate based mostly on gender in training.

“She was completely an inspiration to all of us who labored on that stuff within the Seventies,” stated Sharon Taylor, 77, of Sedona, Ariz.

Like Grant, Taylor coached subject hockey after which turned an athletics administrator at Lock Haven College in Pennsylvania. She labored with Grant and others to begin the Affiliation for Intercollegiate Athletics for Ladies within the early Seventies.

“All of us sort of believed we might do it and, son of a gun, we did,” Taylor stated.

Grant’s later years additionally included many joys, corresponding to her canine, Pepper, boating on Lake Macbride and studying to play the piano. She traveled with shut associates, Bonnie Slatton and Peg Burke, and continued to talk to UI athletes and attend some UI occasions.

When Birdsong requested Grant if she wished to be a part of a UI video in 2021, Grant declined.

Her determination got here a 12 months after the UI determined to chop 4 sports activities, citing monetary pressure in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. In Feburary 2021, the UI reinstated girls’s swimming and diving after a lawsuit was filed by gamers, however the males’s sports activities that have been lower weren’t reinstated.

Former Iowa Ladies’s Basketball Coach Lark Birdsong speaks Sunday throughout a celebration of life for Christine Grant at Carver-Hawkeye Area. Grant was inducted into the College of Iowa Athletics Corridor of Fame in 2006 and the Ladies’s Basketball Corridor of Fame in 2017. (Nick Rohlman/The Gazette)

“Christine was additionally disenchanted within the lack of equality with obtrusive examples nonetheless occurring 50 years later” Birdsong stated. “Equality doesn’t subtract, it provides.”

Sunday’s occasion ended with the UI Athletics Division enjoying the trailer of a documentary about Grant known as “Unshakable Perception,” that will probably be launched in August. Barbara Burke, deputy director of UI Athletics, additionally stated the UI will renovate house within the Athletics Corridor of Fame to give attention to Title IX.

Feedback: (319) 339-3157; erin.jordan@thegazette.com