GRAND FORKS, N.D. – Amongst the faces of the athletic department in 1971, there was one woman who would become a trailblazer for women's athletics at the University of North Dakota. Her name was Dr. Helen Smiley.
During her years at North Dakota, she was a professor, mentor, colleague, friend, mother and wife. While juggling all of those roles, Dr. Smiley made her mark on North Dakota athletics as they are known today.
Dr. Smiley was the first full-time Women's Athletics Coordinator for UND. In this role, she helped North Dakota adapt to Title IX, which was passed on June 23, 1972. From the beginning, she became one of the pioneers for female athletics not only at UND but across the country. She was instrumental in building the first women's athletic conference (Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women), which spanned from 1972 to 1982.
Due to her continuous work for North Dakota, she was named Associate Athletic Director in 1982. Later, she was named the first acting female athletic director from June 1, 1984 until the new permanent athletic director was chosen.
Dr. Smiley continued to create an impact on college athletics for women even after her 14-year tenure at UND. She continues to be honored by the Summit League as they name an award after her. It is the Dr. Helen Smiley Women's All-Sports Award, which is annually presented to the school with the most combined points in all league-sponsored women's sports.
Dr. Smiley made a large impact on many throughout her years as an athletic administrator, which is why our communications staff sat and interviewed her about her career and how she pioneered many projects that were the stepping stones for women's programs at North Dakota.
Q: How did your early years shape the direction that you wanted to take your career?
A: My family was very active, and I had a sister that is an Olympian. She was an Olympian during her high school and college years, and my mother and father were both very athletic, so we were all brought up to be athletic, active, and very well-educated kids. We had a wonderful heritage, and so we all went to college. When I went to college, I was starting in either music or physical education because I liked both.
So, I went out into teaching and started teaching physical education and music in Kokomo, Indiana. That is where I got my first eight years of high school teaching, and I knew even then that young girls really wanted opportunities to do more than they were allowed to do. You know the rules were really different back then, and they limited to a great deal what the girls were actually able to do because they didn't believe that their bodies were built to be stressed. That was just the old philosophy that the people that were my teachers believed. These young girls they'd run the whole track, and they'd do everything that they could, but the rules of the games limited them. And anyway, I just really loved teaching, and I loved physical education. I loved my music too, so I taught there for eight years, and during that time, I got my masters at Ball State Indiana because that was in Kokomo.
Then my husband and I both went over to the University of Iowa. He got an assistantship, and he was in educational administration. I got a full-time job at Iowa as a teacher in the physical education department, so I was a teacher at that time. When I got there, my professor was like "By the way, we would like you to start an athletic program." That's how it was put. I never really had the title of athletic director, and you'll notice that if you know Christine Grant, who unfortunately just recently passed away. She was named the first woman athletic director in 1973, which was right after I left. So, I was the Coordinator of Women's Recreational and Athletic Sports. I was able to start the women's program there and that was quite a challenge. I was a full-time teacher, I did the athletic program, I ran the recreational program, my son was K through two, and my husband and I were both getting our PhDs. It was a wild three years, but I really loved it, and we got that program going.
For instance, when we would go over from the University of Iowa to play Drake, we would not compete against Drake. We would mix our teams, and we would just play volleyball or basketball or whatever it was going to be. We played the game, and then we sat around and talked and had cookies. I mean it was just a social event. That is the way our teachers, who were 30-40 years older than us, that's the way they wanted it. They didn't want it to be this big horrible and stiff competition that the men had. They didn't want it to be like the men's program, but they needed to get it going.
I was given a budget of $770 the first year, and we had ten sports. Each sport had $70 for their budget and believe it or not, we traveled. When we traveled, we got a dollar a day. We could eat a hamburger, a Coke and French fries on a dollar. That's how different the world was. Coach and I would drive, and I laundered a lot of uniforms almost every night. We had two sets of uniforms; a white uniform and a gold uniform. Whatever team was having a playdate or day of competition would get the uniforms for the day. That's for all of the teams, so you wore your own shoes, no funding, no newspaper coverage. I mean coaches had to call their own stories in, and they never wanted to call in when they lost. I'd say, "Coach, did you call in the newspaper?"
She'd say, "No, I didn't want everyone to know that we lost."
I'd say, "You gotta call in whether you win or lose. People need to know."
It was really hard, but we were just trying as hard as we could to have competition and to get the girls out there and get them playing and give them opportunities. The money certainly wasn't great, but finally I got the budget up to $3,000. I saw an article about Christine, and that is where she started when she started the program after I left. She started the program on a budget of $3,000, and of course we were able to go up higher after that through Title IX.
Q: How did it feel to start breaking barriers at a university like Iowa?
A: I guess I never really thought about what those barriers were going to be. You know, you didn't think about that. You didn't think about wanting to be honored for anything. You just got in there and did your job. I mean that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to provide opportunities for young girls and women to be able to go out there and be an athlete. I had a sister that's an Olympian, and she's running and doing things. She was a speed skater for the United States, and she was out there doing it all the time. These girls just wanted to do that, so I wanted to provide that opportunity. You never think that I'm the first this or I'm the first that. I just wanted to do it. Then when I went to North Dakota, it was basically the same thing. They were playing field hockey and they were playing sports but only in-state and against high schools as well. Even in Iowa there weren't a whole lot of schools, so I was just enjoying what I was doing and just trying to surge ahead to get things accomplished.
Q: What was the transition like from Iowa to North Dakota?
A: You asked me how we transitioned to North Dakota. Well when we graduated with PhDs, we both needed jobs and of course we were going to go somewhere together. We were lucky that North Dakota wanted us both with our majors so that's where we went. I was given kind of the same responsibility there that I had at Iowa. The atmosphere was very different toward women at that time, or women in sport. Women they were doing sports, but they weren't organized. They were doing what we called play dates more so than sports. Rather than competition is was more recreational.
When we were at Iowa, we lived in what was called the women's gym. Most of our people had never ever gone across the river to where the men were. Of course, they were in a bigger and better facility at that time. We were always in the women's gym. Finally, I went over to the other building quite often and even taught some classes over there. Because heck I'm not staying over here in the women's gym. I want to get in with the guys and do what we're supposed to be doing. We were still behind even at Iowa, as great a university as it is, but we had to work hard to try to make men and women work together. They weren't, and there was a solid wall.
When I went to North Dakota, most of the men didn't care about the women and the women didn't care about the men. They just were doing their own thing, and it happened to be one of my fortes that when I was directing, I really could work and merge people together and get them to work together. I had to do the same when I went to Western Illinois after UND. It's not easy to make people work together and coordinate efforts and everything. But, we [UND] had field hockey, basketball and swimming going. We had all kinds of sports up there, but we weren't playing anybody and didn't have conferences. We didn't have competitions and that's really where we had to work hard. After Title IX, when that came in, it gave us the impetus to begin forming conference. That's where I spent my tenure, working my tail off to make things better.
Q: Your first year at the University of North Dakota was in 1971 prior to the passage of Title IX in 1972, what was the landscape of athletics like right before the passage?
A: We didn't know much about it [Title IX], we just knew that it was being handled in Washington D.C. It was something political, and I really wasn't into that type of thing. I was just working hard on campus. The minute it began to come around that it was going to happen then of course we knew about it. It made such great change, and it was just by the president voting it in as the law. The minute that law came in boy we were in seventh heaven because we knew that it would open doors for us and opportunities.
Q: What direction did you and the University of North Dakota take initially when Title IX was passed in 1972?
A: Title IX, itself, gave schools about a three-year leeway to get in line. Imagine someone came up to you and suddenly said, "okay your program has to be doubled, but you're not getting any more money." What do you do? We of course made a lot of arrangements and changes. We had a lot of sports, like men's and women's track, men's and women's swimming, golfs, you know a lot of those programs that did the same sport. We merged a lot of those and did a lot of working together with the men and the women trying to make it a little bit fairer. I don't know that we had to add any new sports right away because a lot of those were already going. The women had badminton, which the men didn't have. We had swimming, track, and field hockey instead of football.
Q: Did you have anyone to bounce ideas off? Was there a lot a support for starting female teams from your colleagues in athletics and on campus?
A: Len Marti was the athletic director at that time, and I worked with him of course. The women's coaches were really on top of it. Some of the men's coaches were kind of hesitant because you know they knew that there was going to be pressure on their budgets because how do you suddenly equalize something that's kind of all set. It was a pretty careful time working with people. We had some support in the community, and we didn't have any rebellions or protests. We never did that stuff back then. We were much more feasible as a nation at that time. We just knew what was coming, and we did it on an easy slope. We didn't just get in there and say we're going to take half of the men's basketball budget and put it into women's. We got a lot of things done, and we opened up some facilities. Men had a much bigger and better weight room so we had a lot of facilities that we worked on getting more equitable.
Q: What is one project or effort that you are the proudest of during the early years of Title IX and while you were at North Dakota?
A: The AIAW formed, and it was a parallel to the NCAA. It was basically the women's conference, and we did all the things for the women's programs that the NCAA was doing for the men. Because at the time, they weren't interested in the women. So, we built the AIAW, and we had physical education associations as a full-time P.E. teacher. We had the National Association of P.E. for College Women, and we had the Division for Girls and Women's Sports. We had all types of organizations. So, the women's organizations all worked together to build what they called the AIAW, which is the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women. That was doing the same thing as the NCAA was doing for the men. That lasted for ten years. It lasted from 1972 when Title IX came in to 1982. During that time, we worked on getting state, regional and national competitions, and they worked on developing conferences. That was a lot of work. I mean we were meeting all the time not only about Title IX, but we met with schools to help them understand Title IX. It wasn't only athletics because athletics wasn't even mentioned in Title IX, but it really gave us that opportunity. So, that AIAW was a huge project that we were all involved in. Then in 1982, the NAIA, which is for smaller schools, and NCAA, which is for all the other schools, decided to take in women, but for one year the schools had to decide which they were going to go to. The AIAW basketball championship or the NCAA basketball championship and that only lasted a year and then the AIAW basically died. It lived its ten years, and it really did the job that it needed to do. At one time the AIAW had 41 national championships. That's all the sports you can think of.
Q: Was there instant support in Grand Forks for Title IX? If not, how long did it take before the community embraced and supported the female athletic teams?
A: I think right away when they saw it as competition. That pretty much changed right away. People in Grand Forks are really great people. It's a big home family. I know from spending 14 years there what it was like. There wasn't a lot of negativity shown, some resistance, but a lot of people just came you know to support it. You know its like family. I'm going to go to see what its like and the more they watched it, the more they came and the more they liked it.
Q: What are some continued impacts you saw throughout your 14-year tenure at North Dakota regarding Title IX?
A: Mainly just the growth in the conferences. We became a top Division II program. We were really strong. I mean I'd go to meetings and all they talked about was how great North Dakota was. So, we were well-respected as a school because we had good teams. We won conference tournaments, and we won academic honors. We didn't always have all the facilities to be able to host things because you know we can't even always play baseball or softball outside sometimes. We had a lot of years, we didn't even have a home game, but we had a lot of support nationwide because our coaches worked so hard and they had good teams. We just kept getting stronger and stronger as the conference grew steadily.
Q: What does Title IX mean to you?
A: Who wouldn't want everybody to have the opportunity to try to do things that they wanted to do? Who wouldn't want equality? It was never intentional. I think it was just a battle on the part of the women to really get up there and get in there and get it done. I was really proud to be a pioneer for that, and I spent my whole life doing that because those are very beneficial for teenagers. How many young girls don't know how hard men and women worked for them?
Q: How has Title IX impacted your personal career in athletics and outside of athletics?
A: When I left North Dakota, I went to a Division I, which was a step up. When I went there, I was one of only 12 women athletic directors at the Division I level at the time that I went to Western Illinois. There were 27 at the Division II level and 37, I think, at the Division III level. There weren't many women that had a full directorship, so that was a definite benefit for me in terms of Title IX allowing you to move upward and onward. It was a lot of the same type of work but just different conferences, different levels. I think I benefited from every step up and everything that I did. I loved my job, and I worked hard. That's what it takes.
Q: How honored/what were your thoughts when the then Mid-Continental Conference (now Summit League) decided to name their Women's All-Sports Award after you and your impact?
A: Anytime you honor or award, you know it really means a lot. But I loved that one because I just knew that perpetuity or however long the conference are up then it would be there, and I would be honored in that way. Especially for athletic and academic achievement, then that's great. I'm in about five Halls of Fame and that's the same type of an honor. It's just great to be honored in that way because you worked hard.
Q: What advice would you give or thoughts do you have for younger girls in sports regarding the opportunities that Title IX has given them?
A: Just realize that in order to have those great opportunities there were a lot of people that worked very hard and fought the battle, so to speak, to open up doors for them. So that you can now, you know go towards your dreams. There's a lot of little girls who would love to be athletes and now they can do it. They have the opportunity, but it's going to be hard work, and they need to be dedicated to it. If they love it and really want to do it, they can now with good coaching and lots of time spent.
