"Load up," the coach said in disgust. "We’re going home."
On an April day in 1972, Ken Christensen threw his bat bag in the back of the team van and closed the door on John F. Kennedy College’s pursuit of a fourth straight Women's College World Series championship.
Nebraska officials had just ordered the softball powerhouse from little Wahoo off the field.
“We’ve been disqualified,” Christensen told his team.
The coach chalked it up to jealousy.
"They said we broke the rules," said Beth Richards, a Kennedy pitcher and first baseman, "but they changed the rules."
"They tried to shame us,” said Cathy Buell, Kennedy College’s standout catcher.
Fifty years ago this spring — and two months before Title IX passed — controversy engulfed the now-defunct Nebraska college over its visionary winning ways. It had broken a significant barrier to women getting into college, and Nebraska wasn't ready.
Kennedy College seems almost fictional today.
How could a school that lasted only 10 years and numbered only a few hundred students accomplish so much so fast? How could it send women's teams to China and (almost) South Africa? Why was Kennedy the spark that launched the first Women’s College World Series? All while enduring discrimination, instances of racism and exhausting schedules that — at least once — proved almost fatal.
What united the women of Kennedy? A drive to compete. To demonstrate they belonged.
“We didn’t have any money,” said Lindy Albertson, 71, who grew up in Green City, Missouri (population 620), “but all of us women were out for one thing: We were going to show them we could beat anyone.”
In the end, Kennedy College was too far ahead of its time. Its methods of success too closely emulated the opportunities offered men ... and the women paid the price.
As the Patriettes age, remaining players reflect on those years with pride. They hope it's not too late to receive recognition for what they achieved — on the softball field and in the fight for equity.
“A 50-year grind in our bellies,” is how the now 71-year-old Betty (Alig) Sweet from Iowa describes the near-erasure of their accomplishments. "I just don't understand."
ANYTHING TO PLAY SOFTBALL
John F. Kennedy College didn’t start as a sports powerhouse. It originated as a small-town economic development tool.
The school, like several Midwestern peers, capitalized on the explosive growth in college enrollment in the 1960s, notably the surge in young men seeking college deferments to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War.
In the school's first year, men outnumbered women 8 to 1, college historian Carl Wirth said. To balance out enrollment, Kennedy’s sports-minded leadership conceived a novel strategy: Don’t discriminate against women. Go after them.
“We were a haven for women’s athletics,” said Teri Johnston, who grew up in Conrad, Iowa, and played second base for JFK.
Before the mid-1960s, standout women athletes often played in the "industrial leagues.” Like Judy Lloyd, who was already 29 when Kennedy came calling. Her league team in Des Moines had won the Iowa state championship nine years in a row when she took up Kennedy’s offer to pitch and get a college degree.
“I decided to give it a try,” said Lloyd, 81, who had done bookkeeping at Look Magazine and Greenwood Electric, two of Des Moines’ biggest supporters of women’s industrial sports teams.
Lloyd said she didn’t receive a scholarship but worked off expenses in the college office. Every hour she worked, the school would deduct $1 from her bill, capping her total hours at 200.
Kennedy College enrollment peaked at 690 students, and the makeup of its student body reflected the then-unusual opportunity it offered women athletes. In 1972, the year Title IX would go into effect, about three-fourths of Kennedy's women were student athletes.
The women's basketball team won two national championships and an international championship. It traveled to Communist China on a goodwill tour as relations between the U.S. and that country thawed.
But it’s hard to imagine a more dramatic arc than Kennedy College softball.
“I've always believed there's a fine line between having everything and having nothing at all,” said Buell, 72. “And that's kind of where we were.”
Every summer, they crisscrossed the country, honing their skills against the nation's best teams. In New York and California, in Texas and Florida. Sometimes Vancouver and Montreal. Between college ball and summer leagues, JFK played about 135 games a year.
Money was tight because Kennedy College was in a constant struggle to stay afloat. There were no batting coaches or pitching coaches. Faculty and coaches sometimes went without pay or got help from boosters. Betty Sweet played with the same glove she'd had since seventh grade.
When the Patriettes traveled, they covered their expenses by putting on softball clinics in small towns, getting a cut of gate receipts, or playing exhibition games against a local all-star team. They hawked Kennedy-Lincoln commemorative pennies.
Small-town games drew a couple of hundred spectators, and a summer tournament in Houston drew 5,000 to 6,000 people, Buell said.
Lunch and supper were bologna sandwiches and hamburgers. They had picnics in parks or grilled in a parking lot.
Wherever they were, they had fun. There was the time they sneaked beer into their dorm rooms by stuffing the bottles in a ball bag and pulling it up an outside wall with a rope. Only problem was, the beer was in glass bottles and the bag kept banging against the brick dorm.
"Oh man," Sweet said of the beer-soaked bag. And she still laughs about the time she locked herself out of her hotel room — wearing her baby doll pajamas — and her teammates denied knowing her. The frustrated hotel manager had to roust a none-too-happy coach.
"Coach had to say it was me," she said.
They drove through countless nights in two Ford Econoline vans — no air conditioning — sleeping wherever they could, including plywood boards placed across the tops of the seatbacks.
“We’d finish a doubleheader and we’d be on the road all night with one or two of the players driving,” said Buell, who grew up in Fremont. “I think, how did we live through that?”
On one of their drives back from the West Coast, one of the vans went out of control on an oily highway in Wyoming. It flipped.
A truck driver who ran to their aid said he saw a girl fly out of the van — that she was under it.
“We didn’t believe him," said Sweet, who had crawled to safety through a busted-out windshield. "So I started to count, and we were one player short.”
They gathered around the van, counted to three and lifted it off the player, Robbie Franchini. Her injuries would send her to the hospital, but she survived. She recounts her injuries: fractured ribs, a punctured lung and broken collarbone.
Back in Wahoo, the players paid for their education through loans and by working one, two, three jobs. In summers, they detasseled corn or hoed soybean fields.
Some got partial scholarships for their academic skills, for playing basketball or for being in the band. Several players received “activity” scholarships. Some of the players now say that their scholarships were for an off-the-books activity: softball.
But no one got a free ride.
“Every single one of us worked,” Johnston said. “We worked in the college, we worked in the fields, we waitressed, we did anything we could to stay there and play softball.”
'IF SHE CAN'T EAT, WE'RE LEAVING'
Like so many girls of the 1950s and 1960s, Charlene "Cha Cha" Thompson grew up with little chance of competing in sports.
She had played sandlot softball but was best known for her speed, racing boys on the streets of McKeesport, Pennsylvania. At community picnics, she’d enter foot races for a chance to win a silver dollar.
“I was always running, and I was always getting that silver dollar,” Thompson said. Including the time she had to borrow someone’s else’s shoes.
Kennedy College officials got wind of Thompson's speed on a recruiting trip through the Northeast. They were looking for all kinds of students: academic, artistic, athletic, male or female.
Would Thompson, who is Black and grew up in the shadows of Pittsburgh's steel mills, run track for their rural college in Nebraska?
She said yes.
Thompson's interest in fast-pitch softball developed as she sat on a hillside and watched the Kennedy women practice. Coach Christensen trekked up that hillside more than once to ask if she'd like to give the game a try.
“Once I got my head turned around to softball, I never looked back,” Thompson said.
Thompson became an All-American and, according to her teammates, the best center fielder they ever saw. But when the Patriettes made a swing through the South, a restaurant refused to serve them.
"They said Cha Cha could sit back in the other room, but she couldn't sit up front with us," Sweet recalls. "I couldn't believe it."
“At first I was angry,” said Thompson, 71, who now lives in Atlanta, where she helps run athletic programs. “Up north, I wouldn’t let people talk to me like that, but I realized I couldn’t smart off because there would have been trouble for the whole team.”
Thompson recalls the response of her soft-spoken coach.
"Coach Ken said, 'If she can’t eat, we’re leaving,'” she said. “They didn’t leave me standing there by myself. I was so far from home. The whole team stood by me."
Racism reared its ugly head again as the team prepared to compete internationally. Like the women's basketball team that would go to China, the softball team planned to play overseas. Their destination was Johannesburg, South Africa.
But apartheid was in full force in South Africa: Black South Africans had been driven from their land and homes, interracial families had been forced apart, civil rights protests were met with violence, and leaders like Nelson Mandela were jailed, if not killed.
Kennedy received a message: The team could come, but Thompson and Georgia Gomez, who was a Native American from the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska and another of the team's All-Americans, would have to stay home.
"We had a meeting and wrote on a piece of paper,: 'Go' or 'Stay home,' " Sweet recalls. "It was unanimous. We go with our full team or we don't go.”
They stayed home.
ISSUING THE CHALLENGE
By 1968, coach Don "Pappy" Joe knew that the fledgling softball team he'd organized at Kennedy was practically unbeatable in the college arena.
But how to prove it? He looked some 45 miles down the road to Omaha and thought: If Omaha could host a Men's College World Series, why couldn't it host one for women?
With that in mind, Joe got the blessing of Nebraska State Softball Commissioner Bill Smith to push for the creation of a series. Joe issued a challenge in the October 1968 edition of the softball publication, Balls & Strikes: Come to Nebraska and try to beat my Kennedy Patriettes.
Creighton University and Kearney State College sent teams. So did schools in Florida, Illinois, Colorado, Missouri and South Dakota.
The challenge resonated halfway across the world. A team from the Philippines traveled as far as Japan before mechanical problems insurmountably delayed their flight.
UNO was asked to be the host college, and its assistant professor of physical education, Connie Claussen, helped organize the series. At that time, there were no women's sports at UNO, so Claussen scrambled to create a softball team. Coach Joe's idea, dreamed up at the tiny college in Wahoo, led to the beginning of women's athletics at UNO.
And coach Joe proved prophetic.
The Kennedy Patriettes went undefeated in the inaugural world series, outscoring their opponents 39-4.
The first-ever Women’s College World Series was in the books.
For the Kennedy players, it was sheer joy.
“It was unbelievable that life could be that good,” said Buell, who was named to the tournament’s all-star team and eventually became the only Kennedy player in the Nebraska Softball Hall of Fame.
The next year, with coach Christensen now in charge, Kennedy repeated, outscoring opponents 31-8 in the WCWS.
In 1971, they rolled again.
Opponents couldn't stop the Kennedy College Patriettes on the field. Discrimination off the field would be their undoing.
In April 1972, their dynasty came to a crashing halt. All because of a revolutionary idea that is standard practice today: athletic scholarships for women.
OPPOSITION TO WOMEN'S ATHLETIC SCHOLARSHIPS
Karen (Williams) Nicodemus remembers, as a high school student, toying with the idea of playing volleyball at Nebraska.
"They said, 'If you want to come, you can come.' But that wasn't the same as being recruited."
Nationally and in Nebraska, collegiate officials generally tamped down competitiveness in women's athletics, pre-Title IX. Both recruiting and athletic scholarships were banned. Many colleges weren't allowed to fund the travel of female athletes for more than 50 miles — so some women held bake sales to raise money.
Collegiate officials who oversaw women's sports wanted their programs to be different from men's. Less commercial. Less corrupt. More pure.
That position was a product of its time, said Victoria Jackson, a women's sports historian and an assistant professor at Arizona State University.
At that time, men's athletics had few guardrails. Schools sometimes handed out scholarships to men just to lock up players and keep them from a rival team.
The DGWS (Division for Girls' and Women's Sports) and later the AIAW (Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women) viewed scholarships as unsavory "pay for play.”
"Money was considered corrupting and tainting," Jackson said. "If there was any sort of financial inducement involved, it meant you were not playing for the right reason. Athletic scholarships represented that."
The hard facts of college budgets might also have been at play: Many colleges, including in Nebraska, spent so little on women's athletics, they would have had no money to offer scholarships.
In society-at-large, women also were often treated as second-class citizens. Many, for example, couldn't get a credit card without a man’s signature. They could be barred from jury duty. They weren't allowed in Rotary, Kiwanis or Lions Clubs. High school girls who became pregnant were routinely forced out of school, and laws expressly exempted spouses from being charged with rape.
In Nebraska, the issue of women's athletic scholarships reached a boiling point with Kennedy.
The Nebraska Women's Intercollegiate Sports Council opposed athletic scholarships. Leading the push against Kennedy was a council official who is now an icon in Nebraska women's sports, UNO's Connie Claussen.
“(The council) does not believe in athletic scholarships or recruiting of women specifically for sports," Claussen was quoted as saying in an April 1972 story in The World-Herald. "A girl should be a student first, and if she has time, then she can participate in athletics.”
At a Nebraska hearing on the scholarship issue, the council questioned Buell, a team leader: What does your "activity scholarship" require?
Be active, Buell responded, acknowledging now that her activity was softball.
"I thought at the time, 'Boy, this is really crazy that men are getting scholarships and for some reason, I'm supposed to feel guilty about getting a little scholarship to play softball," Buell said.
Any scholarship she received wasn't a free ride. Among other jobs, she worked in an onion ring factory "eight hours a day, every day, before practice and on game days" to earn money to support herself.
On April 23, 1972, the Nebraska women's athletic council took its opposition to women's athletic scholarships even further. It voted to bar a college's athletes from competition if any women at the college received athletic scholarships for any sport. Thus, because Kennedy College awarded basketball scholarships to women, its female softball players would be unable to compete in the World Series. (Kennedy was able to award basketball scholarships because women's basketball was overseen by a noncollegiate organization, the Amateur Athletic Union.)
“I can’t say what others were thinking when they voted,” Claussen said then, "but my own philosophy is no matter what you give athletic scholarships for — whether it's tiddlywinks or whatever — it goes against the philosophy of the organization.”
Of the 14 Nebraska colleges that were members of the state women's council in 1972, Kennedy was the only college affected by the rule change, according to a news story of the day.
Kennedy players haven't forgotten.
“A lot of people think it’s just men who stood in the way of women,” said Richards, 70, who grew up in Garwin, Iowa. “In reality, it was also women."
Nicodemus said the council didn’t take into account the opportunities they were denying women.
"There was an inherent unfairness to saying across the board that it was wrong for girls to have an opportunity as a result of their athletic abilities,” she said.
Claussen believes that Kennedy had an unfair advantage.
"If you can recruit the better athletes, and you have money to travel, and people hear about that, why wouldn't players want to go to JFK?" Claussen said. “JFK made their name well-known because they won basketball games and they won softball games, but if they were competing against colleges that didn't give scholarships, that made a difference.”
Joyce Solomon, who pitched for Kearney State College and played against Kennedy, said she had no qualms about the incentives Kennedy gave its athletes. If other schools had wanted to recruit the level of talent that played for Kennedy, they could have done so, she said.
"It was an institutional choice," she said. "I was envious."
According to documents from that era, Nebraska colleges adopted their prohibition on all women’s athletic scholarships before the national organization did. The national ban was approved in June 1972, the same month Title IX went into effect.
The driving force behind UNO's women's program, Claussen, now 83, said she supports women's scholarships and doesn't recall making the statements in the articles. Her Nebraska group, she said, was simply following the rules laid out by the national organization.
An UNO softball field has been named in Claussen's honor, and UNO has a scholarship fund in her name.
“(Scholarships are good) as long as schools can afford to give them out,” Claussen said. “If you can help a person go to school, why not? There are other scholarships, like academics.”
THE BANS FALL
The Nebraska and national bans of 1972 didn't last a year. In January 1973, two Florida colleges sued the national women's collegiate sports organization and others over the scholarship ban.
In the Kellmeyer lawsuit, as it is known, the colleges alleged that the organizations were violating the newly passed Title IX law and women's constitutional rights protected by the 14th Amendment.
The case would never go to court. The opposing educational and athletic organizations capitulated. The door cracked opened to women's collegiate athletic scholarships.
Correspondence from that era reflects how entrenched opposition remained in Nebraska.
In a 1973 letter to the national women's athletic council, representatives of UNL wrote that they were reluctantly voting in favor of women's athletic scholarships. They noted they were doing so at the advice of the university's attorney.
"Our philosophical position, however, opposes the granting of Athletic Scholarships to women,” Ina Anderson and Margaret Penny of UNL wrote to the national women's athletic organization.
That 1972 World Series was won by Arizona State. In 1973, with scholarships acceptable, Kennedy College resumed competing in the series with scholarship players. But the school didn't win a title again.
"Other teams were getting tougher," said Kennedy pitcher Christina "Okie" Crownover Provancha of Oklahoma.
Scholarships at other colleges would slowly follow.
According to various university records: UNO awarded its first women’s athletic scholarships in 1974-1975. Nebraska did so for the 1975-1976 academic year. Creighton awarded its first women's athletic scholarships in the 1977-1978 school year. In the fall of 1979, Ann Swanson-Bartek, a tennis player, became the first woman to receive a full athletic scholarship at Nebraska.
But the damage had already been done to the Kennedy's reputation, and its financial problems had only gotten worse. In the summer of 1975, the college closed.
Kennedy's softball players — women who had been lucky enough to find a college that embraced them — were the final students to say goodbye to the college. The summer the school closed, the team was on its West Coast tour. The women played on, carrying the name of a college that no longer existed, traveling from Oregon into Canada and back into the U.S. They returned to an empty campus only to find their rooms ransacked and many of their trophies and other personal possessions stolen.
"It was heartbreaking," Crownover Provancha said.
'KENNEDY WAS AHEAD OF ITS TIME'
By opening the door to women athletes, Kennedy did more than prove the sports value of athletic scholarships. College changed the lives of these women, who went on to change lives of others.
Take the Iowa farm girl, Betty Sweet. Her first job out of college was teaching in Arthur County, Nebraska, where she launched that rural county's first girl's basketball team.
"My parents said that without scholarships, we can’t afford to send you to college," she said.
Judy Lloyd's degree opened the door to 35 years of coaching and teaching in Omaha-area Catholic schools.
Then there's Teri Johnston. Financial help from Kennedy enabled her to be the first in her family to go to college. Johnston, 70, is now the mayor of Key West, Florida.
“Kennedy was ahead of its time, it was so far ahead of its time,” Johnston said. “It saw the value of women's athletics, it saw what it could do for women after they left college.”
Karen Nicodemus, who grew up in Mead, also had a limited view of her future. Thanks to Kennedy, she went on to coach at Bellevue University and North Bend. Ultimately, Nicodemus became the president of Cochise College in Arizona.
“I was a small town high school graduate who had no aspirations or thought of going to college,” said Nicodemus, now 69, who played first base and right field for Kennedy. “I might have been just as happy (without a degree), but it allowed me to walk through doors that I otherwise wouldn't have been able to."
Robbie Franchini, the player who nearly died in the van accident and played only one season and a summer at Kennedy before going home to Michigan, described her experience as "life-changing." Her time at Kennedy helped her toward a career path as a quality engineer for General Motors in Michigan, said Franchini, 72.
"I probably would not have been able to get a good job," she said. "I probably would have been stuck in a minimum-wage job. It opened my eyes to different parts of the country and meeting people and playing ball."
While bigger schools had advantages they could have exploited to build strong women’s programs, Kennedy relied on a winning alchemy.
"Coach Don Joe sold us on ourselves and articulated a dream we all bought into," Buell said of the team's formative years. "We loved playing for him, we had each other's backs, and that made all the difference.
“Even though we worked in cornfields and soybean fields and waited tables, even though we were young, we all knew how fortunate we were."
As the 1980s dawned and women's sports became more lucrative, the NCAA took interest. In 1982, the NCAA launched a competing Women's College World Series, and Omaha’s version — conceived by coach Joe and executed by Claussen — came to an end.
With the demise of the original world series, the accomplishments of Kennedy College have been largely overlooked. Their achievements merit some recognition from the the Softball Halls of Fame, the NCAA and the new WCWS, players say.
The little college in Wahoo not only won big 50 years ago, it showed competitors a glimpse of the future.
"Now it's accepted, girls play sports and they get scholarships,” said Sweet. “We paved the way. And no one knows.”