Ellen Cooper, Kathy McGeehan, and Sandy Vorpahl — all of them East Hampton High School Hall of Fame members — are searching through old yearbooks and making phone calls to ascertain who among the school’s female athletes predating 1976 are worthy of being considered by the Hall of Fame committee.
Title IX, which put girls on an equal footing with boys athletically, took effect here in 1976.
Vorpahl, who was inducted as an “honors” member for her work as secretary to three athletic directors from 1983 to 2002, said she had come up with “at least a dozen names” of notable female East Hampton High athletes from the past. Cooper, who began researching possible pre-Title IX female nominees two years ago, has a list that’s reached 50, she said last Thursday. She and McGeehan were inducted as coaches.
“We’re not casting any stones,” Cooper, a former field hockey coach, added. “We just want to fix” the underrepresentation of women in East Hampton’s Hall of Fame.
A cursory look at the Hall of Fame wall in the high school’s main hall shows that to date there have been 52 male and 21 female inductees, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. The committee’s athletic picks have been balanced insofar as the Title IX era is concerned: There have been 20 male athletes and 18 female athletes inducted from post-1976 classes.
Moreover, lending credence to this writer’s opinion that since the adoption here of Title IX, the school’s female teams have done at least as well, if not better, vis-a-vis their peers than the boys teams have, is the fact that for the years since Title IX took effect here, six girls teams and four boys teams have been inducted.
It’s the pre-Title IX years that are chiefly at issue. There are 15 male athlete inductees from those years on the Hall of Fame wall, and only one female, Eleanor Dickinson, Class of 1936, whose plaque says she would have averaged 45 or so points per game in girls basketball if baskets then had counted as 2 points, rather than 1 point.
Before the high school joined Section XI, the governing body for public high school sports in Suffolk County, with the advent of Title IX, there was competition among high school girls teams in field hockey, volleyball, basketball, and softball, on the East End, Cooper said. But it was far less organized than it is now, and there were no postseason awards to bolster a candidate’s credentials.
Of course, the fact that girls were not accorded their due when it came to athletic competition in the past was what gave rise to Title IX in the first place.
Ms. Vorpahl, a 1965 East Hampton graduate, might just as well have been inducted this year as an athlete — she played field hockey, girls basketball, and softball. In the end there were no female athlete inductees in 2022.
“As a member of the Hall of Fame selection committee, I would like to encourage community members, parents, former coaches, et cetera, to nominate female athletes to the committee for consideration,” McGeehan wrote in an email. “I believe we need to energize the nomination process!”
Nomination applications for the class of 2023 can be found through the East Hampton School District’s website. There’s no nomination deadline per se, though “in the spring,” said Cooper, “we begin putting a list of nominees together and begin gathering as much information as we can about them. We like to announce who the Hall of Fame inductees are at the athletic awards dinner [in June], and the induction ceremonies are held the day of homecoming.”