Impact 50: Roberts vs. Colorado State Altered Multiple Landscapes
Landmark case helped shape Title IX decisions
In 2011, Jennifer Roberts brought a team up from Texas to Northern Colorado for a softball tournament.
The 12-under select team, the Knockouts, included her daughter Maddie, so Roberts wanted to show them the Colorado State campus. The dorms she lived in, where she went to classes for her chemical engineering degree which led her to a job with Dow Chemicals in her home town of Lake Jackson.
Throughout the tour, she told them stories of her days in college – like all alumni do with their children – but she saved her best for last. She shared it when they arrived at Ram Field, where the softball team plays. It wasn’t the field Roberts played on as a Ram, but it exists due to the actions of Roberts and some of her teammates back in 1992.
She told them all about Roberts vs. Colorado State University.
“I was very proud of that. That was a moment that I was very willing to share, and I shared with my players and explained to them what we went through and how this field came to being,” Roberts said. “We took pictures in uniform in front of the field. That definitely was special to me. Those are things young kids don’t understand what people have done before them.”
In 1992, coach Sandy Pearsall had guided her team to a 33-25 mark, the program’s second winning season in her three years as coach. The team was on a bit of an upswing, posting winning records in four of five seasons after losing records the first 12 campaigns of existence. In Pearsall’s first year, 1990, the Rams won the High Country Athletic Conference title, then the next year they joined the Western Athletic Conference.
The WAC tournament ended in early May and the players went home for the summer. In June, the news broke. Some of them had received a letter in the mail first, but others were alerted by Pearsall herself over the phone.
Colorado State University was disbanding the program. Immediately.
“Then we all left for summer break, went home and two weeks later, they were, sorry, we dropped the program. It’s like your whole world folds,” Laura Bielak, a member of the 1992 team, said. “Let’s be honest, student-athletes go to college to be athletes, and that’s how we were able to go to school and get our educations. That pays for it. Now, here you are with something you didn’t choose, you had no warning and now they’re telling you you can’t play anymore, and therefore, your scholarship is gone and your education is particularly gone. It’s in the summer, so you have less than two months to find some place to land. It was pretty earth shattering.”
Back then, there was no social media, and not everybody on earth had a cell phone. There was no direct messaging for the team to use, but word spread. So did the hurt. The confusion. The anger.
They had no idea what was next. Or what they could do. Roberts was mad and hurt. She chose Colorado State not just to play, but for the engineering program. She didn’t want to leave. She also didn’t know why the university she loved wanted to drop her program.
Her father Norman was angry, as well, and it was he who started to ask questions, starting with softball federations and eventually finding his way to the Denver law firm of Kobayashi and Associates in Denver, who took up the team’s cause pro bono.
In 1992, Colorado State’s athletic department was in a budget crunch. The decision was made to not only drop softball, but baseball, as well. While Title IX had been in existence for 20 years, understanding what it all meant and how it was tracked was still very much unchartered territory in the courts, especially when it came to athletics.
“What they did, I’m grateful, for sure. The ability to play, I hadn’t known about the story coming in. The courage and the strength to not only fight for the program and fight for us and future generations of softball, but also go to school ... Some of them did it knowing they weren’t coming back to play. They did it knowing girls like me were going to be able to stay in a program that has honestly shaped who I am.”Current Ram softball student-athlete Kaitlyn Cook
Christine Susemihl, who worked with CSU athletics for 45 years and rose to the position of Senior Women’s Administrator, remembers the decisions to drop sports – others had been eliminated before -- were anything but casual.
“The big thing there was we dropped baseball. The administration felt, well, we can drop softball, because that’s equity,” Susemihl said. “That’s not how the courts viewed it, mainly because a lot of it was governed by the ratio between male and female students in the student body.”
Susemihl said the university knew it was going to be at risk for doing so, but Colorado State wasn’t the only campus dropping sports and trying to balance out the scales and ledgers at the same time.
From 1992, when the university attempted to drop softball, through 1994, when the suit finally came to an end and the softball program was reinstated, there were 20 other cases being heard in the courts.
Not all of them reached the Supreme Court.
“There were issues and surprises, like getting sued all the way to the Supreme Court,” Susemihl said. “I always felt like the university was trying to do the best, and they accepted the decisions, lived with it, and continued to develop the program and invest in it. Finally, it kind of all settled down.”
When the first item in a Google search of your name is a Supreme Court case, you walk the line carefully. Roberts wrestles with the fact, knowing most people carry a negative connotation with lawsuits. For her, the topic is not a conversation starter. It won’t end one, either. Most of the people she’s known for years don’t know about it, and the few who ask don’t make a big deal of it, but she will fill in the blanks of their curiosities.
How her name became listed first among the 13 listed, Roberts isn’t exactly sure. Bielak joked Roberts deserved top billing because her father Norman did all the leg work for the team.
Time and place has a lot to do with those conversations, and the 25th anniversary of the program being reinstated was an ideal setting. So too were those willing to listen, players with “Rams” emblazoned on the front of their jerseys due to the persistence of others. That’s the way it really is for all of the players who dared to stand.
“They came to our alumni game, and a couple of the people who were on the team at the time and went through the whole process of taking the case to the Supreme Court were there,” current senior Kaitlyn Cook said. “They came and talked to us, and I had heard from them my freshman year, and it was nice to re-hear the story from their point of view this past year.
“What they did, I’m grateful, for sure. The ability to play, I hadn’t known about the story coming in. The courage and the strength to not only fight for the program and fight for us and future generations of softball, but also go to school ... Some of them did it knowing they weren’t coming back to play. They did it knowing girls like me were going to be able to stay in a program that has honestly shaped who I am.”
That was the thing. Initially, all of the members of the 1992 squad were mad. How could their university do this to them? It was very personal to them, even if the university viewed it as a financial transaction.
It was all about them, too, especially initially. Their college careers were on hold, but so was their education. Roberts liked the softball program, but she loved the engineering school. It was all tied together.
Still, it didn’t take long for them to see the bigger picture.
“Those things start out a little bit selfishly,” Roberts said. “You’re like, no, I want to play. The more you start to learn about the situation at hand and you consider this is the only Division I program in the state at this moment, this would take away opportunities in a sport that is growing all the time. Since the 1980s, softball has taken off like a rocket at so many levels. Opportunities for young women to go to college at whatever level and have the opportunity to play a sport – sport teaches you so many things.
“Opportunities, to me, are way bigger than me getting to play. I loved going to Colorado State. It was sad for me to think something would be unavailable when all we wanted to do was represent the school and this is something to be recognized in this state.”
The first thing the group did was file an injunction on Nov. 19, 1992 to stop the move, but the court ruled it needed more facts and finding of laws. What did happen was CSU honored the scholarships of those involved in the suit and agreed not to sell off the program’s equipment.
The week before Thanksgiving, the case went to District Court, where both sides presented their arguments, and with the members of the team in court, some of whom were called to testify, their world view was opened.
“It was very scary, because it was in US District Court, a federal court, and it was scary. None of us had any experience with this and what it entailed,” Bielak said. “I’m not sure some of us realized what a huge thing it was while we were doing it. It became a landmark case and it’s been cited how many number of times? It was scary, the judge was scary and CSU marched in with all these attorneys and there were people from the athletic department. It was like we were shell-shocked. Here’s a bunch of teenagers and young women walking in … Very much a David vs. Goliath kind of thing.”
Colorado State argued the female participation rate at the time was substantially proportional to the current female enrollment rate. It was not. At the time, there were 17 varsity programs, and females made up 35.2 percent of the total. The undergraduate enrollment at the university was 47.9 percent female, making the disparity 12.7 percent.
In the decade prior, that had always been the case, with an average of 14.1 beginning from a 1980-81 starting point.
The university argued the framework of Title IX provided no guidance in what determined “substantial proportionality, and they pointed to an Investigators Manual, noting language which stated “there is no set ratio that constitutes substantially proportionate.
The court ruling was that the paragraph preceding did, in fact, make it clear, and ruled in favor of the softball team.
“We had that weeklong court case, then we never heard anything back from the judge until February of 1993. It was kind of, OK, that part is done, now we wait,” Roberts said. “When her ruling came back, Judge Zita Weinshienk – I’ve never forgot her name – it was like 18 pages. When her judgement came out, I think we were just validated. Like, thank you, you saw what we saw. Even more, in some cases.”
“When you meet people and they ask you what your greatest thrill in life is, that’s always my answer, is being part of that lawsuit and doing something so good and being part of something so huge and paving the way for all the little girls and players to help them follow their dreams, too.”Laura Bielak
At that point, the players thought it was over. They wanted to know when they could start to practice, who would coach them and when the season started. But, it was soon after their lawyers said Colorado State was going to appeal the decision in federal court.
All the while, they were still attending classes, and there were some very uncomfortable moments. Bielak remembers going to the weight room to work out and getting side glances from athletes who wanted to know why she was there, since she was no longer an athlete at CSU.
Roberts had a friend in the engineering department whose father worked for the university in accounting, and he was pulled into the case. It was uncomfortable, and she hated that. The good news was their friendship was never affected.
“I didn’t have any friendships that were ruined,” she said. “We agreed to not talk about it and agreed to disagree. I don’t remember anything ugly, but there were moments of awkwardness.”
Around the country, the story was different. The Rams picked up a lot of fans.
The softball community kept a very watchful eye on the proceedings, as did women’s programs in general. If Colorado State could drop their softball program, then what was to stop their school from doing the same?
“Everyone else is in your court. When you’re suing, you tend to think everyone is against you because you’re doing something unfavorable,” Roberts said. “We love our university, yet we’re suing our university. That’s just really weird. There were a lot of people in the softball world who were watching our case and behind us. That was comforting.”
Susemihl said it was, as well, for many members of the athletic department. Many of them had come to know the softball team, but found themselves in a tough spot, supporting the university and the student-athletes they were committed to giving the best collegiate experience they could. Deep down, many words were swallowed which couldn’t reach the air.
In the summer of 1993, the case was heard in the Court of Appeals, and Judge Weinsheink’s decision was upheld. Then CSU pushed the case to the US Supreme Court, where in November of 1993, the highest court in the land refused to hear the case.
Colorado State softball was back in play.
“We were like the Bad News Bears,” Bielak said. “We were scrambling for anywhere to play. We’d play at Rolland Moore Park in the outfield, just like a pickup game. We didn’t have a coach. CSU said we could have the old baseball coach who knew nothing about softball, and he didn’t want to be there either because they cut his sport, too. He didn’t know how to run a practice, how to run the game. We held our own practices and did the drills we knew from before and that kind of thing. Plus we had a new group of people, a bunch of walk-ons and not all of our old teammates.”
Some former players had already found new schools to represent. The Rams were short on numbers, definitely on pitchers, but they did find a willing coach in Candi Letts, who would go on to build back up the program over the course of five seasons. Only the 1994 team had a losing record, and her 1997 team reached the NCAA Tournament.
In 2019, the program tied themselves to the 1994 team, the 25th anniversary of CSU softball coming back to life and the fight they had to show. The season produced the second Mountain West championship for the Rams, the first since 2004. Members of the 1994 were invited back to help celebrate and mark both achievements and share their stories of perseverance.
The 1994 team won by being on the field, just not on it. They posted a 22-30-1 record, going 9-16 in WAC play.
Bielak can still recall all of it. The disappointment she felt, as well as the elation. She can still picture the courtroom and listening to the arguments, things a normal 20-something doesn’t experience. It shaped her for life, as it turned an interest in law into a career as a paralegal for the Denver City Attorney’s Office, where she has been employed the past 20 years.
She was the senior Ram, and as a competitor, circumstances be damned, losing hurt.
But the win was the biggest in program history. Not only does the program still exist, but it now has an on-campus field, something Bielak and Roberts never had. And, in 2022, the 50th anniversary of Title IX legislation, work is scheduled to begin on a significant facility upgrade for the program this summer. Their willingness to challenge their school opened up a lot of doors.
“I can’t speak for the others, but Title IX is a big part of who I am,” Bielak said. “When you meet people and they ask you what your greatest thrill in life is, that’s always my answer, is being part of that lawsuit and doing something so good and being part of something so huge and paving the way for all the little girls and players to help them follow their dreams, too.”
The 1994 season was also a resurrection for Roberts as a player. She came to Colorado State as a pitcher, but became an infielder a year later. But Letts needed pitchers, so Roberts headed back to the circle.
She pitched in 37 games that season, 34 of them starts, ranking sixth and second all time. She threw 216.2 innings, which stands third in program history, tossing 29 complete games, which sits second.
“With a little raggedy arm at the end of that season,” she joked.
By then, going the distance fit perfectly in her nature.
“I guess I never thought about it like that, but yeah, it was very satisfying to know we did something remarkable. I didn’t feel we ever manipulated the court system,” she said. “We just used the law to fight for us, and it proved true.
“Truth won in this case. Justice was served.”