From Casual Athletes to NCAA Champs: How Many Will Follow?

June 24, 2005 — -- Twins Ashley and Courtney Koester were training for a marathon in the fall of their sophomore year at Northwestern University when a stranger approached them and asked if they were interested in playing lacrosse for the school's new varsity team.

"We politely declined because we didn't think it was for us," Ashley, now 23, says. "I'd never seen a lacrosse game or a lacrosse stick or anything because we're from Indiana and it really doesn't exist there."

But the stranger, Northwestern women's lacrosse coach Kelly Amonte Hiller, was persistent. She had been given the daunting task of starting a lacrosse program from scratch and saw a latent talent in Ashley and Courtney. In November 2002, she gave them lacrosse sticks to take home over the Thanksgiving break -- just to try.

"When we took the sticks home, it really reinforced how fun the game was and what a challenge it would be to learn this sport," Ashley says.

The twins are now part of the 2005 NCAA national women's lacrosse championship team, which made history in May when it defeated defending champion, The University of Virginia, 13-10, to become the first squad outside of the East to win the sport's NCAA crown.

"I wouldn't give it up for the world," says Courtney of her lacrosse experience. She originally walked on to the basketball team as a freshman, but quit because she felt it was consuming all her time. "I'm just so lucky that one, Kelly stopped me on the street and two convinced me to play because I was so close to turning it down."

NCAA Senior Vice President for Championships and Education Services Judy Sweet holds the Koesters up as two of the shining successes of Title IX, and a perfect reason a recent clarification of Title IX issued by the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights in March should be amended, if not rescinded.

The guidelines advise schools that they can use an e-mail survey to gauge the athletic interest of the student body. If results show that members of the underrepresented gender (usually women) are not interested in certain sports, schools do not have to provide athletic opportunities in that sport but will still be in compliance with Title IX, the 1972 law that bans discrimination in education -- including sports programs at schools and universities -- based on gender. To read about use of surveys in high schools, Click Here.