In this Journal-World file photo, former Kansas standout Lynette Woodard, left, and then-Kansas-coach Marian Washington sit on the KU bench during a game at Allen Fieldhouse.

In the summer of 2014, when Marlene Mawson was touring Kansas’ new athletic facilities at Rock Chalk Park, she was awestruck at how far the university’s women’s sports programs had come.

Mawson, a longtime professor and administrator who ushered in the era of competitive women’s athletics at KU, was invited to a meeting at Rock Chalk Park just as construction was being completed. As she walked between the soccer and softball stadiums, she thought about the condition of the facilities her teams had to use while she coached basketball, softball, volleyball and field hockey at the university in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

“We played on clumpy fields, and we played where there weren’t even any backstops for softball because that’s what we had,” Mawson said earlier this week. “To see what they’ve got now, it was just amazing to me. … It was just spectacular. Maybe it was the field of dreams for me. I’ll tell you, it was a dream I could never have dreamed of — not here.”

Fifty years ago Thursday, President Richard Nixon signed into law the Education Amendments of 1972, which included a provision most commonly known today as Title IX. It broadly prevented discrimination on the basis of sex in education and has had far-reaching effects on intercollegiate athletics across the United States, notably to ensure that the opportunities provided to men and women are and remain equal.

At Kansas, Mawson guided the university into and through the Title IX era after she was hired as a professor of physical education and director of women’s athletics in 1968.

Her efforts in formally establishing the program led to opportunities for countless women at the university.

What she encountered during her early years were different types of challenges. She said her first budget for the women’s athletic department was $2,000 — roughly $17,000 today — and she had one set of uniforms for six teams. She was initially prohibited from using Allen Fieldhouse and university vehicles, which meant teams had to split up and drive themselves to regional competitions.

Few people in the general public recognized the impact Title IX could have on athletic departments, but Mawson, in her position as an administrator, could see it clearly. She recalled attending a conference in Portland, Oregon, shortly after Title IX was signed into law in which men’s intercollegiate athletic directors, women’s intercollegiate athletic directors and physical education directors were passionately arguing and defending their positions.

“It was very obvious to people that were directly involved in athletics, but for the general public, I don’t think it was a big deal at all,” Mawson said. “They hadn’t heard of women’s athletics at all anyway, so what would be the big deal? They were looking more at, ‘Now women will be doctors and women will be lawyers,’ and so forth like that.”

Title IX’s passage did not immediately lead to equality between the sexes. Following attempts to rewrite the legislation and a series of legal challenges, including one from the NCAA, universities were given until July 21, 1978, to come into compliance.

Mawson said Kansas chose to merge its athletic departments in 1974, when Marian Washington was hired to coach the women’s basketball team and serve as the director of women’s athletics. That year, Mawson believes, was a turning point for women’s sports at KU, even though initial budgets remained paltry compared to what KU afforded its men’s sports.

After stepping away from intercollegiate athletics in the early 1970s, Mawson remained a professor of physical education at Kansas until 1990, when she left to become a department chair at Illinois State. She retired in 2004 after two years as an administrator at West Georgia, was inducted into the University of Kansas Athletics Hall of Fame in 2009, later returned to live in Lawrence and in 2020 wrote a memoir, “Mawson’s Mission: Launching Women’s Intercollegiate Athletics at the University of Kansas.”

“I view my role as having the opportunity to get the ball rolling in the beginning and allowing what I had started to continue to build,” Mawson said. “I knew that it wasn’t going to go back. It would never go back to what it was before. I just wanted it to grow and expand and let more women have the joy of competing and feeling what it was like to put everything they had in terms of energy and intelligence and skills to work to defeat an opponent and know what that joy was.”