A moment on the court

Jefferson City resident Carol Eighmey was a member of the University of Missouri-Rolla's first women's basketball and volleyball teams.
Jefferson City resident Carol Eighmey was a member of the University of Missouri-Rolla's first women's basketball and volleyball teams.

More than 40 years after graduating from college, a women's sports pioneer will finally get her due.

Forty-three years ago, Carol Eighmey played on the first University of Missouri-Rolla women's basketball and volleyball teams. Saturday, Eighmey, a Jefferson City resident of 40 years and the director of the Missouri Petroleum Storage Tank Insurance Fund, will be honored at the school and receive her varsity jacket.

In 1972, Title IX prohibited anyone from being excluded from participation in educational programs or being subject to discrimination in educational programs. Two years after the creation of that landmark law, as women's athletics teams sprang up around the country, the university, which was renamed Missouri University of Science and Technology in 2008, cobbled together its women's teams.

Historically, males dominate enrollment at Missouri S&T, and today, the school is still just 23 percent female, according to US News World & Report. At the time, it had just one female dormitory. A junior then, Eighmey described the teams as a cast of misfits who lost a lot but also had a lot of fun.

"Most of us were just really happy to have an opportunity to play," she said. "Anybody who wanted to be on the team made the team."

Both teams had such a small budget that the players traveled in two station wagons with the coach driving one and Eighmey driving the other. Because of the budget constraints, members of those teams never got varsity letter jackets and instead got cheaper windbreakers.

Saturday, 18 members of both teams, including Eighmey, will be honored in Rolla at halftime of the Miners' football game against Southwest Baptist University and at a dinner later tonight. They'll also be fitted for the varsity letter jackets they never received.

John Kean, Missouri S&T sports information director, said this is an attempt by the school to right a wrong.

"I think part of it is," Kean said.

Today, girls and women compete in sports at about the same rate as boys and men. In 2016, 3.2 million girls participated in high school sports and made up 42 percent of high school athletes, a rate 10 times higher than when Title IX passed, according to an April NCAA report. Across all levels of NCAA athletics, females made up 46.7 percent of athletes in 2016.

A Cape Girardeau native, Eighmey played for three semesters before graduating in December 1975. She stayed on the school's campus for graduate school and eventually got an internship in Jefferson City with the Missouri Department of Natural Resources.

Ever since, she's been firmly rooted in Jefferson City. She now serves as the director of the Missouri Petroleum Storage Tank Insurance Fund.

Eighmey speaks with a reverence for her college days like someone reading a long lost book. The school had an intermural athletics program at the time, so she was already involved in athletics.

"We didn't, at least I didn't, see myself as any pioneer," Eighmey said. "It was a great time. I probably enjoyed my college years more than I should have."