Carol Hutchins Won’t Stop Fighting For Women’s Equality

The esteemed Michigan softball coach and self-proclaimed “Title IX boomer” is committed to combating the ongoing gender disparities in college sports.

Title IX radically altered the sports landscape, but not all at once and not without resistance. In the early years of the statute, the “forgotten heroes” challenged bias and championed equality—and the impact is still felt today. Read more about Title IX’s pioneers to remember here.

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It was a Saturday in 1976, a day Carol Hutchins will never forget.

As a freshman basketball player at Michigan State, she was thrilled to be practicing for a rare game in the main gym, the Jenison Field House, as part of a doubleheader with the men’s team. The session was barely underway when the men’s opposing coach entered and demanded that the women get off the court.

Despite the team’s scheduled time, the coach—whom Hutchins won’t name except to say he’s a “Hall of Fame, high-profile guy to this day”—gathered the team on the floor and repeated his order: “You need to get off this court, because nobody gives a damn about women’s basketball.”

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“We were all pissed. It lit a fire under us,” says Hutchins, 64, now in her 38th year as coach of Michigan’s softball team, the winningest in the sport’s NCAA history. “As women, we experience that [treatment] all across the board, in so many arenas.”

A self-proclaimed “Title IX boomer,” Hutchins, a Lansing, Mich., native, was entering 10th grade when the law was passed. As she grew up, more and more gender inequities were being exposed. “It was a given that the men were treated better, that men were more important,” she says.

By her senior year at Michigan State, Hutchins and her teammates were fed up. First, in a formal complaint letter, and later, in a 1979 lawsuit, they protested the school’s “gross violations” of Title IX, citing not only the clear lack of funding for women’s sports compared to men’s, but the discriminatory differences in facilities, travel arrangements and more. It took nearly a decade to officially settle, but within two years of filing, female athletes did receive some small improvements, like new glass backboards and a dedicated locker room.

After graduating as a two-sport athlete in 1979, Hutchins earned her master’s degree in physical education at Indiana and began her softball coaching career. She was an assistant coach for the Hoosiers (’81) and spent a year as head coach at Ferris State (’82), before finally landing at Michigan as an assistant (’83–84).

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Hutchins recalls her first year as the head coach at Michigan, in 1985: She was hired on a part-time basis, a 10-month appointment at a $3,000 salary that required her to split her time between athletics and a clerk typist role. “We all had other duties,” she says of the female coaches at the time. “My job was to be the secretary for the women’s athletic director.”

She also served as the grounds crew. While the men’s baseball team had multiple full-time coaches, practice uniforms and a manicured field, Hutchins had to pull weeds, paint lines and maintain the subpar softball facility.

Now, more than four decades after that first complaint, “Hutch” boasts the most wins of any coach in Michigan history, 22 Big Ten titles as well as an NCAA championship—and she’s as impassioned as ever about the fight for women’s equality. She’s adamant that the gender disparities in college athletics remain rampant, “getting alarmingly bigger, not smaller.”

“It’s really in recent years that I’ve realized that it is my duty to speak out,” Hutchins says. “In all my salary disputes, when I spoke out, it was not because I needed more money to live. I don’t need much. It’s all about the women that come after me.”