Home Run: August 1996

For years, the Lady Rams—the girls' high school softball team in Owasso, Oklahoma—played their home games at a dusty city-owned ballpark with wooden bleachers and a chain-link backstop. The boys' team, on the other hand, played its games on the Owasso High campus, at a first-rate facility with lush green grass, aluminum stands, and an electronic scoreboard. Ron Randolph, whose daughter, Mimi, played catcher for the team in the mid-1990s, thought the girls were getting a raw deal. When he and several other parents complained to the school superintendent, they were told that a task force would be created to look into the matter. That never happened, but the Lady Rams, who took the state championship in 1995, were treated to brand-new uniforms for the first time in five years.

The uniforms were nice, but Randolph and the other parents wanted more for their daughters. Girls' soccer had become increasingly popular in Owasso, a small town just outside of Tulsa. So had volleyball. Yet the district seemed to treat its female athletes as second- class citizens. The boys got better equipment and better playing times for their games. They had better access to medical and training facilities, too. Randolph, who also has a son, said at the time, "If I pay $100 every year to this school in taxes, and $10 of it goes to athletics, I think $5 ought to go to my boy and $5 ought to go to my girl. To me, it's simple math."

In the winter of 1996, after much deliberation, Randolph, along with 10 other parents and their daughters, sued the Owasso Independent School District for violating Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in educational institutions that receive federal funds. It was the first such complaint in the state of Oklahoma, and one of only a handful of Title IX cases that had been brought at...