March is Women’s History Month--a time to celebrate women and what they’ve accomplished. At Ohio State, we wanted to recognize the university for being a pioneer in gender equality in sports and the women who helped make it happen.  

It’s been 51 years since the passage of Title IX, a federal law prohibiting different treatment and benefits based on sex, and over those years many changes have been made on the premise of women in athletics.

Among the women who have contributed to the advancement of women’s sports at Ohio State are Janine Oman and Kristin Watt.

A native of Celina, Ohio, Oman is the senior deputy athletic director and senior woman administrator at Ohio State. She graduated from the university in 1985 with a degree in physical therapy before earning her master’s in athletic training at North Carolina in 1989.

Oman said she considers herself a “Title IX baby.” She remembers starting to play sports at a young age, as her dad liked she and her sister to be active in something. Oman enjoyed running and told her dad there was no girls’ cross-country team at her high school.

“His comment, I can remember today was, ‘I guess you’ll run with the boys.’ So, we ran with the boys,” Oman said. “And I scored points on the boys’ team.”

Oman said by her junior year, her school had enough girls to form their own team. She said the environment on the boys’ team was welcoming, but she and her sister helped create one exclusively for the girls, which was special.

Watt, a member of the Ohio State Alumni Association board of directors and a partner at Vorys Law Firm, was a four-year letter winner on Ohio State’s women’s basketball team from 1981-’85. In 1992, she was named the first president of Women’s Varsity O, before merging with the men to become the Varsity O Alumni Society.

Watt grew up in Huron, and swam competitively for over a decade. When she reached high school, the results of Title IX had finally started to take shape, so playing with the boys was normal for her. She played basketball, was a long jumper on the track team and played volleyball for a year--long enough to realize she did not enjoy it.

“I competed with the boys, so I didn’t think much about it,” Watt said. “And then it was a girls’ basketball team.”

Watt earned a scholarship to play on the Ohio State women’s basketball team in 1981. She said Stephanie Hightower received one of the very first scholarships-- for track & field—and paved the way for other women.

In 1980, Hightower was on the US Olympic Track & Field team and won Big Ten Championships for Ohio State, according to Ohio State Buckeyes’ website. She was inducted into the Ohio State Athletics Hall of Fame in 1993.

Both Oman and Watt said the difference in how men versus women athletes were treated and their amenities at Ohio State were not too substantial, but rather there was a gap in the number of sports available. 

“The ’90s—we added a lot of women’s sports,” Oman said. “Women’s lacrosse, women’s soccer, women’s ice hockey and rowing. So those are four large sports.”

In 1965, the women’s basketball team was one of the first to become a varsity sport. This was before Watt’s time, but head coach Phyllis Bailey was still around to be a mentor to her.

Watt said Bailey was a “strong advocate for the women’s programs at Ohio State,” and said she “didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer.” Watt even called her a “national treasure.”

Bailey advanced the causes of female athletes at Ohio State and across the country. She helped several club sports become varsity sports and was the assistant athletics director before Title IX was even fully enacted, according to Ohio State Buckeyes’ website.

Bailey died in October 2022, but her influence contributed to women’s sports being “on par” with the men’s, Watt said, specifically basketball.

“Like the men, we got to fly to games,” Watt said. “We got training table, we got to use all the same workout equipment. We used the same gym.”

Unlike the men, Watt said there were no opportunities to be inducted into the Hall of Fame for the first 16 years, and there were no women in Varsity O, the alumni society.

Watt said Bailey told her to volunteer to become the women’s version—Women’s Varsity Os—first president in 1992, and that she did. The first female athletes inducted into the Hall of Fame came one year later.

“I designed the original Varsity ‘O’ logo and it’s the same logo today,” Watt said. “I was the one that started Varsity ‘O’ Women, in the sense that Phyllis Bailey said, ‘You are going to do this.’ And so, I did.”

Today, Ohio State offers 17 female sports and three for both men and women, according to Ohio State Buckeyes’ website.

Oman said she doesn’t feel as if the current female athletes feel any sort of inequality, and that’s the way it should be.

“I speak for Ohio State, where we feel like we’re providing all of these opportunities in a very equitable way,” Oman said. “Whether you’re male or female here at Ohio State. And it hit home for me where we have a lot of women on our teams who don’t really even think about Title IX.”

Watt said athletes are privileged to play a sport at Ohio State and not every school treats its athletes equally. Though, she said there is always room to improve.

There were only two women inducted into the hall of fame in 2022, Jenna Harris Griffin with women’s track and women’s lacrosse’s Alayna Markwordt, according to Ohio State Buckeyes website.

Despite the shortage of 2022 female inductees, both Oman and Watt said Ohio State is still a leader in providing equal opportunities to athletes regardless of sex.

“We still have work to do. I don’t want to say we’re in a perfect place,” Oman said. “For our women that are here, means that we’re probably doing some good work, that they feel like how they are treated is in a very equitable way as our men, and they don’t even know the history.”