Girl Aggies

[kepdawg]

Doing pretty good

Trail the Lady Vols 29-27 at halftime

[HEMOTOXIC]

Go Ags! Whoop!

[rockdale80]

I thought this was a thread about BBDE;)

[kepdawg]

Girl Aggies lose 53-45

[Bull Butter]

Awful shooting in the 2nd half by both teams. Lady Vols stepped it up down the stretch, though.
Can't deny the greatness that is Pat Summitt:)

Don't pay a lot of attention to women's hoops but it seems Blair has really elevated the A&M program

[coiled2strike]

looked like to me they made the same mistake the men made down the stretch...continued to drive and force poor shots with the big folks inside...
the huge 3 w/ the shot clock at 3 secs was great...even though it wasn't the ags...great job ladies
best season in school history
GIG 'EM

[rockdale80]

ATM is building a great program across the board.

[zebrablue2]

Originally posted by kepdawg
Girl Aggies lose 53-45


Very good season for the LADY AGGIES. Finishing in the top 10 is something to be proud of.

[Phil C]

A&M has really worked on their women's programs which account for just over half the points in the State Farm Lone Star Cup competition.
They seem to mainly want to choose good athletes rather than great ones that go pro after a season or two. This means they have athletes for 4 years instead of 2 which makes a difference.

[Bubba-Joe]

The announcers were so Pro Tennessee it was hard to listen to em
still Tenn made the plays when it counted, great season for the Lady Aggies.

[Panther One]

Actually, we've worked on improving all of the programs. It's just that the women's programs have taken off a little faster. There's been improvements on the men's side, as well, except in football, of course (thank you Fran).

[Old Tiger]

Originally posted by Bubba-Joe
The announcers were so Pro Tennessee it was hard to listen to em
still Tenn made the plays when it counted, great season for the Lady Aggies. Well it is womens college basketball and Tennessee is the class of it.

[westtxfballfan]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/sports/ncaabasketball/30aggies.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=texas+a%26m&st=nyt&oref=slogin

New York Times Article from Sunday about the lady Aggie basketball team and their women's sports in general. It credits gates with lots of changes.

March 30, 2008
Women's Tournament
Elite Women Prove That A&M No Longer Stands for ‘All Male’
By JERÉ LONGMAN

When Trigg Crawford arrived at Texas A&M to play basketball in 1977, the women’s team finally got its own locker room. It was a converted men’s dressing room and came with curious decorating choices. The walls were bubble-gum pink, as was the shower curtain. And the bathroom?

“They put silk flowers in the urinals,” Crawford said with a laugh.

For only the second time, Texas A&M has reached the Round of 16 in the women’s N.C.A.A. tournament. The Aggies are seeded second in the Oklahoma City region, where they will face third-seeded Duke on Sunday. If the favorites advance, Texas A&M would meet defending champion Tennessee on Tuesday for a chance to make its initial appearance in the Final Four.

If one wants to gauge how far women have come in collegiate sports since the passage in 1972 of Title IX, the federal law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex, there may not be a more striking example than Texas A&M.

The ascent of basketball — and of women’s sports in general at Texas A&M — represents a profound cultural shift at a university that was founded as an all-male military institution in 1876 and did not admit women until they sued their way onto campus in 1963.

Even as women began to join the university’s Corps of Cadets in 1974, they met fierce and novel resistance when trying to enter some of its elite units. One student from the late 1970s, Melanie Zentgraf, said that a fetal pig had been tossed in the window of her dormitory room and that spirit signs draped outside the women’s dorm had been set on fire.

She filed a discrimination lawsuit against the university, and her case drew widespread attention. When she graduated in 1980, the A&M president refused to shake her hand.

A wholesale change in attitude appears to have occurred since then. Today, about half of Texas A&M’s 46,000 students are women. The university president is also a woman. And the Aggies have committed to an ambitious, extensive program for female athletes, not unlike those found at its archrival Texas, at Stanford and in the Ivy League.

The women’s basketball team, which has won 15 of its last 16 games and plays suffocating defense, gained its highest ranking in the Associated Press news media poll this season — eighth.

The women’s swim team finished fourth last week at the N.C.A.A. championships. The track team finished seventh at the N.C.A.A. indoor championships in mid-March. The softball team reached the Women’s College World Series in 2007. The equestrian team has won five western-style national riding championships in the last seven years. The soccer team is a regular top-10 performer.

“It took a long time for people to respect the ability of women to play sports and to have an interest in it,” said Penny King, who went to Texas A&M in 1972 to work in the ticket office and is now the deputy athletic director.

“It started with everybody putting their arms around you, ‘Hi sweetie, honey,’ all that,” King said. “There are still some of the older Aggies who’ll do that. But for the most part, I think the university has really come of age. They accept women in every position. It’s been an amazing turnaround.”

There had been previous success in women’s sports at Texas A&M, which is located in College Station. The softball team won national titles in 1982, 1983 and 1987. And the basketball team reached the Round of 16 in 1994. But across-the-board success has coincided with the tenure of the former university president Robert M. Gates, now the secretary of defense, and the hiring five years ago of Bill Byrne as the athletic director.

Gates, who was the president of Texas A&M from August 2002 until replacing Donald Rumsfeld in December 2006, has been credited with increasing minority enrollment at the university. He also continued a campaign to make Texas A&M one of the nation’s top public universities by 2020.

Sports provide a common interest for a disparate student body and serve as a kind of “front porch” to the university, giving it widespread public attention, Gates said in a telephone interview.

“I think, perhaps subconsciously, a lot of people associate excellence in athletics with excellence across the board,” Gates said.

His wife, Becky, was a regular at Texas A&M sporting events, university officials said. In fact, Gates said, she skipped his confirmation hearing on Dec. 5, 2006, to accompany the women’s basketball team on a trip to Seattle.

“I think her being at these events told both the women on the teams and the coaches that there was high-level support for their programs,” said Gates, who welcomed the women’s basketball team to the Pentagon during a trip last December.

In January 2003, Gates replaced the athletic director with Byrne, who previously held the same position at the University of Nebraska. Armed with a $70 million annual budget, Byrne was given a bold mission — to make Texas A&M the top athletic program in the country.

There have been mixed results with the most visible sport, football, which has not gained a top-25 final ranking since 1999. But Byrne has hired highly respected coaches, including the track coach Pat Henry, who won 27 N.C.A.A. titles while at Louisiana State; and for women’s basketball, Gary Blair, who guided Arkansas to the Final Four in 1998 and calls Texas A&M a “sleeping giant.”

Byrne said: “We’ve been trying to change the culture, as far as making sure every sport is important. Football is very important in Texas, but I’ve always had the philosophy that when you keep score, you might as well try to win.”

To that aim, the university is building a $26 million, 68,000-square-foot basketball practice facility that provides equal space and amenities for men and women.

“We want to win a national championship,” Byrne said. “We can be as good as we want to be in any sport. We’ve got the resources; we’ve got the facilities. As long as we make a commitment to doing that, we’re going to win everything we want to win.”

There is still work to be done in women’s basketball. Home attendance of 3,674 a game this season ranked eighth among Big 12 Conference teams. Still, that represents a great improvement for a sport that did not charge admission for the first dozen seasons after being organized in 1973.

That year, the 153 women representing Texas A&M in 10 sports had to share a $300 stipend from the campus bookstore, according to a history of women’s sports at the university. At one time, women bought their own equipment and used athletic tape to fashion numbers on their physical-education uniforms. The former coach Kittey Holley sewed the uniforms for her golf team. Not until the late 1980s did women gain dining privileges at the university training table.

Cindy Gough, who earned eight varsity letters in basketball and softball before graduating in 1979, remembered riding her bike to a local laundry, carrying a bundle of clothes, when it was her turn to wash the team uniforms. Now, the women’s basketball budget at Texas A&M is $2.8 million and the overall women’s athletic budget for 11 varsity sports is $25.2 million — laundry included.

“Potentially, I knew what women’s sports could be,” said Gough, who is now the athletic director at the Kinkaid School, a private school in Houston. “I think it lacked leadership. Ten or 15 years ago, they didn’t care how teams did but football. Now, everybody has figured out, if we bother to do this, let’s try to be good at it. When you change the culture, there are no limitations.”

Change, however, has been balanced against a preservation of Texas A&M’s traditions, which are built around its military provenance.

There are no female cheerleaders, only male yell leaders. When a female dance team was introduced in recent years at basketball games, some women in the stands covered their eyes with their programs, said King, the deputy athletic director.

“They thought it was indecent to have those young girls with their midriffs showing,” King said. Then she laughed. “The men watched.”

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company