It was an invitation Mike Ryan could not refuse.
Wrapping up a training session in the fall of 1973, the University of Washington men’s coach was approached by a UW student, a young woman. She wanted to play soccer, and she wanted someone to coach a team of fellow Husky coeds.
Ryan was already coaching the Huskies plus youth and adult teams. He was a Dublin-born father of four and foundry worker who seemed to spend the rest of his waking hours growing the world’s game in his adopted homeland. Since arriving in Seattle in 1960, he had served as president of the Washington state men’s association and youth association. However, that addressed only half of the population.
Ryan agreed to serve as coach and his Irish brogue greeted Washington’s first female footballers. Few of them had any competitive athletic experience, let alone kicked a ball. He started them with the three-man weave drill, then another called Hit and Run. That first year the Huskies would play a jumbled schedule with such opponents as the Eastside Shamrocks, Green River Community College, Highline CC and the Capitol Hill Strikers.
By the following February, on the morning of his 39th birthday, Michael Patrick Ryan awakened not only as coach of the newly founded UW women’s soccer club but also president of the 10-team Washington State Women’s Soccer Association which had been formed the night before at a University District hotel.
“He was interested from the start,” remembered Debbie Barlow, one of those UW coeds who responded to an ad in the UW Daily and attended that first tryout. “He was there at our first meeting. He was always a big proponent.”
Ripe for Growth
The early Seventies, and specifically 1973, was a time of profound and lasting change for girls’ and women’s athletics. Title IX had been signed into law the summer of ‘72. Sixteen months later, Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes. Females were now being allowed to run marathons and play Little League baseball. Where there was once a dark curtain was now a bright horizon.
The number of state women’s soccer teams and players expanded by four-fold in 1975. Housewives, office and restaurant staffers and teachers came out in droves to kick balls in the grass – until there was no more lawn. Growing beyond 300 teams was limited only by field space. And yet there at Ground Zero, on the UW campus from where it all began, the women’s soccer club’s development was at a standstill.
More than 50 women were trying out for the club each year, enough for two teams in the new women’s division of the Northwest Collegiate Soccer Conference. Across the state in Walla Walla, Whitman College became the state’s first varsity women’s program in 1977 and expanded the NCSC membership to seven teams.
Unfortunate Timing
Other than basketball and volleyball, UW athletic leaders had chosen, in 1974, to provide funded varsity opportunities in individual sports such as women’s tennis, golf and gymnastics. A grand total of $10,000 athletic aid was divided among 18 women from a department then generating $2.1 million in revenue. Soccer players were not among them.
On the other side of the country were comparative visionaries. The universities of Connecticut, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Penn State all initiated women’s varsity soccer programs by 1979. In 1980, the West Coast began to come online, with varsity playing starting at Oregon, Portland and Santa Clara.
Meanwhile, the Washington Huskies, with an immense amount of interest and gifted, young talent seemingly surrounding the campus, refused repeated attempts by students and community members to take UW to varsity status, even at a meager funding level.
Not until 1991 – nearly 20 years after the UW club had formed – did the Huskies finally go varsity. By then, North Carolina had accumulated nine national championships, the first few accomplished with key players coming from Washington. Local players helped Oregon reach the 1981 AIAW semifinals and at the small college level Pacific Lutheran, Puget Sound and Western Washington were emerging national powers.
“That was just shameful,” said Barlow of UW’s protracted delay.
No Friend of Footy
A few factors worked against Washington adding a varsity women’s soccer program. First, there was timing; the WSWSA was chartered, and the explosive growth came only after UW administrators had identified the first sports to get funding following Title IX’s enactment. Geographical isolation may have contributed; Oregon was the first Pac-10 women’s program but was eliminated after only two seasons for budgetary reasons.
Most of all, soccer was not looked upon favorably by UW athletic director Mike Lude. For more than a decade the repeated pleas from players and the community were met by Lude’s obstinance.
With nominal backing of the recreational sports office, the women’s team was contending for the conference championship. To go varsity would require funding for a coach, travel, equipment and some scholarship aid. During the 1980s a group of community leaders, including former Seattle Sounders executives John and Claudia Best and FC Seattle owner Bud Greer, was raising funds to attract top local players and lobby Lude to grant women’s soccer varsity status.
Russ Amick and his friend and fellow youth coach Chuck Rumpf were part of that group and asked Lude for a meeting.
Never, Not on His Watch
“When we met with Mike Lude it was like we were meeting the assistant football coach, not the AD,” said Amick. “(Lude) just disparaged everything that wasn’t football, and he did it for a couple hours. We told him what a great soccer program he could have for women because of all the talent around the Puget Sound area. He didn’t want anything to do with it. We walked out of there just shaking our heads.”
Around 1984, Amy (Allmann) Griffin joined a group of top high school players and their parents pledging to stay and become Huskies if the club became varsity. They, too, met with Lude.
“(We) said what are the chances there would be a varsity women’s soccer here at the University of Washington within the next 4-6 years?” Griffin told a Seattle audience in 2019. “(Lude) literally said, ‘As long as I am AD at this university there will be no women’s (varsity) soccer.’
“At the time we were all embarrassed,” continued Griffin. “I didn’t think anything of it, but my blood slowly started boiling…thinking of how many different ways you could tell a bunch of young women (tactfully), ‘We’re not looking at it right now; we have all these other sports to add. It’s a great idea, let me look into it.’”
About 10 years after that infamous meeting, Griffin returned to Montlake following her national team career. She began a 24-year run as UW associate head coach with Lesle Gallimore.
Rumpf, president of the Washington Women’s Soccer Foundation, claimed women’s soccer would immediately earn nationwide respect. “These women are not playing kick-and-giggle soccer; they’re playing fine soccer,” Rumpf told The Seattle Times. “The team will probably bring the accolades that crew has brought to the school. Soccer is probably the biggest sport in the Northwest. The U should take a leading position in activities the community is interested in.”
Lude responded with something of a shrug. “Soccer around here is a proven recreational sport,” he told The Times, adding that basketball, volleyball and gymnastics provide a better financial return.
Threatening Legal Action
Two members of the UW women’s club, Kathy (Ballew) Graves and Karen Eans, filed paperwork to sue UW athletics for failure to comply with Title IX. They were confronted by associate AD Catherine “Kit” Green.
“Kit Green said, ‘Why are you guys doing this?’” Graves recalled. “We said because we have these amazing players and all we wanted was the varsity status so we could travel and play California teams. But nothing happened.”
“We had multiple meetings with him,” said Traci Brown, another UW player. “It was contentious. His personality (made it so). I was 18-19 and very defiant anyway. But it was very clear, and he said multiple times (he couldn’t approve it because) we would be taking the place of a men’s sport.”
Mutual Lack of Respect
Without a doubt, football was king at UW. At the opposite end of the power spectrum was soccer. John Graves was one of Washington’s top players from 1977-81. Graves had come out of Tacoma’s Norpoint Royals club, which had spawned the careers of professionals Jeff Durgan, Mark Peterson and Jeff Stock.
With minimal financial support, the men’s team had reached the NCAA tournament four times under Ryan and two more times under Frank Gallo to start the Eighties. Both were part-time coaches, and Gallo was earning less than $3,000 when he left after an 18-2-1 season. Gallo said the program was run on a shoestring, with four scholarships and seldom enough funds to travel to California to play other top Div. I teams.
“We made the NCAA playoffs my sophomore year,” John Graves said, “and I don’t remember anybody (administrators) congratulating us. Of course, at that time we were irreverent, soccer assholes. If they would’ve respected us, we would have respected them so much more. But that wasn’t the case.”
“We certainly had no budget,” he continued. “We would get the worst uniforms. Today they have everything. But back then nobody got shoes, and they gave us sweats which were more like purple pajamas; they were terrible. The coolest thing we had were grey sweats that said UW Athletics on them. It was totally focused on the football, and I get that (football produced nearly all the revenue).”
And World Cup is Unwelcome
During the late 80s, after the United States was named host of the 1994 FIFA World Cup, Husky Stadium was a venue finalist. In 1987 the new north upper deck opened, lifting capacity to 72,000. FIFA inspectors gave the venue high marks.
Despite Governor Booth Gardner being a longtime coach of national-caliber girls’ and women’s teams, Lude and UW administrators were unsupportive of welcoming the world to “The Greatest Setting” if it meant laying sod over the AstroTurf for a couple months during the summer of ‘94.
In 1987 Washington football was averaging over 71,000 in attendance, rising in national prominence and raking in nearly $10 million in private contributions and broadcasting sales. Despite amassing a $15 million surplus by the end of the decade, no new varsity sports were being added, and Olympic sports such as UW men’s soccer were getting along on the bare minimum. Nearing the close of the decade the profile of the women’s club was diminishing, with Lude having stood firm and increasingly top local players made an exodus out of state.
Meanwhile, across the state in Pullman, a 10-year-old, gender equity lawsuit (Blair v. Washington State University) reached the state Supreme Court. The plaintiffs prevailed. It was then that Lude, Green and state legislators took notice.
Varsity Play, Finally
Beginning in 1989, WSU and other state universities were provided $700,000 by Olympia for tuition-waiver funds for women’s sports. Noted state representative Ken Hutchinson, (Washington) “won’t have to lose another generation of women athletes” to out-of-state colleges.
Barely four months before the ’89 season would begin, Washington State would lift its women’s soccer club to varsity status.
Facing increasing pressure from his university bosses, Lude would not survive as AD to see the Huskies win the 1991 football national championship (UW would not win an NCAA team championship until 1997; all nine national titles to date have been by women’s programs). Ironically, he would remain in his post long enough to announce the addition of women’s soccer and softball in December 1990.
In making the announcement, Lude told onlookers how his life in athletics would not have been possible without athletics, first in high school, then college. “My life has been greatly enriched by sports,” said Lude, in a statement that would end thick with irony. “This is putting something back. If I experienced all those things, why shouldn’t women have those same opportunities?”
On the eve of that first varsity season in 1991, there was optimism, that perhaps it wasn’t too late to become a collegiate superpower.
“I know what this program is capable of accomplishing, and that’s an NCAA championship” said Dang Pibulvech, who became the first UW varsity coach after taking tiny Colorado College to four D1 semifinals. “With the luxury of so many good players in this state, Washington will be competitive immediately. I came here to build a national power, and I believe with the kind of backing we have, this will be one of the best Division I programs anywhere.”
Ryan went even further. “I would expect [the Huskies] to make a run for the national title in their third year,” he claimed.
To date, Washington is still seeking to reach its first NCAA College Cup women’s finals.