Former women’s AD helped women’s athletics gain prominence
Story by David Snow | Photos from University Archives & University Relations
When Bettye Giles arrived on the campus of the University of Tennessee-Martin Branch in 1952 as an instructor in physical education, there were no varsity sports for women. If the female students were interested in playing a sport, there was nothing for them outside of intramural sports.
However, the idea to provide equal opportunities – combined with her own experiences in physical education and athletic competition – led her to begin women’s athletics at what is now the University of Tennessee at Martin and leave her own mark on history.
While growing up on her family’s farm in Oak Grove, Kentucky, she and a few of her girlfriends would play football with the boys in a nearby field.
After her family moved to nearby Clarksville when she was in grade school, she played on the intramural basketball, tennis and volleyball teams at school, as there were no girls’ varsity teams available.
While studying for her bachelor’s degree in physical education and English, a double-major, at Austin Peay State College (now Austin Peay State University), Giles found that there were no women’s varsity sports for her to take part in and was again relegated to taking part in intramural sports.
Up to that point, having no women’s sports in schools was just a matter of how things were, but the deeper her postsecondary education went, the more she thought about gender inequity in sports and how there could be more balance.
Upon completing her bachelor’s degree, Giles attended the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and earned her master’s degree in health and physical education in 1952.
After a brief time teaching physical education in Montgomery County, she was hired the same year she received her graduate degree as a physical education instructor at the University of Tennessee-Martin Branch.
Giles said she immediately fell in love with the Martin campus and was impressed by its intramural program, where each student was assigned to a team.
Soon after arriving on campus, Giles began a women’s tennis program that would go on to become the first women’s sport at UT Martin to gain varsity status. She coached that team for eight years.
That year, she also became the cheerleading sponsor, holding that position from 1952 to 1973. At age 95, she still stays active with that sport to this day, helping to organize its annual camps, which she created in 1975 and plays an active role in every summer since then.
Those camps have grown over the years and bring thousands of middle school and high school students to the UT Martin campus.
“Gosh, I was involved at UT Martin in just about all the sports,” she said
from her home in Nashville. “Not as a coach, but driving a group of women across the state or into other states to play.”
Still, Giles became more and more aware of the imbalance between men’s and women’s athletics not just at UT Martin but also nationwide, and she worked with others in women’s athletics statewide to effect change.
“I always felt that it was a genuine place to be for women who were interested in it,” she said. “I’ve spent most of my life being involved in athletics.”
Giles was a co-founder and the first president of the Tennessee College Women’s Sports Federation in 1969. The federation was established to promote intercollegiate competition and state championships in women’s sports. It started with 18 colleges and universities and grew to 34 collegiate institutions in 1973.
The TCWSF was dissolved as the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW)–which was founded in 1971– and was dissolved in 1983 after losing its antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA.
However, the federation and the AIAW played a great part in the development of Title IX of the Educational Amendments Act of 1972, which banned discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance on the basis of sex.
“We were sorry when (the AIAW) dissolved – very definitely,” Giles said. “The AIAW was our nest, as far as the women were concerned. We all felt like we lost a lot, but then, we realized that it’s going to be this way. I think we have done the best we can to help develop women’s athletics and become a part of (the NCAA).”
Giles was the university’s first and only director of women’s athletics from 1969 to 1994. She retired from UT Martin in 1995 after 43 years of service.
“I was very determined when I came to UT Martin to see that women’s athletics could get more dedication than they were given,” she said. “I feel like they were able to grow, and I think we did it not in a demanding type of way, but in a slow, dedicated way. We did an awful lot of background work. We were able to work with the men in athletics in a way that they felt like we were all a part of something. They were most dedicated to help us.
“James Henson was the athletics director at UT Martin when I went there, and he was such a great man. He felt that we needed to have the women involved and give them opportunities, and he did that for me at the very beginning. It almost felt like I had a new father when I went there with him as my boss. He was such a wonderful man to see how we could improve things if we all got our heads together instead of fighting each other.”
For her work in the development of women’s athletics in Tennessee, Giles can be found in at least three Halls of Fame. She was inducted into the UTM Athletics Hall of Fame in 1985, the Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame in 2020 and was a member of the inaugural class of the Weakley County Sports Hall of Fame in 2022.
Her name has become a part UT Martin athletics, as the Bettye Giles Softball Field is named in her honor, as is the Bettye Giles Female Athlete of the Year Award.
UT Martin honored its pioneering female athletics director, women’s basketball head coach and superstar player on Oct. 6, 2012, when statues of Giles, Nadine Gearin and Pat Head Summitt (‘74) were unveiled at the entrance to the university’s basketball venue, the Kathleen and Tom Elam Center.
Giles has been celebrated in other areas as well. Dr. Mary Ellen Pethel – an assistant professor of global leadership studies at Belmont University and the associate director of the Global Honors program there – wrote a book titled “Title IX, Pat Summitt and Tennessee’s Trailblazers: 50 Years, 50 Stories” that was published in 2022, the 50th anniversary of Title IX.
Along with world-renowned University of Tennessee head coach Pat Head Summitt – who played basketball at UT Martin and is the honored namesake of the basketball court there – the book features chapters of interviews with the state’s noted female athletes and pioneers, including Olympic track star Wilma Rudolph; Teresa Lawrence Phillips, who served as an athletics director and men’s and women’s basketball head coach at Tennessee State University; Ohio Valley Conference Commissioner Beth DeBauche; and University of Tennessee basketball player and former head coach Holly Warlick.
One of the chapters in the book is about Giles – it calls her “the matriarch of college women’s sports in Tennessee” – and Giles traveled statewide in 2022 at age 93 to help promote the book.
Before she began her career in collegiate physical education, Bettye Giles saw no varsity athletics opportunities for women. By the time she retired, sports opportunities abounded for women in college nationwide.
“For the most part, I’m proud of what we did,” she said, “not because we did everything right, not that we did everything we should have, but we’ve made a program out of athletics at UT Martin. I am very proud of that.”
