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Fall 2001

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GOLF PROFILE: TAKING YARDAGE

by Allen Woods '80




	NERVES OF STEEL: Title IX expert Carol Bar '91G, '94G says it's all a matter of managing the stress. Photo by Thom Kendall.

IN THE SUMMER OF 1993, when she was analyzing UMass sports programs to see how they complied with federal laws prohibiting sex discrimination, Carol Barr had nerves of steel. Her study and recommendations would affect thousands of athletes and budgets in the millions, but she wasn’t nervous.

“I felt confident going into it,” she says, “and I knew as much or more about the law’s requirements as anyone on campus.”

A few years later, when pro golfer Kim Shipman hired her as a fill-in caddy during the Friendly’s Classic in Agawam and asked her to read a long, snaking putt on the 18th green in the final round, Barr was “terrified,” she says.

Later, she could look back at the severely sloped green and see a break of about four feet right to left. At the time, the best she could come up with was, “It’s got quite a big break.” (Shipman managed to two-putt anyway, and used Barr again later that year at a Boston area tournament.)

Barr’s view from “inside the ropes” of a professional tournament convinced her that golfers are distinguished by how they manage pressure. Pros and amateurs alike, she says, may “have their swings and shots down to a science . . . but when there’s pressure, it’s not as easy to execute what you want to do physically.”

Barr is no stranger to competitive pressure. She played field hockey at nationally ranked Iowa as an undergrad, and was director of national teams – including the Olympic team – for the U.S. Field Hockey Association for six years before coming to UMass in 1990. She came for graduate work in sport management and chose to stay on and teach because “I love the students and the classroom. I’m interested in athletic administration, but you don’t get the same kind of relationships you do in the classroom.”

ONE OF BARR'S AREAS OF expertise, Title IX of the Education Amendment Act of 1972, has created tension across the country by mandating that athletic programs move toward equal opportunity for men and women. In 1992-93, Barr was midway through graduate school and working in the athletic department when a Title IX complaint was filed against UMass. When she resigned that spring to finish work on her Ph.D., newly appointed athletic director Bob Marcum asked her to stay on briefly as a consultant on Title IX. She produced a review report over the summer, followed by a compliance plan that fall.

“I would say Bob and the other administrators have done a great job at trying to ease tensions surrounding Title IX here,” says Barr. “A common response among coaches of men’s teams is, ‘How are we going to be affected: Is our sport going to be dropped, are we going to lose scholarships, is our operating budget going to be cut in order to provide more to the women?’ And the message that was instantly communicated to the coaches is: ‘Your team will not be hurt.’

UMass achieved compliance, says Barr, by adding women’s sports (crew and water polo) and increasing athletic scholarships and operating budgets for women’s teams. She says funding came not from men’s sports but from the chancellor’s and president’s offices, and eventually from state funding for Title IX. (UMass’s share of those funds went to the new field sports and softball facilities.)

Barr has appeared across the country to speak on Title IX, and has seen the successes to which it’s contributed – notably the growth of women’s soccer and basketball. She notes also some unintended consequences, such as high-school male ice-hockey players staying in shape by joining formerly all-girls’ field-hockey teams. Golf as a sport builds in some equity, says Barr, with different sets of tees allowing girls and boys at small high schools to play on the same team.

She herself is an avid golfer and occasionally plays from men’s tees so she’s not excluded from the social group. But in a competitive situation, “I’ll always take my yardage,” she says with a grin.
As a competitor against brothers, uncles, and nephews in an annual family golf tournament in upstate New York, UMass’s resident Title IX expert hopes to get her name back on the Barr family tournament plaque on her mother’s kitchen wall this year.

“I’m trying to get rid of my field-hockey swing to get my handicap down,” she says. And of course she’ll have to manage the pressure.

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