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Perched on a hillside overlooking Alpine, the smallest state university in Texas was best-known in the years after World War II as the birthplace of collegiate rodeo. Its campus, located in one of the state’s remote corners, was home more to beat-up boots and weather-beaten cowboy hats than sneakers and volleyballs. Football was king and men’s basketball a big draw on winter nights.

Into the late 1960s, its female students were “girls,” and they were forbidden from competing in intercollegiate sports by the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The common logic: They would have been a drain on the finances for men’s sports.

But a chance meeting about 40 years ago between a teacher with a touch for the dramatic and an Olympic volleyball player looking for a job sparked a series of changes that would lead to two national championships for Sul Ross — the first ever awarded to women’s collegiate volleyball teams — as well as national publicity for the little school in the state’s largest county.

It also helped build the momentum toward what would be the seminal moment in women’s sports history in the United States, the adoption of the Education Amendments of 1972.

Title IX of that law states that “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

Interpreted and debated for more than seven years, it eventually became the basis for equality in funding and facilities in college sports throughout the country. And part of the impetus came from stubbornness, persistence and a get-it-done attitude at places such as Sul Ross in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

“It put the foot in the door to open up college athletics for women,” said Kay Whitley, who was on the first volleyball team at Sul Ross and is now the school’s athletic director. “A lot of people don’t realize it, but it was the beginning of Title IX.”

Marilyn and Mrs. Lynn

Marilyn McReavy Nolen graduated from Southwest Texas State in 1966, but she put her teaching career on hold to pursue a spot on the U.S. Olympic volleyball team. The pursuit mainly involved moving to California and training full time, and it paid off when she made the team that competed in Mexico City in 1968.

During those two years in California, she would return home to Big Lake periodically, and on one trip, she ran into a high school friend who knew Nolen was going to need a job after the Olympics.

So she introduced her to the woman who, even 40 years later, she refers to as Mrs. Lynn — Billie Lynn, head of women’s physical education at Sul Ross.

Lynn was a career P.E. teacher, and she always was looking for opportunities for her students, for sports and activities that might be beyond her knowledge, but not beyond her sights.

“She was very enthusiastic and outgoing, and she said if I would come back after the Olympics, I could be a graduate assistant in her department,” Nolen said.

“I was just so taken with her, and she did all the right recruiting things. I thought, ‘I could have an office, I could have student workers, I would be teaching, and I would get a Masters.’”

Lynn persuaded the school to hire her to teach an assortment of P.E. classes, beginning in the spring.

Mary Jo

Nolen hadn’t even begun teaching at Sul Ross when she came across a woman who had been her teammate on the gold-medal winning U.S. team at the 1967 Pan American Games.

Mary Jo Peppler was working part-time at a Catholic school in Long Beach, Calif., in the fall of 1968, and she was traveling with several of the nuns who taught at the school across the country during Christmas break.

They stopped in Alpine and visited with Nolen and Lynn, who made a pitch for Peppler to come to Sul Ross to finish her degree.

Peppler, who once wrote that she was burned out on sports after playing on the 1964 Olympic team and the ’67 Pan Am team, decided during the long drive that she would enroll at Sul Ross.

Peppler and Nolen had no intention of doing anything but going to school and working. That also was the impression given in a feature story that February in the student newspaper, the Sul Ross Skyline. The headline: “Olympic Pair Trades Volleyball For Books.”

But Lynn had other ideas.

She came up with the idea to have the duo put on volleyball exhibitions during halftime of the school’s well-attended basketball games, hitting back and forth to each other over a temporary net.

When that didn’t turn out to be very dramatic, Lynn grabbed the microphone and issued a challenge: The women would take on anyone in the crowd — and beat them.

Dozens of football players poured out of the stands, pulling off their cowboy boots but leaving on their hats, and filled the side of the net opposite Nolen and Peppler.

“They just crucified them, they crucified the boys,” Lynn said. “And after that, every basketball game, they wanted to play. Six more boys wanted to challenge them.”

The exhibitions sparked an idea — why not have a competitive team at Sul Ross? Nolen and Peppler knew dozens of young women who could play at the highest levels, and because Texas was one of the few states that had interscholastic sports for girls in the ’60s, there were recruits available on campus as well.

Whitley, who was a tennis player and had Nolen as a teacher, was among them. Nolen contacted Jerrie McGahan and Lucy Courtney, two women who were playing on top teams in Houston, and they enthusiastically agreed to come to the school.

“I knew I wanted to play at a higher level, and I knew they would,” said Courtney, who was working at the post office when she heard from Nolen. “You knew they were among the awesome ones around the country.”

Quick success

The team launched in the fall of 1969. Peppler, who was impressing everyone on campus with her vast athletic ability, immediately was the star. Nolen, just a step behind Peppler as an athlete, was the de facto coach since she was a graduate student and ineligible to play in college games.

During the 1969-70 school year, an organization called the American Association for Health, Physical Education and Recreation announced it would be holding a women’s collegiate volleyball tournament in April through its Division of Girls’ and Women’s Sports. The tournament would be open to any two- or four-year college and would be in Long Beach.

The Sul Ross volleyball team — variously nicknamed the Loboettes, Lady Lobos or Lobos — rolled over the competition.

Led by Lynn, who remodeled a barn in her backyard to house McGahan and Courtney, they scraped up travel expenses by holding garage and bake sales, babysitting and picking up soda bottles for the three-cent deposit.

Sul Ross was among the 28 teams that showed up in Long Beach in April. The Lobos were the only one that did not lose a game, much less a match, and they beat UCLA 15-9, 15-4 in the finals.

Nolen went on to win the national title in the AIAW — the organization that succeeded the DGWS in running the national tournaments — as a coach at Utah State. When she retired after 35 years, Nolen was the third-winningest coach in college volleyball history.

“We were happy (at Sul Ross) because it was a national championship, and we had bragging rights,” she said. “It didn’t bring us any funds or anything like that. But I never could have imagined how it would be now.”

Whitley, the tennis player recruited out of a P.E. class for the volleyball team, said the players didn’t think they were doing anything revolutionary by going to — and winning — those first two tournaments.

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