MADERA - The first thing that comes to mind when walking through the one-year-old boy's baseball stadium at Madera High School is, “Wow! What a beautiful monument to the game of high school baseball.”

From the aluminum stadium seats that wrap around the infield from dugout to dugout, the granite walls with the lists of past Championship teams, the concession stand with handicap accessible restrooms, padded backstops, multi-inning scoreboard, school name and logo cut into the batter’s box, batter’s eye screen in center field all the way up to the air-conditioned press box that sits atop of this brand new $2 million facility.

Except for one thing, you might think this was a facility in the Clovis Unified School District. That one thing is that the girl’s softball team at Madera High School, while in the Valley Championship Playoffs most every year, doesn’t have any of these amenities. But in Clovis, they didn’t forget about Gender Equity or as it is called in the courts, TITLE IX.

For each boys baseball stadium in Clovis Unified, there is an equally impressive girl’s facility for softball. Some of them even have elevators for the handicap to reach the press box to stay in compliance with the American’s with Disabilities Act, but that is a topic for another story.

In 1989, when Madera High School Varsity Softball Coach Judy Shaubach took over the reins of the softball program, the girl’s varsity softball field was at the City of Madera’s Town & Country Park at the corner of Howard Road and Schnoor Avenue, nearly two miles from the high school. They had played there and at Thomas Jefferson Junior High since the program started in 1979 with Coach Barbara Avila.

Then with the purchase of portable fences in 1990, their field was moved to the James Madison Elementary School Campus at the corner of Olive Avenue and Santa Cruz Street, across the street from the well established on-campus boy’s junior varsity baseball field. They played at the Madison Elementary campus until 2008 when they moved into their current facilities.

During all this time the boys had their varsity field at Coyote Lane and Olive Avenue and the aforementioned junior varsity field on campus. This despite the 1972 Federal law requiring gender equity in all schools that receive Federal monies since then-President Richard Nixon signed TITLE IX into law.

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.

Thirty-seven simple words put into place in 1972, though even after twenty years since they were made into law, the girls at Madera High didn’t have a softball field of their own on their own campus!

It would be nearly twenty more years until the Madera Coyote Softball Team would have a permanent home when the old agriculture farm-lab behind the Madera’s Memorial Football Stadium. When the new Madera South High School was built in 2006, the farm-lab complex would be moved to the new campus with the old Ag land being repurposed as a multi-sports complex over the next two years featuring one baseball field and three softball fields.

An old AG classroom was converted to a girl’s locker room which included a shower and restroom faculties that could only be accessed from outside the building and the softball field had no lights. Though to be honest Coach Shaubach never wanted lights on her field so her home games would be over at a reasonable time.

Once the girls got to play on their new field, that was once a peach orchard, they realized that the dirt wasn’t the cleanest on campus. Large rocks and concrete chunks were just under the surface layer and would cause injury to the high school athletes playing on the field. The girls on the team and Shaubach broke out the rakes and shovels with the school maintenance staff and removed the dangerous obstacles themselves.

Then there was the other problem with the complex. When it rained, there was no drainage and Lake Porterfield would form. The school district hired engineers for this problem and soon it was fixed but Big Valley News still has photos of an MHS janitor in his canoe floating around the lake during work hours.

We’ve asked Madera High School Varsity Softball Coach Judy Shaubach to comment on the TITLE IX disparities at her high school but she does not want to do that until she retires. She says that there are parents of current and former athletes that would be more than willing to take up that fight if anyone just asked. Big Valley News has been contacted by some of these folks in the past but like Shaubach, I wanted to wait. In my case, until my daughters were cleared from the school’s battlefield of retaliation.

So let’s look at the disparities between the boys and girls facilities. We can start with the field house behind the baseball stadium. The boys are afforded a full locker-room with restrooms, showers and a trainer’s room. The girls have an old converted classroom with one shower and two restroom stalls. If they need to see the trainer, they need to walk over to the main field house the boys use.

The boys have a state of the art stadium, press box, snack bar and fully accessible restrooms for their fans to use. The girls have a couple of portable bleachers, a table for the press to sit at behind the backstop, a converted sea-train storage container to use as a snack bar and two old restrooms behind centerfield that were built in the early seventies.

The boys have a multi-inning scoreboard, parking facility, ornamental baseballs decorating the entrance to the stadium and granite monuments to past winning teams and sponsors. The girls have a large granite “Z” at their entrance honoring former pitching coach Leon Zimmerman. Nothing to honor past championship teams (we will do that at the bottom of this story) or sponsors and a scoreboard with no spots for inning by inning scoring.

The boys play on a monument to baseball and the girls have nothing more than they have always had in the past whether they played at Town and Country Park in the ’80s or the Madison Campus in the ’90s. Oh wait,  the outfield fence is now permanent.

It’s been Forty-seven Years since TITLE IX became the law of the land. Why has this been allowed to continue for so long? How did the Madera Unified District Office not anticipate that there would be a TITLE IX complaint when they rebuilt the boy’s varsity baseball field?

The Madera High School Boy’s Junior Varsity Field is a better facility than the varsity girls have for softball at Madera High School! Why isn’t MHS Athletic Director John Fernandez standing up for his athletes and demanding this issue be resolved? Why isn’t Madera High’s first female principal, Robin Cosgrove, demanding the district fix this issue for these female athletes?

Is it going to take a lawsuit that the district cannot win to finally make some changes to girl’s sports in this town? We pay a high school football coach over $100k a year and he doesn’t even teach a class or win games? We give access to our kids at Madera Unified to a convicted felon from the Pelican Bay Prison who freely admits to stabbing a man in the face four times and pay him over $100k, more than a teacher with 25 years of experience.

Why can’t we get this one right for the sake of the female student-athletes, who in a lot of cases have a better record than the boys?

No matter what, the attorneys are coming. Like it or not, change is coming. How much is this going to cost today’s taxpayers because for 47 years a bunch of men didn’t do the right thing for all students? Please let’s not let this be Madera business as usual!

Madera High Varsity Softball Records:

League Championships:

NYL 1985, 1988, 1989
NYL Divisional Champions 1984, 1986, 1987, 1990, 1991, 1993

TRAC Championship 2008

CMAC Champions 2011, 2012

830-419 MHS Over-All Program Record

660-335 Under Head Coach Judy Shaubach

Side-by-Side Comparisons