Jack Mowatt, Softball Administrator and umpire, Prince George’s County, Maryland

I was born and grew up in Washington, D.C. playing baseball with the Boys Club and on my high school team. After high school I was a catcher on a local recreation softball team. One day, a runner crashed into me and hit me so hard I wound up in the backstop. The umpire said, “What are you doing catching? You should be an umpire.” I agreed, and I started umpiring softball in 1968. I’ve held various positions in softball around the area including the assigner of the local umpires association (not a popular job) and in 1982 I was appointed the Amateur Softball Commissioner in D.C. area. I love being an umpire. I love the game and I love the kids. The kids treat me great on the field. I never had any problem. Sometimes when I look at them, I say to myself, ‘Where would they be if they weren’t here playing ball?’ Doing this gives me an opportunity to give something back to the kids.

Over the years I’ve seen a lot of softball fields. The safety conditions of the school softball fields in Prince George’s County, Maryland worried me more and more. One day in 2002 during a high school game, I decided to do something about it. Along with a friend and fellow umpire, we took pictures of the fields, especially where we thought there were safety issues, like backstops with bolts sticking through them, fields with pipes and tree stumps sticking out of the ground, no fences protecting girls in warm-up areas, and no benches. By the time we finished, we had taken pictures of all the schools in the County; twenty-one in all. The girls’ fields were a mess. The boys’ fields were in much better shape, but they needed work, too. I made a book from the pictures and brought it to the people who were in charge of the school programs and explained the situation about the fields. They said they would look into it but never got back to me and they didn’t fix any of the conditions. A few of us umpires said we wouldn’t go back on the fields unless they were fixed.

Months went by and then one day a former coach Gene Robertson and I called the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC). It seems that some community advocates had seen the book, heard our complaints and asked the NWLC for help. Working with these ladies at the NWLC was great. The NWLC conducted a comprehensive investigation of the treatment of female athletes as compared to male athletes in the county’s public schools, and they found significant inequities in the ways girls’ teams were treated. The NWLC then sent a letter to the school board outlining the ways in which it was violating Title IX, the federal law that requires schools to treat male and female students equally. Over the next year and a half, the NWLC successfully negotiated an agreement with the county Board of Education to not only fix the safety problems on the softball fields, but also bring the school system’s athletics program into full compliance with Title IX.

We weren’t thinking about Title IX when we took our stand, we just wanted to get the fields safe. We knew we would make a lot of people angry when we complained, but don’t think anything special was done. I just got tired of seeing the girls being treated like second- and third-class citizens. In addition to the unsafe fields, boys had equipment and uniforms but the girls were lucky to even get a shirt. The law is great. Without it, I don’t think we could have gotten this agreement. When I was in high school, I don’t recall girls playing softball. They played basketball, were cheerleaders and pom-pom girls. Title IX has made things a lot better for them. I think the girls are equal and should be treated the same as the boys. When you get safe fields and other places for these kids to play, you’ll see some changes in their behavior in and out of school.

It took two years to finally get this agreement, but all the time spent was worth it. I haven’t umpired a high school game since 2002 and I can’t wait to get back to the fields and do my job again this spring.