Judy Sweet is far too modest to call it her wall of fame, but anybody else would.
In the hallway of her spacious Clairemont home, with its gorgeous views of Mission Bay, are the mementos from a career spent as a top-level in college athletes.
In one photo, Sweet poses with then-President Ronald Reagan. In another, she is flanked by Merlin Olsen and Jack Kemp. In a third, she’s in a group with television newsman Harry Reasoner.
The photos say something about the stature Sweet earned. They say another thing, too: She is a modern sports pioneer.
In all of the pictures, Sweet is the only woman.
She didn’t choose to make it that way. It was her reality.
Sweet was the only girl playing pick-up sports with her boy cousins in her native Milwaukee.
She was the first female physical education teacher — amid a dozen men — at UC San Diego in the early 1970s.
In 1975, Sweet was named UCSD’s athletic director, and in 1991 she became the first female president of the NCAA.
“When I became an athletic director, when I became the NCAA president, people would say, ‘Was this a lifelong dream?’ “ Sweet said in her home last week. “And the answer is no way in my wildest dreams could I have anticipated that career path.
“Being the first is about timing. The important thing for me was to not be the last.”
On Wednesday at the 74th Salute to Champions dinner, Sweet will be honored with the San Diego Sports Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Eight others have been previously honored, and Sweet is the third woman, after tennis great Dorothy “Dodo” Cheney and Carolyn Greer, who served as the University of San Diego’s head athletic trainer for 40 years.
“I’m truly honored and humbled to be recognized in the city that I love,” Sweet said. “It makes it extra special.”
For nearly five decades, Sweet has been a leader in advocating for women’s rights on and off the courts and fields in college athletics.
“Equal rights in sports was a big hill to climb when Title IX came in, and (Sweet) is one of the people who has spent her career making sure that hill got climbed,” Wally Renfro, former NCAA vice president and chief policy officer, told the Sports Business Journal in 2012.
At UCSD, Sweet was among the first athletic s in the country to put into practice what was laid out in the Title IX civil rights law of 1972. Title IX further strengthened the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by prohibiting sex discrimination in employing people at educational institutions. Providing gender equity in athletics was part of the mandate.
In the years since, Sweet has served to ensure that universities recognized their duty in the law, and when they didn’t, she worked with others to push for greater adherence. Even today, two years shy of the 50th anniversary of Title IX, Sweet said there is far more work to be accomplished.
“We’re come such a long way, but we’re not done yet,” Sweet said.
“Title IX was influential in my career. Without it, I’m certain that I wouldn’t have had the opportunities I had. When you look at the great female athletes of today and the young girls participating in sports, they would never have had the opportunities. More importantly, they may not have been itted to law school, medical school or engineering programs.”
As a child of the 1950s and ‘60s, Sweet knew all too well about the acceptance, or lack thereof, for women in sports. While boys chose any sport they wanted, girls in school had occasional “play days.” Most girls who craved more than that were labeled “tomgirls.”
That didn’t stop Sweet from playing anything she could with her cousins, and she took keen interests in basketball, volleyball, softball, tennis and bton.
After college in Wisconsin and while doing graduate teaching at the University of Arizona, Sweet, on the recommendations of a student, packed up her belongings in her Oldsmobile Cutlass and moved to San Diego without a job in 1972.
She quickly got a long-term sub teaching position at Kearny High School, though it came as a shock when the principal informed her that she’d be teaching modern dance.
“That was the furthest thing from my level of expertise or my interest,” Sweet said. “But what I learned from that is that you can do anything if you have to.”
By the beginning of the next school year, UCSD — a fledgling university of fewer than 10,000 students — had an opening in the PE department, and Sweet was hired as the only woman, coaching men’s and women’s bton, among her other duties.
In her second year, Sweet was promoted to assistant athletic director, and then in 1975, with the rise of Howard Hunt to chair of the physical education department, Sweet was tabbed as the athletic director. She was 27 years old.
“I give a lot of credit to UCSD to be willing to do something that had never been done before,” Sweet said.
The appointment was not met with open arms by some.
“I’m grateful there was no internet, email or Twitter back then,” Sweet said. “I was stunned by the number of people who took the time to hand-write letters. Some of them were congratulatory, but a lot of them were critical that I had taken away a job that should have gone to a man. Comments like, ‘Go back to the kitchen.’
“Little did they realize that the negativity fueled me. People were saying she’ll never make it. I was in the position for 24 years. I think I proved them wrong.”
In her time as athletic director from 1975 to 2000, UCSD won 27 of its 30 national championships while playing in NCAA Division III, and Sweet began the transition when the school moved to Div. II in 2000.
When Sweet took over UCSD’s athletic department, she said the entire budget was $90,000, including coaches’ salaries, with the highest paid among them earning about $2,000.
The inequity between men’s and women’s sports was absurdly obvious. The men’s basketball team had a $10,000 budget, was in the NAIA and traveled all around Southern California for games. The women’s budget was $1,000 and they played in a local community college league.
Against pushback by some, Sweet moved to correct those differences. Her mantra with anybody who disagreed: “Why would we treat our daughters any differently from our sons?”
Sweet eventually took that philosophy to the highest levels of the NCAA, first as the organization’s secretary-treasurer, and then as its first female president in 1991.
Once again, she was met with derogatory commentary, including the memorable tantrum in print by Atlanta Journal columnist Furman Bisher, who called Sweet’s ascension “pure tokenism” and likened it to “having a debutante as head of the National Mule Skinners Assn.”
As a credit to her aplomb, Sweet always seemed to keep her rhetoric down and her head up.
“My style is trying to build consensus without ranting and raving,” Sweet said. “I don’t usually raise my voice, and I think that helps in of having calmness in the room.
“Learning to disagree without being disagreeable has been a strength of mine. I’ve been a good listener and tried to present logical reasons for the causes I’m advancing.”
Sometimes, the rewards come in the smallest of moments.
At a convention, Sweet congratulated Greg Sankey on becoming the new commissioner of the Southeastern Conference.
Now one of the most powerful people in college sports, Sankey said he needed to show her something. He pulled from his wallet a piece of paper on which he’d written down what he’d heard Sweet encourage others to do: “Watch, listen and learn.”
Sweet was touched.
“That was pretty special to me,” she said.
Sankey had listened to — and heard — the only woman in the room.
