West Chester Gymnasts Lauded After Court Battle 
WCU Duo's Fight Honored Following Successful Title IX Lawsuit

ETHAN B. SZATMARY
Denton Record-Chronicle (TX)
April 9, 2004

WCU gymnasts Stephanie Herrmann and Ashley Gillman won an award at the USAG nationals after TLPJ won reinstatement of their team.

West Chester gymnasts Stephanie Herrmann and Ashley Gillman have not worked any harder than the other competitors at the 2004 USA Gymnastics Collegiate National Championships, but they definitely fought harder to get there. 

After West Chester decided to eliminate its women’s gymnastics team in spring 2003, the Golden Ram gymnasts, including Herrmann, Gillman, Elizabeth Barrett, Jessica Deutsch, Melanie Heckert, Caroline Krystopolski, Carmen Mills, Kyla-Dawn Lenti and Cecile Allen, hired lawyers and sued the school for violation of Title IX. The gymnasts won, forcing the reinstatement of the team. 

While the Golden Rams were locked out of their gym all fall and did not qualify for the USAG national championship as a team, senior Herrmann and junior Gillman grabbed spots as individuals. 

“After all we’ve been through, it’s just exciting to be here,” said Gillman. 

The ordeal for the West Chester gymnastics team began on the week before finals last spring, April 28, 2003 specifically – a date that Herrmann fires from her lips the moment she is questioned. 

Out of the blue, West Chester athletic director Dr. Edward Metejkovic informed the team that it, along with the men’s lacrosse team, was being eliminated due to budgetary constraints, and team coach Heather Straccia was immediately let go.

Metejkovic had his reasons. The cost of gymnastics team is $30,000 annually, and the lacrosse team had a budget of $70,000. 

“We had our third year of budget restrictions, and we needed to cut $100,000,” said Metejkovic. “There were two programs that nobody else in our conference sponsored, and we didn’t want to have to eliminate classes or fire professors.” 

The ladies on the West Chester gymnastics team saw the situation differently. 

“It was just a shock. It hurt because we really liked West Chester and had been working hard for a long time. We had shown a lot of school spirit,” said Herrmann, the Golden Rams’ captain. 

“The whole team was devastated,” added Gillman. Your whole life you do something, and then you get no heads up at all. That’s it. You’re done. You’re finished. It felt like we weren’t important enough for them to keep us.” 

But the Golden Rams weren’t finished, as the school would soon find out.
Spurred on by their parents, the women hired lawyers, [lead counsel] Sharon McKee and William Hangley of Hangley, Aronchick, Segal & Pudlin [in Philadelphia] and Leslie Brueckner, [Rebecca Epstein, and Adele Kimmel] of Trial Lawyers for Public Justice. 

The lawyers then filed suit in the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, citing violation of Title IX – a 1972 law that mandates gender equity in funding for any educational program that receives federal financial assistance. 

According to Brueckner, who already had Title IX wins under her belt against Brown University, Temple University, and Indiana University of Pennsylvania, the case was just waiting to be opened and then shut. 

“I was quoted in the Philadelphia Inquirer saying that this case is a no-brainer, and it was,” said Brueckner. “West Chester was already way out of compliance. Dramatically out of compliance. The school’s own gender equity committee was telling them they were out of compliance. Not only were they out of compliance, but they knew it.” 

Metejkovic denied any knowledge of such a study. 

In order to save the gymnasts missed practice time and court costs, Brueckner, whose firm is a public trust, wrote a letter to the school, telling it the gymnasts planned to sue. Moreover, if they did sue, they would win. All the school had to do was reinstate the team. 

Being a state school, West Chester was backed by the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office and did not back down from the threatened suit. 

“Obviously, we did not think we were out of compliance with Title IX, or we would have settled,” said Metejkovic. “We thought we had a good case.” 

Metejkovic was wrong. 

The trial began in September of 2003 and lasted until Nov. 12 when Judge R. Barclay Surrick ruled in favor of the gymnasts and ordered an injunction to immediately reinstate the team, hire a coach and give the team equal or greater funding than it had received in 2003. Surrick cited the fact that West Chester’s student body is 61 percent female, but only 45 percent of the school’s athletic slots are slated for women. 

West Chester is currently negotiating a permanent settlement with the gymnasts’ lawyers that will guarantee the continuation of the team. 

For Herrmann, Gillman and the rest of the Golden Ram gymnasts, the ruling was a moment of elation. 

“It was like ‘wow,’ it was such an amazing feeling,” said Gillman. 

The West Chester ladies still needed to undo the damage done by a semester of lost work. 

Instead of working out 20 hours a week as they were accustomed, the Golden Rams were limited to two-hour sessions without a coach, twice a week at the Spirit Gym – 45 minutes away from West Chester in North Wales, Pennsylvania. 

In order to attend the hearings, many of the women missed class, so the negative effect of the layoff wasn’t limited to the gym. 

“A couple of the girls said to me that when this all happened, they had a lot of extra time on their hands, but they were so upset about the whole thing that they didn’t even want to do their school work,” said current West Chester coach Jennifer Teneza. “That semester was the worst academically for several of them.” 

The gymnasts didn’t waste time crying about it, however. 

“Immediately, we thought, ‘Where do we go from here,’ said Herrmann. “We’d better find a coach.” 

Enter Teneza. She had been the Golden Rams coach from 2000-02, but had stepped down to have a baby. She was already looking for a part time job, and she had the experience. The shoe fit, and Teneza joined the team in mid-December. After Christmas break and the cancellation of the first meet of the year due to time constraints, the Golden Rams started working in the gym.

Nobody is going to confuse the West Chester gymnastics team with the seven-time USAG champion TWU Pioneers, whose coach Frank Kudlac is an alumnus of West Chester’s now defunct men’s gymnastics team. West Chester has never been a threat in the USAG women’s team competition. But the West Chester gymnasts still worked hard. 

Despite limited practice time and the stress of the trial, they still managed to match the team record of 186.775 not once, but twice this season. According to Teneza, this is not a team that can be measured in wins and losses. 

“I tell people all of the time, this is the best team I have ever coached in my entire life,” said Teneza. “Not because they’re the best gymnasts, but it’s their attitudes and their drive. They’re just happy to be in the gym.” 

Ironically, the elimination of the team and subsequent trial actually helped Herrmann and Gillman make it to this year’s USAG national championship. In 2002 and 2003, the gymnasts who qualified for nationals were told that the school didn’t have the funds to send them. This year, money was no longer an issue. 

Neither Gillman nor Herrmann advanced to Saturday’s individual finals. But they were both winners before they even showed up in Denton. 

“I wanted to do the best I can, but I wasn’t looking to come out on top or anything,” said Herrmann whose career ended at the USAG. “I just wanted to finish with a smile on my face.” 

Both Herrmann and Gillman can go back to Pennsylvania beaming. 

ETHAN B. SZATMARY can be reached at 940-566-6869.