A Wise Woman Enlightens Geezer Jock

Alice with her gold medals at the 2024 U.S. Table Tennis National Championships in Huntsville. She adds a quick asterisk saying the best Americans were in Rome, Italy that weekend for world championships, but Tym has plenty of pickleball gold medals where the best players were on hand. She has even more gold in the way of insights into women in sports.

By Ray Glier

Alice Tym, 82, is a living monument to women in sports. So, when she mercifully and gently smothered my idea for a Geezer Jock crusade to get more women in Masters track & field, and other sports, I felt enlightened, not like I had been blindfolded, had a cigarette jammed in my mouth, and asked if I had any last words.

The answer was obvious, but most men don't grasp it.

“Ray, women are caretakers,” Alice said. “We have aging husbands and grandkids we want to be around. Younger women of Masters age have parents they want to take care of, or kids still in school.

"So, I’m sympathetic (to women who don't do Masters competition).”

A 2024 study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology concluded that only 33% of women met weekly recommendations for aerobic exercise, as opposed to 43% of men. Women's health suffers.

In 2023, when I counted the number of men and women each at the USA Track & Field Masters Outdoor Championships in Greensboro and found there were twice as many men as women competing, I thought, “Somebody has to do something about this gender gap.”

I’m down the list of somebodies. For one thing, plenty of women in USATF are actively recruiting for the sport because they understand the health benefits and sheer fun. They really don’t need me. Then Alice gave me a different perspective—the ordering of priorities—and I listened because her experience with women in sports is not a coast-to-coast awareness, it is a continent-to-continent awareness.

In 1960, as a freshman at the University of Florida from Peoria, Illinois, Tym organized the first women’s tennis team at UF. In the 60s, she played on the grass courts of Wimbledon and the dirt courts of India where the calls were not just “Out” but “look out” for cow dung on the court. Alice got the full international experience.

Sixty years ago, she could buy a round-trip airplane ticket for $1,250 and hopscotch the tournament circuit as it went from country to country. Tym also played tennis with the majestic landscape of East Africa in the background and wants to have her heart buried in Kenya.

It figures she majored in Geography at Florida.

After her playing career, Alice coached the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga women’s tennis team to three consecutive national championships while being paid $1,750. For the year.

With three kids to raise, Tym took a job as Tennis Director at Yale and guided the women’s team to Top 20 rankings.

When it came time to get back to competing, Alice did Masters Track & Field and entered the throws. She settled on Pickleball and Table Tennis and, as you might guess, won national titles and gold medals in each.

That loaded resume shut down my crusade, but Tym went further arguing that women have access and momentum and the courts of law to make a priority of whatever they want.

“Isn’t Caitlin Clark great?,” Alice said. “But she’s here only because it’s law. It really wasn't until it became law that people took notice and women played more. Title IX helped me because the woman at Yale who had the job before me sued for equal pay.”

Alice cautions that not all men wanted to keep women’s athletic opportunities limited to the back yard. Some of those athletics directors with daughters rode side-by-side with Tym and others who laid the foundation for Clark to explode on the scene.

“Team sports have changed everything for women in sports,” Alice said.

**

The money is starting to flow in women’s sports, which is too late for women in their 50s, 60s, and 70s, except for the occasional pro pickleball purse.

“It shouldn’t be about the money, it should be about personal growth for young girls and Masters,” Alice said. “You have to learn to love a sport, which can help you learn about yourself. That's one of the things that we should stress with kids.

"You learn about yourself and how far you can push yourself.”

What’s different in this day and age for young and old is that women are in control.

“But, you have to make it happen,” Tym said. “You make your own destiny, and women have to realize that nobody, no men, except men with daughters, are going to pay much attention, so they gotta grab it.

“It’s not up to men anymore. It's up to women.”

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