It was a time when athletic scholarships were nonexistent for female athletes, and women basketball players had to buy their own shoes.

A time when coaches drove the team to games, and the players didn't compete in a Big Ten schedule.

"Back in the '70s, the differences between the men's and women's programs were so obvious," said Kathy DeBoer, who played from 1976 to 1978.

The disparities became more glaring on road games.

DeBoer rode with her teammates in a station wagon to Pennsylvania, almost 11 hours away, knowing that the men's team traveled by bus or airplane.

On overnight trips, four women would share a hotel room, some using cots, while the men's team slept two to a room.

It seemed little had changed in the six years since Title IX passed in 1972 — which outlawed gender discrimination at federally funded institutions.

"Things just remained the way they were," said Karen Langeland, who coached the team at the time.

So the women's basketball team countered back, filing a class-action lawsuit against MSU in December 1978 for gender discrimination under the 14th Amendment.

Out of the lawsuit would come equal treatment for traveling, lodging and food for all women athletes, not just basketball players.

"It was the beginning of college athletics the way it was today," said Carol Hutchins, an MSU women's basketball player from 1976 to 1979.

A time for change

Road games were by no means extravagant. Sometimes, the women's field hockey team would crash on the floor in sleeping bags if a teammate knew someone in the area in order to cut hotel expenses.

Sally Belloli remembers her teammates cramming into cars and splitting gas money.

Back then, the team usually split the costs out of their own pockets. Most of the women brought their own field hockey sticks and also paid for their own uniforms.

"We made do with what we had," said Belloli, who played from 1965 to 1967. Belloli now is the assistant director of MSU's IM Sports and Recreation Services.

"To us, that was the way it was," she added. "Even when we saw men get more than us, it didn't really occur to us that we should be asking for a lot more."

The reason why was simple.

"We played because we loved the game," said Joey Spano, an MSU women's basketball player from 1970 to 1974. "We were happy to compete. I don't think we were rebels back then, thinking we'd like to be on equal footing. It was just a different era."

But as the women's movement of the 1970s took off, that mind-set faded.

"Society started changing, and the culture and everything — athletics was just part of that," Langeland said. "People were starting to pay attention."

In 1972, Title IX passed, but it went seemingly unnoticed at MSU, said Langeland, whose coach's salary started at $6,000 a year. Adjusted for inflation, that amount would be slightly more than $21,700 today.

In contrast, current MSU women's basketball head coach Joanne P. McCallie earned a base salary of $225,000 as of July 1, 2005.

Funding still was lopsided for the men's and women's basketball teams. In 1977, the men's team's budget was almost nine times bigger than the women's.

Four years after Title IX passed, one full-ride scholarship for the women's basketball team existed, compared to 12-15 scholarships for the men's team, Langeland said.

It was a frustration that slowly brewed on the women's team, who had expected equal treatment to quickly happen after Title IX passed.

The team decided to take action without help from their coach.

"We really didn't want to jeopardize her — she didn't think of it, she didn't start it. It was a bunch of rowdy students that started it," DeBoer said. "We were feminists. We were very interested and engaged in women's rights."

After voicing their concerns to the MSU Board of Trustees and the athletics director, the team waited for change.

When none came, the team prepared to go to court, filing the class action lawsuit in December 1978.

Within weeks, a court injunction ordered the university to make equal accommodations for the men's and women's teams in lodging, food and transportation.

By 1979 — the year that Earvin "Magic" Johnson led the men's team to the national title — the women's team received the same treatment as its male counterpart on the road.

A world away

Gordon Bowdell was friends with MSU athletes — the men's track stars, the men's soccer players and his football teammates.

The former MSU football player, who befriended the athletes in the dorms, followed his friends' teams. But looking back on his college career from 1966 to 1970, Bowdell can't recall any significant moments in women's sports.

Back then, he said, the emphasis on women's sports just didn't exist.

"I just can't remember anything. I would have been paying attention," Bowdell said. "That tells you it was awfully low-key at the time."

After the class-action lawsuit, the momentum continued in 1980 as women became eligible to earn varsity letters for the first time.

Two years later, the women's teams joined the Big Ten Conference, a move that made it easier for fans and the media to follow their schedules, said Langeland, who retired from coaching in 2000 and now is MSU's associate athletics director.

"All of a sudden, we started playing a Big Ten schedule like the men had been playing," she said. "Now, they understood if we lost to Purdue or beat Michigan."

"Today's athletes here at Michigan State don't realize what this group of women did for them," she added. "They have no idea. They think it's always been this way."

Almost 40 years later, Bowdell calls his father from his Florida home to ask how the MSU women's basketball team is faring in the NCAA Tournament.

Breslin Center — where MSU basketball player Katrina Grantham competed during the first two rounds of the tournament — is a far cry from IM Sports-Circle, where the team used to play in front of a crowd of fewer than 50 people.

Unlike DeBoer, Grantham has spent her MSU basketball career equal to the men's team.

"We have the same facilities as the men, we have the same travel, same foods, same accommodations — everything," Grantham said. "I don't feel cheated at all."

Also, unlike the female athletes of the past, women vie for more athletic scholarships. This year, 202 out of a total 433 athletic scholarships went to women, according to MSU Sports Information.

Nicole Bush, a long-distance runner for the women's track team, earned a full-ride track scholarship — something that would have been almost unimaginable 30 years ago, DeBoer said.

For Bush, a Grand Rapids native, college at MSU wouldn't have been a reality without it.

"It would have been really hard for me to go to school," she said. "I probably would have went to a community college."