Nance Mize

“As someone who has lived through the whole thing, my personal life and professional life have all been around diversity and equity in sport. On the one hand, I am so grateful we have Title IX, and on the other hand, we have so far to go.”

 Nance Mize is a long-time volunteer for North Carolina Senior Games and for Greenville/Pitt County Senior Games.  She is the retired Associate Vice-Chancellor for Student Life at ECU and had a nearly 50-year career in Higher Education in Campus Recreation and Wellness.

Nance has played softball for most of her life, starting when she was a child, and now playing on the Greenville-Pitt County Senior Games Ole Rascals. Growing up in Texas, her High School didn’t offer girls’ sports, they instead had a girls Recreation Association that had to meet at 6:00 am to run their activities, so as to not interfere with the boys’ sports. “You know I never really thought about it,” she says, “At the time you just say okay, and then you look back on it and think ‘how did they make us do that?’” Nance received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Texas Women’s University. When she started her first job at Pittsburg State University in 1971 as the Director of Intramurals, and she was asked to be a representative for the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, she says it was a rude awakening to the disparity between men and women’s sports.

Nance has spent years fighting for equality from whatever position she is in, both for women and people with disabilities. Nance says Title IX is a valuable tool for fighting for equality and gender equity, but she wishes it wasn’t a fight we still have to fight. “Those 37 words sound really, really good, but I don't know how we immerse that more into society, other than just to keep fighting. But it shouldn't be a fight that's the thing it should not be a fight,” she says. She regrets?? That the fight for equality often becomes an “us vs. them” fight with men’s sports, because it clouds the message of Title IX. “For people our age that have lived through the entire 50 years plus and seen the evolution of women in sport it is a historical perspective of we've come a long way from having nothing. If we can continue to turn it into a perspective of ‘it's the right thing to do’ not ‘because we have to’, that to me would be a real positive change from where we are now.”