Foot planted squarely in mouth. That was me, chatting with “coaching legend” Maggie Quita-Mulkins, who guided La Jolla High girls tennis to 22 Western League titles and 17 CIF championships from 1974 until her retirement 38 years later in 2012.
Momentarily forgetting the reality of pre-Title IX before 1972, which we had been talking about, I asked Quita-Mulkins, “So, what sports did you play in high school?”
“We didn’t have any sports,” replied Quita-Mulkins calmly. In fact, the reality of post-Title IX implementation has brought growth and development in girls’ and women’s sports in high school and college, but it isn’t perfect.
The La Jolla grad, Class of 1968, didn’t sugarcoat it: “I think it’s still a struggle.” She didn’t go on to enumerate the reasons, which include lack of coach recognition and support, funding issues, boys’ practices, and games being scheduled on better fields and courts at more convenient times, and public perception of women’s sports as “inferior” or “less than.”
But Quita-Mulkins didn’t skip a beat because of my momentary lapse. On the occasion of her alma mater’s 100th birthday celebration with Homecoming 2022, a parade at halftime of La Jolla’s football game on Sept. 30 against San Diego High (the only older high school in City Schools), and an alumni celebration at Coggan Pool, La Jolla’s jewel of a swimming facility, she proved to be her usual self-effacing person, not calling attention to her considerable contributions to the Vikings’ success in sports, STEM, theater, and many other fields.
She repeatedly invoked the names of her long-time colleagues on the LJHS staff in the 1960s-’70s-’80s especially: Gene Edwards (1958-1990), Dick Huddleston, and Dave Ponsford (football); Vicki and Rick Eveleth, volleyball and basketball coaches, respectively, grand marshals for the Vikings’ Homecoming Procession with their son Ty Eveleth; Bob Allen, baseball; and more.
In Quita-Mulkins’ time as a student at La Jolla High, and later as a coach, it was a different era. “We had to kneel on a chair” to have their skirt length checked. Girls, and guys, could not wear shorts to school except on special dress-up days. In coaching, “(Almost) all the coaches were (on-campus) teachers, so you got to know the kids really well and you could track them,” Quita-Mulkins says. “They would go to the coaches” in case of needs.
Meanwhile, in Homecoming festivities, the Vikings’ football team (1-0 in the Eastern League, 4-3 overall) dominated SDHS 36-16 in a successful defense of “their house,” which is now populated with a new locker room, training, and coaches’ facilities, along Edwards Field that didn’t exist 20 years ago. On a campus tour Saturday, alumnus Kevin Hall discussed the “academic emphasis” that continues LJHS’s scholastic excellence and the expansion of the campus footprint over the years to 14 acres. Eleven students in the first yearbook became the present 1,300 students in an ever-diversifying student body.
