Jan. 31, 2022
Decades before Congress passed the 50-year-old civil rights law known as Title IX, June Handley and Dorothy Middaugh Wallace laid the foundation for women’s athletics at Hartnell College.
Two more coaches and physical education instructors, Carolyne West-Karnofel and Helga
Buss, further shepherded the women’s program toward its current stature, highlighted
by Hartnell’s first-ever women’s state championship – won by the Panthers women’s
soccer team on Dec. 5.
Title IX, adopted in 1972, prohibited sex discrimination in any educational program that receives federal funding, but its most celebrated outcome has been equal funding and dramatically greater opportunities for women in interscholastic sports. Previously, high schools and colleges were on their own when it came to offering sports programs for girls and women, which resulted in second-class status across the board.
On Feb. 2, competitive athletics for girls and women will be celebrated as the 36th annual National Girls & Women in Sports Day. The Women’s Sports Foundation established the event to recognize the accomplishments of female athletes and honor the continued pursuit of equality for women in sports.
“We’re so proud of our outstanding women athletes,” said Dan Teresa, Hartnell’s dean of athletics. “We’re also grateful for the determination and commitment of women’s coaches and student-athletes who pursued equal opportunity in sports long before it was the law of the land.”
Women’s organized athletics was not on the horizon when Hartnell was established in 1920 as Salinas Junior College (renamed in 1948). Due to its small initial enrollment, the college did not even have its first men’s team, in basketball, until 1926.
June Handley expanded early opportunities
By all accounts, the college did not offer an after-school sports program for women until 1941. That was also the year it added the first woman to its physical education faculty, June Handley, who also was dean of women.
The Gonzales High School graduate handled the entire women’s athletic program for the next 13 years. Handley’s duties included coaching men’s golf and tennis, as well as swimming, archery, beach volleyball and, during World War II, she reportedly coached a women’s football team.
However, for the most part those sports were classified as physical education. The closest thing Hartnell had to an after-school sports “team” for women was the formation of what was considered the nation’s largest majorette program (pictured). The Hartnell corps’ size peaked in 1941 at 50, and it was featured as a national phenomenon in LIFE magazine.
Handley, meanwhile, was voted into the inaugural Hartnell Athletics Hall of Fame class in 2013. She funded a scholarship in 1977, and an endowment created upon her death in 2003 at age 86 has perpetuated the June Handley Memorial Scholarship for transferring students.
From 1941 to 1972, women’s competitive sports at two-year colleges were planned and
conducted at a “club” level through the Women’s Athletic Association, in which Hartnell
physical education instructor Helga “Buzz” Buss played an organizational role. 
Buss, who also coached fencing, archery, golf and field hockey, was at Hartnell from 1961 to 1985 and became its first full-time academics counselor for athletics. She also is remembered for helping women athletes obtain scholarships to four-year universities around the country.
Middaugh Wallace developed women’s program
After Handley had laid the foundation for Hartnell women’s athletics, it was Dorothy Middaugh Wallace who most carried the effort forward through the late 1950s and ’60s.
A 1941 graduate of Hartnell, Middaugh Wallace returned to her alma mater in 1954,
and for the next 18 years – as a mother of three – she worked relentlessly to mold
and shape the women’s athletic program. Ironically, she retired the year Title IX
became law. Middaugh Wallace remained in Salinas and died in 2019 at age 97. The Dorothy
Middaugh Wallace Memorial Scholarship was established in her honor.
Like Handley, she was the only woman in the Hartnell athletics department for much of her career. Her workload consisted of teaching and coaching field hockey, softball, basketball, tennis, archery,dance, badminton, swimming and diving. She was not compensated for such after-hours activities as participation in women’s athletics organizations or taking teams to out-of-town events.
In her 2013 Hartnell Hall of Fame induction profile, Middaugh Wallace said, “I did whatever was needed to help women athletes compete, never really thinking about doing it for money.”
West-Karnofel recalls persistent inequities
“Basically the season for each sport was quite short,” said Carolyne West-Karnofel, who coached volleyball, basketball, tennis, softball and track for 23 of her 36 years at the school, starting in 1970. “A full season per sport was typically five to six weeks starting with the first practice.”
Nonetheless, interest among women students was strong, especially among a core group who went out for multiple sports, she said.
“They were just hungry, you know, to be included – to be treated like what they were
interested in mattered,” West-Karnofel said. 
She taught PE full-time and had no paid assistant coaches to help her. The men’s teams, by contrast, had individual head coaches and paid assistants. In the late 1970s, West-Karnofel started a volleyball camp to raise money for coaching assistance and players’ meals during road trips. (Pictured: Karnofel-West accepts trophy for women's basketball team following a 1977 tournament at Ford Ord.)
“It was so difficult because there were so many more men’s coaches, and usually just one or two women’s full-time coaches,” she said. “And because we didn’t have enough qualified women to coach some women’s teams, men were assigned to ‘fill’ their load in their off-season, with little knowledge or investment in that assignment.”
Before Title IX, most women’s sports played just once a week. Not only did they play a short season, they did not even have uniforms.
“We’d slip on a bib with a number on the front and back,” West-Karnofel said. “We
used the same bib for each sport all year, and for several years.” The bibs were often
made by the players, players’ mothers or coaches.
“There were no pre- or post-season contests,” she added. “It would simply be about four weeks of going to, or hosting, one of those mini-tournaments (typically a four-game event).” Those events, known as “play dates,” typically included a post-game social between the teams to deemphasize competition. (Pictured: Women's basketball team in 1977.)
Following Title IX, women’s intercollegiate sports made the transition from “club” status to conference competition, and yet equity with men’s teams in such areas as coaching, equipment, facilities, travel and scholarships did not come easily, West-Karnofel said.
Momentum accelerated in recent decades
The Bay Area Community College Association of Women’s Athletics was established in 1974. Two years later, women’s teams at Hartnell joined what had previously been the male-only Coast Conference, the same conference it competes in today as part of the California Community College Athletic Association (CCCAA).
West-Karnofel, who retired in 2006 and was inducted into Hartnell’s Hall of Fame in 2016, takes special pride in her role coaching track and field. In 1977, she was host and director of California’s first officially sanctioned Women’s Track & Field State Championship, and in 1978 she was honored as “Track Coach of the Year” among all California Community College men’s and women’s track coaches.
2013 Hartnell Hall of Fame inductee Denise Cornell (pictured) set a state high jump
record at that championship meet and later qualified for the U.S. Olympics Trials.
She became the first Hartnell woman awarded a full-ride scholarship, attending California
State University, Northridge. 
Cornell was joined in 1979 by a second woman, volleyball standout Diane Mazzei, who received a scholarship to attend and compete for Idaho State University. She was inducted into the Hartnell Hall of Fame in 2014 for volleyball, basketball and softball.
Today Hartnell offers seven sports for women – basketball, softball, volleyball, soccer, cross country, track and field and swimming and diving. The men also compete in seven sports.
Since 1977, the college’s women’s teams have prevailed as conference champions numerous times in multiple sports. Twenty-one women athletes have been inducted into its athletics Hall of Fame, as well as two women’s teams.
In 2014-15, every Hartnell women’s sport advanced to the post-season for the first time in school history. In 2021, in addition to the women’s state soccer title, the women’s cross country team placed second at the CCCAA state championship meet on Nov. 20.