By Olivia Ondrik, Studio Art ’27

My name is Olivia Ondrik, and I am a second year Studio Art major here at Ohio University. I have an interest in museum studies, and am minoring in anthropology, and I decided that this University Archives internship would be a great opportunity to learn and practice a skill that is so closely related and necessary to both fields.

So far during this fall 2024 semester, I have had the privilege of processing the Kim and Catherine Brown Collection. This task at the beginning was intimidating, because it was my first time ever processing a collection. Despite this, I was very excited to get started. I was given a singular brown cardboard box that contained the entire collection. There was some original organization in the given collection, but I still had a lot of work to do to make better sense of it for future researchers. Some things were easier than others to organize, such as newspaper clippings and letters.  But there were a great deal of documents for which I had a difficult time finding the correct places. After weeks of sorting through this collection and debating and imagining in my head on how I should order the records, I was finally able to decide on a level of organization that I was happy with. From this point I ordered the collection, and I created a finding aid and description of it.

Some Historical Background:

This collection centers around the Ohio University careers of two former coaches of women’s athletics at the university: domestic partners Catherine Brown and Kim Brown. These two women played a crucial role in advocating for women’s athletics at Ohio University at a time just after the passing of Title IX legislation during an era in which more administrative attention to university compliance with the new federal law was necessary.  Both Kim and Catherine coached many different sports, but most of their time was spent coaching field hockey and lacrosse. But whatever they were coaching, the Browns had to deal with a multitude of issues relating to Title IX, especially in advocating for higher budgets for women’s athletics, better equipment, better space and better conditions to practice in. Various letters from the two coaches to upper-level administrators at Ohio University make it obvious that neither of the Browns were afraid to make their voices heard in the cause of improving the status of women’s athletics at the University.

Interesting Finds:

While looking through this collection, a researcher will find many interesting things that depict the narrative of what women’s athletics was like at Ohio University about 50 years ago. Various newspaper clippings can be found which show the climate and attitude at the university regarding women’s athletics. One such attitude is represented in a letter to the Athens Messenger titled  “OU Team Name Change Suggested,” in which the author wrote that the women’s athletic teams should be referred to as the “Bobkettes” rather than the “Bobcats” so that he could be forewarned that the stories were not going to be about men’s athletics.

Other interesting things a researcher will find in this collection are photographs of Kim and Catherine Brown, various programs from athletic events, documents from a Title IX investigation that took place at the university in 1983, and many other eye-catching materials.