The sun is out, reflecting off the water on the Derby side of the Housatonic, but there's too much chop for a decent practice before the upcoming Ivy League championships. So the members of the Yale women's crew prepare two of their sleek Vespoli eights, one of which reads "1979 national champions." In the meantime, several male rowers work to retrieve a football from the river before it plunges over the dam a few hundred meters downstream.

It's just a nice May afternoon at Gilder Boathouse, the striking cedar edifice built in 2000 and designed to resemble a boat. Looking like interlopers, two ordinary yellow school buses wait outside along Route 34 to take the rowers on the 30-minute ride back to New Haven.

If you were to think of Title IX as a river, with a source, tributaries and a mouth, this is the point where the rapids began. "These women are bearing the fruits of what the 1976 crew stood for," said Will Porter, the women's crew coach. "You can be sure that before their four years are up, they will hear the story."

Ah, the story. As with many legends, the facts of March 3, 1976 have gotten muddled over the years. Did it happen in late morning or early afternoon? Was Mrs. Barnett's office on the first floor, or the fifth? Did the women use lipstick or magic marker to write the words on their bodies? Time and age have played tricks on their memories. But this much everybody agrees on: It began on the school bus.

Back in 1976, women were still new to Yale, which went co-ed in 1969, and women's athletics were a curiosity often treated with disdain. Nat Case, a former Yale rower, had taken the job as the women's crew coach for all of $500 a year -- a stipend he supplemented by working at a foam rubber factory. "One basic problem," recalled Nat, "was that while Princeton and Harvard had fully funded women's varsity teams, Yale tended to treat women's sports like intramural programs."

Nat Case, a former Yale rower, took the job as the women's crew coach for all of $500 a year. Yale University

As for the rowing program, two Yale women, senior Christine Ernst from Illinois and junior Anne Warner from Massachusetts, had already made a name for themselves as members of the "Red Rose Crew," the surprising silver-medal eight from the 1975 World Championships. But at Yale, the men took precedence. In the normal hierarchy of rowing, the heavyweights picked on the lightweights, and now both groups of male rowers looked down upon the women -- quite literally.

"Chris and I would be lifting in the weight room," said Warner, "while the men stood over us, hooting and calling us names. It was horrible."

The men had state-of-the-art boats, but were mired in the program's worst rut (no Olympians since the 1964 Games). The women, who were far more successful, made do with antiquated, shoddy wooden shells. But the harshest indignity was the wait. After every practice at what was then the Bob Cooke Boathouse -- a Spanish-style building that was the footprint for the Gilder Boathouse -- the men would go into the showers, while the women got on the bus and waited for them. There was a small trailer with four showerheads for the women, but because Yale and the municipality of Derby were at odds over the boathouse sewer line, the facility didn't have the variance needed to get hot water.

So the women sat on the bus, cold, wet, tired, and steaming that they had to wait to get back to Yale to shower. They had made countless entreaties to the athletic department and Joni Barnett, the director of women's athletics and physical education, but still, no showers. "I would sometimes work out in the morning, when nobody was there," said Warner. "But I still couldn't use the showers." In February of that Olympic year, Warner came down with pneumonia.

Trapped on the bus, waiting for the men and for answers, the women talked among themselves about what to do. As Ernst now says, "Never leave the prisoners alone." Keep in mind these "prisoners" had been admitted to one of the most prestigious universities in the world because of their intelligence, talents and strength of character. Now imagine that these bus passengers included not only future Olympians, but also women who would become doctors, attorneys, professors, the owner of a WNBA team, a taekwondo world champion, the head of an all-female plumbing company ... no one at Yale knew with whom they were dealing. "We didn't know who we were at the time, either," said Mia Brandt, a junior then and now the director of communications for UNICEF.

The athletic department also picked the wrong sport to ignore. As Elaine Mathies, a freshman then who would become a national team rower (and a systems analyst and Scandinavian folk dancer) said, "One of the greatest thrills of rowing occurs when the entire boat moves together, and you feel like you have the power of the boat at the end of your oar. That's what we call 'swing.'"

March 3, 1976: Joni Barnett, Yale's Director of Physical Education, listens as Chris Ernst reads the team's grievance. Nina Haight/Yale Daily News

'We're human and being treated as less than such'

Despite their differences in size, age, ability, sexual orientation and background, the crew was literally in harmony with another. "We did a lot of singing on that bus," said Elizabeth de Bethune, now an artist and teacher, but then a freshman. "Anne, as head of the Slavic Chorus, would lead us."

As the winter of '76 played itself out, someone on the bus jokingly suggested throwing Mrs. Barnett in the river to show her what it felt like. That idea was trumped by another: Let's stage a demonstration in her office where we show her the bodies Yale doesn't seem to care about. "I dare you," Anne said to Chris. "No, I dare you," Chris said to Anne.

The women, many of them freshmen who would become the core of Yale's 1979 championship eight, usually took their lead from Anne and Chris. "I was the stroke," said Warner, "and Chris was the captain, the best captain you could ask for." Susan Vernon, a sophomore then and a future sword champion in tae kwon do, said, "We would have followed Chris anywhere."