Helen Connelly - Legacy 2002

In 1969, Helen Connolly was hired at Pioneer High School to start the women's athletic program and teach physical education.  Over the next 35 years, Helen coached seven different women's sports, she led the crusade on equal rights for women's athletics.  She became the women's athletic director in the mid-seventies, recruiting some of the best men's and women's coaches in the state.

Helen was raised in Grosse Pointe Farm

s where she attended the Academy of Sacred Heart and play sports.  Helen did not know that girls were not supposed to participate.  She attended college at the University of Miami in Florida where she played tennis.  She taught high school for several years in Florida and returned to Michigan to attend graduate school at U of M and EMU.  While in graduate school, Helen was a substitute teacher in Ann Arbor, and was recruited to work in the physical education department at Pioneer High School.

 

Helen fought tirelessly for Title IX.  She educated other coaches around the state and in Washington.  She filed grievances against Ann Arbor Public Schools to get equal facilities for girls.  She filed a lawsuit against the Michigan High School Athletic Association on behalf of women's participation in high school sports.

 

One of Helen's greatest gifts was to network and recruit good coaches for the Pioneer program.  Helen believes it was her job to make the coaches job easy allowing them to spend as much time with the student athletes as possible.  Helen spends her winter months in Florida, and summers golfing in Michigan.