Wendy Piltz and her college teammates, together led the fight for greater head protection. They had seen enough serious injuries in the women’s game, yet nothing was being done, while it was mandated for men to wear them.
When conviction, clarity and intellect come together, it can be a potent mix.
Wendy Piltz and Teachers College teammates of the 1980s could see that their position regarding wearing protective headgear was not gaining traction.
So the woman, who in the ensuing decades went on to establish a formidable reputation in the national and international field of Physical Education and Human Movement, chose a different tack.
She joined the SA Women’s Lacrosse Association board and then the national board where, as national coaching director, she created coaching programs for coaches Australia wide.
From there, she successfully applied for a grant from the Australian Sports Commission.
That grant proved to be the turning point in the almost decade-long debate over the wearing of protective head gear.
Wendy Piltz and College teammate, Jenny Williams in particular, had together led the fight for greater protection. They had seen enough incidents of serious head injuries in the women’s game, yet nothing was being done, while it was mandated for men to wear them.
That never seemed reasonable, nor did it seem fair.
The opposing viewpoint held by the game’s administrators was that the wearing of head protection would encourage a more physical game, a more aggressive game, more like the men’s game.
Furthermore, they argued that neither the helmet nor the facemask were particularly aesthetic for women.
Piltz’s research centred on those elite players who had been injured and to what extent – and examined how protective head gear could have prevented those injuries.
By the early 1990s, the rule was finally changed to give female players the option of wearing helmets and face masks, which by then had been specifically manufactured in a lightweight form.
Internationally, the rule came considerably later – in 2010.
Meanwhile, Mary Pickett, Wendy Piltz, Jenny Williams, Shirley Ploog and their teammates, many of them PE teachers, were also slowly transforming the game from a stop-start passing game into a running, free-flowing style – by drawing on similar basketball principles.
The new era used off-ball screens, helping defence, dodging, and left and right-handed passing and shooting.
Given everything, it’s reasonable to hold the view that Piltz et al caused profound changes to the women’s game that would ultimately ripple across the world and would establish an exciting pathway for the players that followed.
It must also be noted that Piltz was a key player in the SA team’s dominance of the national titles from 1985 to 1995 (an unprecedented 11 consecutive national titles) and was a member of the outstanding gold-medal-winning 1986 World Cup team.
She was a thinker of the game, a catalyst for change for the better, an administrator, and an enormous advocate for the game.
