JOHNSTOWN — Four decades have passed, but Mag Strittmatter probably never will forget the day all the girls at Cambria Heights High School assembled in the auditorium for an important announcement.

Cambria Heights was forming a girls’ basketball team.

Sure, the team was organized in rapid fashion so that the Patton school – like so many other high schools and universities throughout the country – would be in compliance with Title IX.

That didn’t matter to Strittmatter, who had spent countless hours playing basketball against her brothers John and Bob in the family’s barn near Patton.

“I thought it was amazing that I’d get to play basketball in high school. To get to go to college and play was incredible,” said Strittmatter, who eventually took her basketball skills to Penn State University, where she was among the first group of women to receive athletic scholarships. In one interview, former Nittany Lions women’s coach Pat Meiser said Strittmatter was the first women’s basketball player under scholarship at Penn State.

“Our family was not one of much means,” she said. “To have the opportunity to go and play in college and earn an athletic scholarship was an incredible opportunity for me and a great blessing for our family. There was not an additional expense for me to have that college opportunity. It was Chapter No. 1 and Chapter No. 2 of the dream.

“I learned how to be competitive. I learned how to play the game and how to be a part of the team.”

Strittmatter, 55, is executive director at The Action Center, an organization that assists disadvantaged and low-income people in Denver.

Much of her life’s journey might be traced to that day in the Cambria Heights auditorium. Strittmatter graduated from Heights in 1974 after a standout basketball career. She made the most of her scholarship to Penn State, leading the Nittany Lions in rebounding all four years, and her career average of 10.3 rebounds a game still is the best in Penn State history.

“When you look back and think about what opportunities were like for young girls, what was available in the mid- to late-1960s when I was a kid, even if you knew you could play a sport, the opportunities to participate were nonexistent,” Strittmatter said.

“My brother John, in the late 1960s, was playing junior high basketball at Cambria Heights. We lived on the family farm. The boys thought it would be great to put a court on the second floor of the barn to practice and play. They tolerated me coming out to practice and play. I always played against the guys. When their friends came over it was a great chance to learn how to play.”

John Strittmatter eventually coached boys’ basketball at Cambria Heights and Bishop Carroll. Brother Bob was a longtime assistant at Windber Area High School and was part of the 1987 boys’ team that finished as state runner-up. He also served as the Windber girls’ coach later in his career.

Their sister was a quick learner – and a competitor.

Talk of forming a Lady Highlanders basketball team began during her freshman year, even before Title IX officially was passed into law on June 23, 1972.

“When 1971 rolled around, in the spring, all the girls were called together in the auditorium,” Strittmatter said.

“We were told that we could be a part of the first girls’ basketball team at Cambria Heights. I felt like I had hit the lottery.

“It was like a dream come true.”

The girls’ uniforms actually were gym uniforms with numbers tied around the players’ waists. The game wasn’t as fast or polished as today. That didn’t diminish the impact being a part of a team had on Strittmatter.

“It was amazing,” said Strittmatter, who averaged 27 points a game during her three seasons with Heights.

After her high school graduation, she briefly worked at a sewing factory in Altoona with hopes of saving enough money to attend Penn State’s Altoona branch campus.

Her plans changed when Meiser, the new Penn State women’s basketball coach, invited Strittmatter to a tryout.

“I gave the first women’s basketball scholarship at Penn State to a potato farmer’s daughter, Margaret Strittmatter of (Patton), Pennsylvania,” Meiser, now the director of athletics at the University of Hartford, said during an interview for an American East Conference series on Title IX trailblazers that is on YouTube.

Strittmatter’s Penn State career coincided with the development of the Nittany Lions’ women’s program.

“It really was in its infancy. A portion of the drum roll of compliance was beating very loudly as far as colleges were concerned around Title IX,” Strittmatter said. “Penn State hired a basketball coach in the spring of 1974 (Meiser). She was charged with making what was the equivalent of a club team into a college team. She had to build a program. It took a few years to get off the ground.”

Strittmatter didn’t take long to establish her game. She led Penn State with 18.3 points and 15.3 rebounds a game as a freshman in 1974-75. Her 260 rebounds in 1977-78 set a single-season record in Happy Valley.

“I did lead the team in scoring and rebounding my freshman season. But as more players came in following me, Coach Meiser was able to recruit other role players,” Strittmatter said. “We were able to have a really balanced attack. I was able to find my calling, which was rebounding.

“I never played on a losing team. That’s one of those things I’m grateful for.”

Strittmatter will join another distinguished team on July 14 when she is inducted into the Cambria County Sports Hall of Fame.

“It really is humbling because it’s nice to know that what you’ve done years ago is remembered,” Strittmatter said. 

“I’m grateful for the fact that it is the 40th anniversary of Title IX.

“Title IX changed my life in a way I never could have imagined,” she added. “It gave me an opportunity to find out who I am as a person, to push myself, to challenge myself. In those days female athletes were not considered on the same level as male athletes. You had to work really hard. You had to study. You had to work on the sport that was your job. It taught me a lot about responsibility. It helped me grow up.”