A great general leads with an integrity that prompts respect -- even from opponents -- and upholds personal principles, serving as a role model for those to come.

Now she moves into a five-year phased retirement at Iowa, where she will remain active as an associate professor teaching future athletics administrators. Grant also will remain a vocal advocate for women's athletics on the national scene, where for the past three decades she has become synonymous with efforts to increase sport participation opportunities for women.

At 11, she took up competitive sports, competing first in "net ball," a sport similar to six-player basketball, and then at age 12, she found field hockey.

"Field hockey became my No. 1 love," she said. "I had tremendously supportive parents, and that made a huge difference in my sports participation. From a very early age, I aspired to become a physical education teacher and coach."

Grant -- the 'Haston' and 'Barr' being family names as is the tradition in Scotland -- graduated from Dunfermline College of Physical Education, also in Scotland, in 1956. At Dunfermline, she learned to be a leader.

"It was an all-women's college," she said, "and I now realize that was very important. Women were naturally expected to take leadership roles there, unlike elsewhere in society at the time."

Grant became restless after a few years, and went to Berlin to visit her brother, who was stationed there with the Royal Scots. She considered working for the Scottish forces, but then the Berlin crisis intervened. Instead, she found an opportunity to go to Canada, where she ultimately became the coach of the Canadian National Field Hockey Team in 1963. Grant served as an international field hockey umpire, as the organizer of the first Canadian national field hockey tournament, and then as publicity chair of the Canadian Women's Field Hockey Association.

Along the way, she became active in the International Federation of Women's Hockey Associations (IFWHA), an organization run by and for women, and one that influenced her developing opinions on the philosophy of sport.

"It stressed more than anything else the development of the individual in lots of ways," she said. "It was process rather than product. It made me decide what my philosophy really ought to be."

"If a team played another team that really was weaker, they would put in their subs to try to make it more competitive," Grant said.

"But the other team automatically took one of their players off as well," Grant said.

The IFWHA's national tournament was configured so that there was no ultimate champion.

"People look strangely at me when I explain that there was no national champion, but it was the same as football in this country," she said. "We don't have a national champion and we don't think it's that strange. The idea behind it was to promote the sport itself and play at a highly competitive level, but always to try to instill an understanding of different cultures and friendship. So you would have Australia talking with South Africa, talking with England, all claiming to be the best team."

To Iowa and Title IX

In 1969, Grant moved from Toronto to Iowa City to attend the University of Iowa and do graduate work in physical education.

"Iowa had a very good reputation in Canada. Dr. Gladys Scott, who is regarded by some as the mother of biomechanics, was chair of the department, and her book, 'An Analysis of Human Motion,' was used quite widely," Grant said.

"People here were very, very good to me as a foreign student. But I had no intention of staying -- none. I had been living in Toronto and really enjoying that city as a cosmopolitan city. I was just thinking I would finish the Ph.D. and go back to Canada."

The passage of Title IX in 1972 changed Grant's plans, although she didn't know it at the time. The next year, Iowa President Sandy Boyd decided to elevate women's club sports at the school to varsity status.

"Dr. Scott asked me if I would like to apply," Grant said. "I was in the middle of a dissertation, I was broke -- as all graduate students are -- and I thought, 'Well, this is a great opportunity. I'll take this for a couple of years, finish my dissertation, and then I'll go back to Canada.' And here I am today. Who would have believed it?"

Grant was one of many women all across the country who suddenly found themselves in the middle of a "revolution" of sorts, as universities rushed to accommodate women's sports and women finally had a foot in the door to the gym.

"Title IX caused ripples across the entire country, she said. "The threat was that if you were not in compliance with Title IX, your federal funds would be blocked. Well, any university whose federal funding was eliminated would come to a complete halt, so that was a big stick and institutions moved very quickly to avoid that."

The Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) was founded in 1971, and it became the governing body for women's programs. It was a challenging time because women in sport were not yet accepted by society. (See related story below on Grant's involvement in the AIAW.)

"I knew fairly early that I was involved in a revolution, and I think that's unusual. I think sometimes things are happening so fast you don't have time to think," Grant said. "But I think some of us in the AIAW really did have a very good idea that we were living in an absolutely historical time."

When Grant became director of women's athletics at Iowa, she was a graduate student writing a dissertation, and she also was teaching physical education classes. She was the head field hockey coach and head golf coach, and she was her own typist as well, when she wasn't lining the field for field hockey games.

"There was no support system," she said. "There was me. And I have no idea how I survived that. I remember one of the first years, somebody asked me what my goal for the year was, and I said 'to survive.' And I wasn't trying to be funny. We had so many hats on. Honestly, that was the goal, to get through everything that had to be done."

In one year, Grant took 12 women's club sports and made them varsity sports. She also assisted in starting the national, regional and state AIAWs.

"We had 10 balls in the air simultaneously, but it was all so exciting," she said. "You had to work very, very long hours in order to get anything done that you needed to get done--with no support personnel, with graduate students often as head coaches and back then, no assistant coaches, no athletics scholarships."

"One weekend in particular, we went up to the University of Northern Iowa," she said. "They had a crackerjack field hockey team, and it was a tournament. We were playing on Saturday and Sunday, and we had literally no money. So, the team and I slept on the gymnasium floor. I had been coach of the Canadian team, and I remember thinking, 'I've come to the most affluent country in the entire world, and I'm sleeping on the floor.' We didn't do that often, thank heavens.

"We paid for the privilege of coaching, quite honestly. You had to love it to do that. And I don't want to paint it that we were having a miserable time. We were having a fun time. We were doing it because we wanted to do it.

"That was why when it dawned on us what Title IX was saying, we could almost not believe it. Because when we looked at how we were being treated, and then we looked at how our brothers were being treated, we couldn't believe that, either. That the country was actually going to change and treat us equally -- that was a huge and very important concept.

"I call it an athletics revolution within a much larger societal revolution. What was happening to those of us in women's sports was only one small part of this huge revolution about how our society was going to change opportunities for women."

Revolutions begin at home

Grant's first challenge was right there at Iowa. Women were not permitted in the field house, so that issue had to be worked out promptly. Chalmers "Bump" Elliott was the men's athletics director at Iowa at the time, and he worked with Grant to address these issues.

"Bump is a gem, he really, really is," Grant said. "He's such a reasonable person, and very secure in his own right. He and I just worked our way through some critical problems.

"(As far as women not being allowed in the field house,) I sat down with Bump and we worked it out. For some of the men's coaches, that was not easy. If you could put yourself in their shoes, and this facility has always been yours, whenever you wanted it, the prime time, and here suddenly these upstarts are coming in and wanting to share, that was a difficult concept. And of course, back then hardly anyone cared about women's sports. So the men were feeling as though they were losing out, and that was their perception.

"I always felt as though I could talk to Bump about problems. Now, we didn't solve them overnight, because we had to try to change attitudes. But when you've got somebody like Bump who's helping to change the attitudes, it makes it so much easier."

"Nobody wants to change the status quo, generally. But when you talk about changing men's intercollegiate athletics, it's an overwhelming task. Sometimes I think, 'How did we have the audacity to try to do that?' "

In 1974, Iowa's President Boyd appointed a committee to investigate whether the men's and women's athletics departments at the school should remain separate or merge.

"Schools around us were merging left, right and center. In fact, there was a joke among women in athletics administration that you never took a vacation because if you did, you'd be merged by the time you got back," Grant said. "Actually, a friend of mine took a long weekend and was merged when she got back. So, it wasn't really a joke so much as it was a reality."

The committee investigated the concept, and ultimately came back with a recommendation that the departments not merge, which was Grant's preference at the time.

"At many places it was a submerger of the women, since (the departments) were not two equal parts. And Sandy (Boyd) said, 'We're going to try something different. We're going to try to be separate and equal.' And that was a wonderful experiment, it really really was."

At Iowa, Grant had the support of the administration, the support of the men's athletics director, and a separate department, of which she was the head. That combination of factors permitted her to step forward and take a leadership role in the fight for women's opportunities for nearly three decades.

"Iowa has always allowed me to do what I thought was right. Now they may not have always agreed with me, but they always gave me that opportunity," Grant said.

"In fact, I felt, because I was not in a merged department, that gave me freedom to speak out. And because I had the support of the administration I felt that gave me the responsibility to speak out, because not many women had that. I think many women, who may have wanted to do what I did, would have been fired."

The national fight

"The reason I started working to try to improve participation opportunities was because I love sport and I loved it as a participant. That was my initial reason for doing what I've done most of my life. But, in recent years, I came to a great realization that gave me a passion for what I do. It's because sport gives young women the right to empower themselves and it has forever a lasting impression on every aspect of their lives," Grant said.

"Think about the woman athletes you know. If you were to describe them, I think you'd be using terms like: 'competent, confident, high self-esteem, assertiveness, tenacity.' Now what am I describing? I am describing, usually, a very successful woman. And if you speak to former student-athletes, as I have done on so many occasions, you begin to realize what sport has given them. And it's so much more than any of us ever dreamed. It took me a long time to fully realize the implications of that. You help prepare them for life and you make them strong and successful women."

Grant also believes sport can help girls and women mute the ills of a society obsessed with thin bodies.

"Sport embraces a dozen or more different types of ideal bodies. The ideal body type for a rower is drastically different from the ideal body type for a point guard, but they're both ideal, and that's different from the ideal body type for a power forward.

"If we could ever get that concept across to our young women, they would discard the societal obsession with thinness and actually life-threatening eating disorders. Sport can do so much for young girls and women. I've noticed, especially our basketball players, many of whom are well over six feet, they are so proud of their height. And I think that is absolutely wonderful. They carry themselves proudly."

In 1978, Grant served as an expert consultant to the federal government's Office for Civil Rights Title IX Task Force. Over the years, Grant has tracked participation opportunities for women, and she also has spent a great deal of time testifying about women's participation -- and interest -- in sport.

"We have had almost seven generations of young women deprived of their rightful participation opportunities. And that's just the right to participate. Think of the number of athletics scholarships that should have gone to women, but they've been denied them."

"We have made phenomenal progress, don't get me wrong, absolutely phenomenal progress. But we're still not in compliance with the spirit of Title IX and the intent of Title IX. When it comes to participation opportunities at the elementary, junior high, high-school and collegiate level, we are not where we ought to be, and I'm very disappointed in that because to me the essence of sport is the right to participate.

"I would hope that young people would understand where we were 30 years ago (with women's athletics) and where we are today. It's like black and white. It's like the 17th century and the 21st century. And to have lived through it was a wonderful experience.

"But the boys and the men in this country have, still today, way, way more opportunities than girls and young women. At the NCAA level, we're around 148,000 opportunities for women and we're at 211,000 for men, and yet women constitute the majority of the undergraduate population. We're still not providing equal opportunity for our young girls and our young women.

"When young women say to me, 'Why is there disparate treatment? I want to say, 'Please go and ask your president at your university, because I can't answer that question.' "

But Grant believed that women never would be able to benefit from sport if they weren't allowed to participate, so she testified in her trademark Scottish brogue -- again and again. She kept her good sense of humor, even when her opponents turned nasty. And her message, always backed by the careful research expected of someone who has never missed a semester teaching college classes, was simple: "Women are just as interested in men in sport and therefore deserve to have equal opportunity and benefit from sports participation."

As an expert witness in lawsuits over the years, Grant until recently did not take any compensation. Even then, she gave it all to women's athletics at Iowa, because, as she said, "it was taking time from Iowa for me to testify."

One of Grant's most memorable moments came in the Brown University case, in which she testified most of a day and then had to be deposed that evening. Attorneys were still firing questions at her at 11 o'clock that night. It was a strategy that backfired.

"I think because of my athletics training and the competitor in me, the more they tried to wear me down, the stronger I got," Grant said. "And so I felt that by the time 11 o'clock came around, I was just getting started."

Grant's work for women's participation has never advocated dropping men's sports. In 1992, the Iowa Board in Control of Athletics made a commitment not to drop men's sports. That commitment won great support from both Grant and Iowa wrestling fans, including legendary Iowa wrestling coach Dan Gable, who now assists the Iowa athletics department with special projects.

"And rather than collectively finding ways to reduce the expenditures and keep all of the men's and women's sports, schools in Division I-A have decided they don't want to touch football and men's basketball and the easiest thing to do is to drop one or two men's sports. I find that unconscionable."

The next hill

Grant will continue to work for women's opportunity in sport, and now that she no longer has to concern herself with the day-to-day demands of being women's athletics director, she may have even more time to devote to increasing opportunities and emphasizing the role of education in sport -- for women and men.

"Now that I'm out of it, perhaps I can contribute to help change sport for the better because I have more time. And I can certainly assist, I hope, through the education of future athletics administrators, to help them form their philosophies. I'm just taking a slightly different direction," Grant said.

"When you're in the athletics director position, sometimes you get so caught up with what it is that you've got to get accomplished, you almost don't have time to reflect on what changes ought to be made. The changes seem so mammoth, and where do you begin?"

The men's and women's programs at Iowa have merged, with Bob Bowlsby, the men's athletics director at Iowa for the last decade, taking over the helm. Grant believes the merger in 2000 was very different than it would have been in 1974.

"Now that they are merged, it is not a submerger of the women," she said. "It's hopefully a merger of two equal parts. We've got highly successful (women's) teams and teams that we can be proud of. Our overall grade-point average for all 12 (women's) teams is over a 3.0, and our graduation rate is terrific. So I feel we in many ways epitomize what I think of as educational sport."

Grant never planned all that has happened to her, and she's still surprised that a once-shy little girl from Scotland could have so much impact on women's athletics in the United States.

"Going to Canada, being the Canadian national coach, coming to the USA at the beginning of a revolution, living through the revolution," Grant said. "I was just a little kid from Scotland. I never dreamed of being outside of Scotland, my goodness."

"I could not have been blessed with a better family, better parents or a better career. I have been extraordinarily lucky. And I have friends, really all over the world, because of sport. That's really what makes me so grateful about my experiences."

And to Grant's obvious surprise, the Iowa women's rowing team came out onto the floor hoisting their sleek, new eight-woman varsity boat, the "Christine H.B. Grant," which had been funded by a donor. Grant christened the new boat as university officials announced a fund had been established to ensure that a varsity-8 boat at Iowa would always be the Christine H.B. Grant.

Grant was nearly speechless when those in attendance then rose and held up signs, acknowledging her three decades of work for women's opportunity in sport. "Thank you, Dr. Grant," the signs said.

That's a sentiment shared by thousands more -- men and women alike -- who have been, or will be, affected by Grant's legacy.