If discrimination were a track and field event, Dr. Donnis Thompson would have been competing in the pentathlon.

And not just competing but dominating.

A woman. An athlete. African-American. Educated. Persistent.

The battles were on the athletic courts and in the legal courts.

Thompson was very good at winning both.

There’s a reason that the late Hawaii Congresswoman Patsy Takemoto Mink asked Thompson, the University of Hawaii’s first Director of Women’s Athletics, to help her write the legislation for Title IX of the Education Amendments to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The 1972 landmark decision designed to prevent discrimination based on gender in education or activities that received federal financial assistance celebrates its 50th anniversary of being signed into law today.

Mink found a kindred soul in Thompson, whose passion podium was equally shared by education and athletics. Thompson, a high school graduate at age 16, believed academics and sports were all part of the higher learning of life.

The original intent of Title IX was to end discrimination that women and minorities faced when pursuing educational goals. When denied acceptance to a number of medical schools based on her gender — Mink said the rejection letters openly stated that as the reason — she instead attained her law degree in 1951 at the University of Chicago, coincidently in Thompson’s hometown.

When no Honolulu law firm would hire her, Maui High’s first female student body president and Class of 1944 valedictorian instead started her own practice. And so began her decades-long path for equality that eventually led to Title IX being renamed the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act following her death in 2002.

>> RELATED: Title IX report: Hawaii’s milestones

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That the legislation she co-authored was applied to athletics came as a surprise.

“I never anticipated that all this would happen,” Mink said in a 2002 interview with the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. “It was a deep-down wish that it would make a difference at some point.”

“At some point” meant immediately to Thompson, who was very fond of saying, “Anything worth having is worth having now.”

She had experienced the benefits of athletic competition starting in high school where she excelled at track and field, later traveling with AAU teams and then the Chicago Comets Track Club.. Thompson enrolled at George Williams College, an institution that had its genesis in the YMCA’s key concept of integration of body, mind and spirit, and won a national shot put title in 1953 prior to graduation.

Her most impactful throw perhaps came in 1961. Thompson received a call from the University of Hawaii asking if she’d be interested in coaching the school’s inaugural women’s track and field team. This came two years after statehood when the thought that UH competing in intercollegiate athletes would validate the 50th state’s transition from a territory.

“I had 1 minute to decide,” Thompson said in a 2007 interview with the Star-Bulletin. “I didn’t know what to do with the other 59 seconds.”

She became one of the first African-American women to coach a collegiate team and, a year later, Thompson was chosen to coach the U.S. Women’s National Track Team at the prestigious USA-USSR Dual Meet.

Thompson received $700 to coach the Wahine, augmenting her professor’s salary of $5,000. That $5,000 was the same amount as her women’s athletics budget in 1972 when, after leaving to attain her doctorate from Northern Colorado, she returned to UH as its first Director of Women’s Athletics.

There is much documentation about the battles that followed, locally with funding from the Hawaii state legislature and within the UH athletic department itself, to nationally with the NCAA’s initial refusal to comply with Title IX while also losing law suits filed by the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women and other entities. The definitive educational tool perhaps is the 2014 award-winning documentary “Rise of the Wahine: Champions of Title IX” that uses archival footage intertwined with contemporary interviews to highlight the struggles endured by Thompson, Mink, the late state representative Faith Evans and the Rainbow Wahine Hui booster club for funding and recognition.

Although Thompson’s first love was track and field, she realized the inherent popularity of volleyball in Hawaii. Her dream was to have Wahine volleyball prove its marketability by selling out Blaisdell Arena … and it happened.

On Oct. 8, 1977 a capacity crowd of 7,813 saw Hawaii outlast rival UCLA in five sets. It was capped by a Set 5 comeback where, down 14-4 with traditional scoring, the Wahine pulled it out 16-14.

The two programs had met for the AIAW championship the previous three seasons with the Bruins winning every time. The marathon victory in 1977 was just the third in 10 meetings but the real victory was in proving Thompson right.

Her legacy resonates with so many nearly five decades later.

“What I remember, other than being the other Black woman on campus, is she was always so kind and supportive and welcoming,” former Wahine All-American middle Deitre Collins-Parker said in an interview earlier this week. “I didn’t know about her until I got to campus and she didn’t play a role in why I chose to go to Hawaii.

“But it was amazing that I had a Black athletic director when no one else could say that. I was extremely proud of that. What an amazing woman. You could walk into a room and you knew that she was in charge.”

Thompson had a commanding presence with a voice as distinctive as her signature earrings and shoes, both red.

“What I remember is whenever she spoke, she always used her words so eloquently,” said Marilyn Moniz-Kaho’ohanahano, who was the third UH women’s athletic director (1989-77) and played for the Wahine volleyball team (1972-75). “It was composed, intense but rational. I remember thinking often, ‘I have to write that down.’”

When the Wahine traveled to Princeton for the 1975 AIAW national tournament, Thompson made sure the trip also was educational. There was a stop in Washington, D.C., where the team met with Mink and the late Sen. Spark Matsunaga, as well as playing tourist in the nation’s capital.

“Yes, she was my AD but she also was my role model,” Moniz-Kaho’ohano said earlier this year. “When I was hired, she told me I didn’t have to be like she was, that she HAD to be strong and aggressive.

“I still call her ‘Doctor Thompson.’ I have such great respect for her. She wasn’t just involved in campus. She was engaged with others and all aspects of the community.”

Thompson also had a few pet peeves, including having others use the correct term of “Physical Education” and not “P.E.” She had worked hard to attain her doctorate and the title of “Doctor” went beyond the Hooding Ceremony, reminding some if they seemed dismissive by calling her ‘Donnis’ with a ‘Never forget this. It’s Dr. Thompson.’”

“You always had to say, physical education and not P.E.,” former Wahine All-American hitter Waynette Mitchell said when interviewed this week. “I met her when I was still in high school (Radford) and she wanted me on the track and field team. At the time I had the national record in shot put.

“I was playing volleyball but at the USVBA level, not for UH. The (1975) nationals in track conflicted with the USVBA nationals. I was told I’d lose my track scholarship if I went to the USVBAs. So I lost my scholarship. Dr. Thompson then encouraged me to walk on for volleyball.”

Mitchell, the only girl in Hawaii to win the shot put for four consecutive years (1970-73), sat out the 1975-76 school year to earn enough money to return to Manoa. She had helped Radford to the 1971 state volleyball title and tried out for Dave Shoji’s second season as Wahine volleyball coach in 1976.

Her UH career culminated when serving “aloha ball” as the Wahine won the 1979 AIAW championship in five, a reverse sweep of Utah State, for the first title in program history.

Shoji, hired by Thompson in 1975 as a part-time coach, retired in 2015 after 42 seasons, three more national titles and 1,202 victories.

“At the time she hired me, I didn’t realize what a visionary she was, what a champion for women’s rights,” Shoji said in an earlier interview. “It’s not that I was ‘enlightened’ but it was her pointing out that our women athletes didn’t have the same things as the men. She was way ahead of her time.

“She had a constant battle with our male administrators. She was a real pain in their … sides. It may not have been politically correct in that era to grant her her wishes but I think they kind of gave in because they didn’t want her in their office every day.”

Her vision of equality never failed but her eyesight did at the end, a result of diabetes. Thompson held on at Leahi Hospital until after Barack Obama, the first African-American president in U.S. history, was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2009.

“That was a big thing for her,” Moniz-Kaho’ohanohano said. “She decided once that happened, it was time to go to heaven.”

Thompson died 13 days later.

DONNIS HAZEL THOMPSON

>> Born: April 1, 1933 in Chicago

>> Died: Feb. 2, 2009 in Honolulu

Education

>> 1955: B.A. in education, George Williams College, Williams Bay, Wis.

>> 1967: Ph.D in physical education, Northern Colorado University, Greeley, Colo.

Career

>> 1961-66: Professor of Health, Physical Education and Recreation, University of Hawaii

>> 1961-66: Coach of inaugural Rainbow Wahine track & field team

>> 1962: Coach of U.S. women’s track team for USA-USSR Dual Meet

>> 1973-76: Interim Director of Women’s Athletics, University of Hawaii

>> 1976-81: Director of Women’s Athletics, University of Hawaii

>> 1981: Administrator, World Games, Mexico City

>> 1981-1984: State Superintendent, Hawaii Department of Education

>> 1984-1991: Professor of Health, Physical Education and Recreation, University of Hawaii

>> 1989: Chair, Hawaii’s Martin Luther King Jr. Commission

Awards

>> 1981: Dr. Donnis Thompson Day in Hawaii

>> 1986: Dr. Donnis Thompson Rainbow Wahine Golf Invitational established

>> 1991: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. National Outstanding Serve Award

>> 1998: Girls Scout Council of Hawai’i Woman of Distinction

>> 2000: University of Hawaii Sports Circle of Honolulu

>> 2007: Hawai’i Sports Hall of Fame

>> 2007: Women’s History Month in Hawaii honoree

>> 2007: Thompson sculpture installed, Stan Sheriff Center concourse

>> 2008: NACWAA Women Leaders in College Sports Lifetime Achievement

>> 2008: YWCA Leadership Award