Women need to support each other and act as role models for women's athletics to survive, let alone prosper, Dr. Dorothy Harris said last night in a speech in honor of National Girls and Women in Sport Day.

As athletic department budgets continue to grow and men continue to dominate those athletic departments, women's sport could be pushed to the back burner, said Harris, a professor in the College of Exercise and Sport Science and world-renowned sport psychologist.

"If all the women on this campus went to a single women's event in Rec Hall they could fill Rec Hall," Harris told the audience, mostly women varsity athletes at Penn State. "And you athletes who play one sport, how many other women's teams have you watched perform?

"Men have generally twice as many opportunities, and yet 52 percent of the population happens to be female. It's just a matter of trying to really make a difference by supporting the women."

A former athletic director at Arkansas said that unless sport is financed differently, a football ticket will cost $57 per game by the year 2000. If most people aren't going to pay that much, women's sports will be cut first, Harris said.

Women's athletic casualties are already occurring. Stanford, which has one of the highest budgets and best women's programs in collegiate sport, dropped its women's field hockey program Monday, field hockey coach Charlene Morett Newman said.

"To be sure that your daughters and granddaughters have the same opportunities you have then there's a lot of work to be done," Harris said. "It can be cut unless you stand there and fight."

Women in the past have not given back to sport, she said. Most women athletes are coached by men and don't consider a coaching career possible. Most married women give to a charity of their husbands' choice, which would normally not be women's sport.

Harris also cited a survey in yesterday's USA Today, in which respondents indicated their attitudes toward sport. Of the 14,457 respondents, 38 percent thought women's basketball should be eliminated from television or shown less. Thirty-one percent thought it should be shown more often.

The poll did not give a breakdown of female and male respondents.

"Obviously television and corporate sponsors will not pay if people don't want to watch it. If women would respond to this kind of thing, they could effect a change," Harris said.

Newman played field hockey for Penn State, became a graduate assistant here and is now the head coach. She said more women need to think about doing the same, if not in coaching, then in physical education, sports administration, sports marketing or research.

"I think there's a lot of work to be done at the grass-root level of all sports," she said. "We just need women getting out there and giving their time to keep the road open for the younger athletes coming through the system."

Harris also said that today's high school and college athletes aren't aware of the struggle women athletes have faced in the past. Athletes today started competing after Title IX, which passed in 1972 and guaranteed equal funds for men and women in all activities at schools which receive some federal aid.

"The big changes have come by the clout of the law, not because people became magnanimous about what opportunities women should have," Harris said. "(Title IX) was one of the most reluctantly implemented acts . . . in the whole educational system."

Harris also emphasized that women's sport at Penn State in 1990 is far better off than most places in the world today. And discrimination today's athletes have known is nothing like discrimination in the past.

"I think it's important to get our athletes from here on campus to understand what National Girls and Women in Sport Day is all about," Newman said. "I think that we get very comfortable in what we have here."

In the year 4 AD, women were killed for simply watching men compete. Until 1964, the longest distance women could run in the Olympics was 220 yards; men administrators didn't think women could run any further. The women's marathon wasn't run in the Olympics until 1984.

And at the 1988 Olympics women carried the signs announcing the teams. One Muslim country would not march behind a woman, so a man had to hold its sign.

"Sports are political, sports are religious, sports are big business and sports are macho," Harris said. "So we have all of these barriers to fight through."

National Girls and Women in Sport Day is a way to start fighting those barriers. It was started five years ago by the Women's Sports Foundation and is recognized by Congress. Someday the foundation hopes to have the date marked on calendars, Harris said.

This week is the first time Penn State has celebrated National Girls and Women in Sport Day, said Newman, who organized the speech. The actual date is tomorrow, Feb. 8, but Harris will be in Washington for the event so her speech was given last night.