By MATT CHITTUM
ROANOKE TIMES

Sandi Tun called the cadence from the back of the line, each "left, right, left" pushing out a cloud of breath ahead of it. Before her were three lines of women in matching green sweat suits, their long hair stuffed into black stocking caps that looked like misshaped turbans.

The sun was still floating upward, lighting the dim Mary Baldwin College campus like a lamp left on in another room.

Most women at the college were still sleeping, but the freshman class of the Virginia Women's Institute for Leadership was up, dressed, in step and ready to take morning physical training.

"Wake up!" cadet-in-charge Kimberly Primerano shouted in case some were drifting off as they lined up for exercises. Push-ups, flutter kicks, sit-ups and jumping jacks. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

"Yeah VWIL," 18-year-old Erika Wendt called to her breathless classmates.

"You can do it, ladies."

Yes, Virginia, VWIL is carrying on.

And it's more than a vestigial feature of the lost battle to keep Virginia Military Institute all-male, more than an unsuccessful cure for a disease that no longer exists.

The "separate but equal" program that was the last hope of an all-male VMI is taking on a life of its own. Big questions remain, however.

Now that the battle over VMI is lost, will the state continue to pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into a program at an otherwise private college?

Will the Virginia residents in the program continue to get the $7,400 tuition subsidy from the state that allows many of them to attend the pricey school? And is it constitutional for the state to continue funding VWIL? The program arguably is a state-supported single-sex entity, and therefore unconstitutional under the Supreme Court ruling that essentially forced VMI to go coed.

And if the state money dries up, will Mary Baldwin fund the program?

Those questions didn't concern freshman Shari Cheeks as she ran relays on the frosted grass at 7 a.m. She smiled. Her gangly arms flopped at her sides.

"I'm just happy to be out here," she said.

The future of VWIL is a heady topic for Cheeks and her sister cadets, and one they rarely consider. They simply trust that VWIL will always be here.

There wasn't much to VWIL when Trimble Bailey arrived as part of the inaugural class in the fall of 1995.

"When we came in, what we had was paper," she said. "We've created this corps into what it is Right now, we're the beginning, and we're starting the traditions that people are going to be talking about in 100 years."

It wasn't always fun, said the graduate of Roanoke Valley Christian Academy, former Roanoke County Junior Miss, and the ranking VWIL cadet. Setting all their own rules that first year "was a little like spanking yourself. Here you are a college kid, and making yourself be in by midnight."

And if you weren't in on time, you were on your honor to "gig" yourself - turn yourself in for demerits. The program still isn't done, director Brenda Bryant can tell you. Butthen, they've hardly had a chance to get ahead since the state came callingthree years ago.

Mary Baldwin was already considering a leadership program when state officials approached the school with the idea of setting up a program for women that would produce leaders like those coming out of VMI, Mary Baldwin President Cynthia Tyson said.

VWIL was never intended to be a mirror of the system at VMI. VWIL is set up on a positive training model, with emphasis on team building and leadership instead of humiliation and push-ups. Each Virginia resident in the program received the tuition subsidy - roughly the difference between the cost of Mary Baldwin and that of VMI. The program also received about $80,000 from the state that first year to fund its uniquely military aspects, like uniforms and cannons. The private VMI foundation volunteered about $22,000 a month in support until VWIL's class of 2001 graduates.

But when VWIL was held up before the Supreme Court as a viable alternative to VMI, it failed miserably. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg was hard on VWIL in her majority opinion.

"Virginia has closed [VMI] to its daughters and devised for them a 'parallel program' with a faculty less impressively credentialed and less well-paid, more limited course offerings, fewer opportunities for military training and for scientific specialization." Without the "pressures, hazards and psychological bonding characteristic of VMI's adversative training," she wrote, "VWIL students will not know the feeling of tremendous accomplishment commonly experienced by VMI's successful cadets."

That was in June 1996.

VWIL has since recruited two more classes, and expects to receive $521,000 from Virginia this year in tuition subsidies, as well as $178,600 for things military.

"Who cares if VMI is coed?" cadet Bailey asked. "We're still another option."

Kristy Wheeler was the fifth woman accepted to VMI's first coed class. But the 18-year-old from Richmond who wants to be a Marine wound up at VWIL.

"I can achieve the same goal going through VWIL without going through all the nonsense," she said.

Most VWIL women feel the same way. VMI is fine, but it's not for them. Shari Cheeks, of Columbia, Md., just wanted to be around more people like her.

At Wilde Lake High School, where she was homecoming queen, "I didn't really like the girls because they were so girly."

"Where else are you going to go to school where you have 20 other tomboys to run around with?" asked sophomore Kelly Thorkilson of Arlington.

But not all of the VWIL women are tomboys. In fact, when they aren't in uniform - which is most of the time - it's hard to pick them out on campus. They are Mary Baldwin students first, after all. But they are in the program all the time, Bryant, the program's director, said. It's not a club.

Though it's based on a different training model than VMI, it's hard not to judge VWIL against the rigors of the Lexington college. And there are some basic similarities.

VMI freshman are called "rats." First year VWIL cadets are "nulls."

Nulls can't walk on the grass or use the curved stairways on campus. There are curfews, required physical training, and some good-natured pranks.

A few months ago, the nulls hung a banner outside the upperclass dorm that said physical training "kills" and drew chalk outlines of their bodies all over a parking lot.

Nulls can even be dropped for push-ups once in a while like their VMI counterparts, but usually not in public, and upper-class cadets do the push-ups, too. But there are no spartan VWIL barracks. A VWIL dorm room looks pretty much like any other one, though it may be cleaner because it gets inspected once in a while. Stuffed bears and Dalmations cover the bed and floor in Cheeks' room. Her bulletin board is covered by handmade cards from her upper-class mentor - her "calic," from an old VMI term for girls - that say "I'm proud of my null" and "I love my null." That's a degree of nurturing you'd never find at VMI.

Twice a week in the afternoons, the nulls do team-building exercises during Leadership Challenge. Recently, they propelled themselves across a gym floor on pieces of plywood buoyed by tennis balls. Later they all held hands while the members of the training cadre tied them in a knot and challenged them to untie themselves. They giggled like kids in a tough game of Twister.

"You'd think they'd get tired of it," said Jennifer Lordan, a junior from Richmond.

"Yeah, but they never do, they're so enthusiastic," said Celeste Buccola, a sophomore from Chesterfield. "They're like kids at recess."

The VWIL curriculum is heavy with math and science, ROTC and plenty of seminars in leadership and ethics.

And it has some success stories. Bailey, the ranking cadet, finished near the top of her summer Air Force ROTC program, and was the fastest female runner there.

The VWIL women have served as team-building consultants for local governments and worked on a number of public service projects. They attended the dedication of the women's war memorial in Washington, D.C., and escorted the veterans to their seats. The average VWIL cadet has a higher grade point average than the average traditional Mary Baldwin student, too.

The achievements of a cadet like Bailey, Mary Baldwin officials say, are evidence of why single-sex education works for women.

"Women find their voice in a single-sex institution," Tyson, the president, said. They take risks, and "do things you might not do if there's a potential boyfriend in the class."

But that single-sex status could ultimately prove to be something of a rub, if anyone ever decides to challenge it.

Since its birth in 1995, VWIL has received more than $1.6 million from the state in tuition subsidies and the Unique Military Appropriation. VWIL cadets are part of the Virginia Corps of Cadets, which also includes cadets at VMI and Virginia Tech, yet they are taught by the faculty of a private college.

So, is VWIL a state supported single-sex entity, and therefore unconstitutional like the old all-male VMI?

It's hard to tell exactly.

Kent Willis, director of the Virginia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, thinks VWIL could be vulnerable to a lawsuit if someone wanted to challenge its state funding or its single-sex status. Deputy Attorney General William Hurd said his office believes VWIL is constitutional, and that the ruling in the VMI case is specific to VMI and "thus cannot be automatically applied to other schools.

The U.S. Department of Justice did not respond to requests for an opinion in the matter.

Most officials believe the program resides safely within a gray area.

"For one thing, we're a private institution with a privately appointed, self-perpetuating board," said college spokeswoman Crista Cabe. VWIL is less of a state agency than a program operated by Mary Baldwin for the state by contract. And most of the money the program receives from the state is in the form of tuition subsidies, which are similar to the state Tuition Assistance Grants students at other private colleges receive.

Even if Mary Baldwin is right, it's no guarantee there will be money for VWIL in the budget Gov. George Allen will unveil Dec. 19, and if it is there, that it will survive a General Assembly budget battle.

Governor-elect Jim Gilmore said he fully supports VWIL. And there appears to bipartisan support in the legislature, from Democrats like Women's Caucus leader Del. Gladys Keating, D-Fairfax County and Del. Vance Wilkins, R-Amherst County.

But VWIL isn't likely to end, even if its state subsidy does.

"Mary Baldwin is committed to this program," said Tyson, "and Mary Baldwin will see that it continues."

But it may change without that $7,400 subsidy for in-state students. Thorkilson, the sophomore from Arlington, said she couldn't afford the $20,760 Mary Baldwin fee without the subsidy.

All but 20 of the 94 VWIL cadets receive that subsidy, and more than half receive an average financial aid package of nearly $17,000. That VWIL will survive in some form, though, seems certain.

"The women make it live," Tyson said. "The legal matters are gone. The political matters shift and change, but VWIL lives on."