Episode 13 - The Door, Part 1: Pioneers of Women's Sports

Introduction & What’s the Story Format

Caitlin: We already know this girl’s a badass. She’s going to do just fine on a sprained ankle. Like, polio couldn’t take her down. Sprained ankle’s not going to hurt her. Hi, I’m Caitlin.

Alex: Hi, I’m Alex.

Caitlin: And welcome to a special episode of Raising the Game. So we’ve been talking about this for the last few episodes, and we are coming to you today with a little bit of a different structure to what you normally hear on Raising the Game. We’re going to take our first journey through a story arc. With it being Women’s History Month, we wanted to celebrate by talking about some of the pioneers who have gotten us to what we see today in women’s sports, sort of do a brief overview of a bunch of super impactful female athletes. And then hopefully in future episodes, be able to do a little bit deeper dive on each of them.

Alex: Yeah, I’ve had a lot of fun prepping for this.

Caitlin: Yeah, I’ve learned a lot more than I realized. So we are looking forward to this one and would love to hear from you how you feel about this episode. So episode one of this special episode type, which we’re tentatively workshopping as “What’s the Story,” is called “The Door.” And really in that, we’re using that as the metaphor for how these women sort of had to bang a door down, get it to crack open. All the different things, challenges they had to face as they were fighting for equality, equity, respect in a lot of cases. So let’s get into it.

Alex: Let’s do it.

Althea Gibson: Breaking Tennis’s Color Line

Caitlin: So we spend a lot of time on the podcast talking about records. We talk about attendance records. We talk about world records and performance. We talk about sold-out venues. We’ve been hyping some of those high viewership games, viewership records, and things like that. None of what we talk about here today on Raising the Game would be possible without the women who paved the way to get here. And so what we really sought to answer as we were prepping for this was how did we get here? But more importantly, who got us here?

Alex: Yeah. And so I think what we want to do is kind of introduce the idea of a through line called “the door.” And what we’re going to do here is talk about 11 different women and how each of those on this list broke down a door, built a new one, or held it open long enough for the next generation to walk through it. And sometimes at very enormous personal costs.

Caitlin: Yeah, often.

Alex: And the other thing I think that we’re going to highlight is that not every woman had the same door in front of them. It was always something new. And so I think we’re going to have a lot of similar themes here about this relentless pursuit against different types of resistance, and then also kind of what differentiates them and dig into each of those and try to bring it back to how it connects to what we talk about on a weekly basis.

Caitlin: Yeah. So let’s get into it. We’re going to open this with kind of our first chapter. It really is centered around proving or owning existence. And we’re going to start back in the 1950s with Althea Gibson. So imagine being told your whole life that a room doesn’t exist for you. And then one day someone finally unlocks the door and you walk in and you still can’t win. So that was Althea Gibson in 1950. Taking us back a little bit of her origin story, Althea was born in 1927 in Harlem, New York. She discovered tennis through the paddle courts in the neighborhoods where she grew up. And through that ended up acquiring a mentor who was actually a Black physician in the neighborhood who mentored her through the all-Black ATA circuit. That was the only circuit available to Black people at the time. The mainstream USLTA circuit was of course segregated and closed off as an opportunity to her entirely.

Alex: Yeah, a hundred percent.

Caitlin: So moving ahead, we get into the fifties. So Althea is 23 years old at this point. She has this door cracked open for her by white tennis champion Alice Marble. She writes a public letter shaming the establishment into compliance. She’s a really big tennis star at the time. She writes this letter to the USLTA and is basically like, it’s abominable that you don’t allow this woman to compete. She’s very qualified. The only reason you’re excluding her is racism. And they end up allowing Althea to play.

Alex: Amazing.

Caitlin: And Althea becomes the first Black player to compete at the U.S. National Championships in Forest Hills. So this is 1950. And then in 1951, she is the first Black player to compete at Wimbledon.

Alex: Yeah. That’s huge. That’s a massive achievement. And I think it’s kind of interesting how getting there is not the same as being welcomed, right? Like just because you’re allowed in doesn’t mean that you are welcome there.

Caitlin: Yeah, you can imagine the discomfort, like an outright kind of lack of safety that she probably experienced being in those same quote unquote rooms as other players on the circuit, being the only Black woman at the time. And so I think we’re going to see a little bit more of this here in her story. So she wins Wimbledon and then the U.S. State Department decides in the mid-1950s that they’re actually going to use her as this symbol of American excellence, and they have her go play tennis in Asia and Southeast Asia on this Goodwill tour. So she’s there. They’re validating or qualifying that she’s good enough to be used as a symbol for American excellence, yet she’s not even held space. There’s not even space held for her back home.

Alex: Yeah. It’s kind of like, you’re good, but we want you to go away for a little bit.

Caitlin: Yeah, exactly. Not be in the spotlight. Or like, we’re going to go put you up on a pedestal somewhere where they don’t have the same societal rules that we do. I mean, we’re literally talking about Brown versus Board of Education passing right around this time in America. And it took 20 years for that to really kind of settle into normalcy or semi-normalcy. And obviously we know we still face tensions around us today.

So she’s doing this tour and you can imagine how that would make you feel. She considers quitting tennis altogether. This is in 1955, she’s about 28 years old. She’s getting close to her thirties and she doesn’t really feel like she has a path, and she kind of has to go do some soul searching. And in that soul searching, I think this is where we really see that resilience. She decides she’s not going to quit. She actually decides, hey, I’m uniquely gifted and talented to excel in this sport. And so far, when I’ve walked into these rooms because of the fear, because of the prejudice, I’ve sort of shown up and tried to not lose.

Alex: Yep.

Caitlin: She’s like, I’m going to go out and I’m going to dominate.

Alex: Yeah. And I think the big thing there is that there’s a lot of things that make the story great. And the decision of her to continue on is kind of the turning point here.

Caitlin: Yeah. And I think we’ll actually see that as a theme for a lot of these women, where they’re deciding door gets slammed, right? And they’re deciding, well, I’m going to go find another door. I’m going to force this one open. So here’s the payoff. She comes back to tennis and starts to compete. And then in 1957, about seven years after she was at Wimbledon before, she wins Wimbledon on center court and she’s handed the trophy by Queen Elizabeth II.

And I couldn’t get this image out of my head because I’m sitting here being like, here we have the symbol of one of the most extensive colonizing nations in the world. And then this woman who has faced segregation and prejudices back home. It was just, I couldn’t shake that image from my head as I was thinking about her story. It’s like a weird juxtaposition for some reason.

Alex: I really imagine a lot of empty faces while the award’s being handed off by a lot of different people.

Caitlin: Yeah. But what a way to reach that pinnacle. And then guess what, she turns around and she does it again. She went back-to-back Wimbledon championships. She wins in that same time period back-to-back U.S. National Championships. She is named AP Female Athlete of the Year during that time. And she is the first world number one ranked tennis player as a Black woman. So just out of that desire to not quit and embrace who she was, she became the best in the world.

Alex: Yeah. And I mean, it is one of those American stories, right? From the Harlem courts to being the best in the world while facing probably the biggest adversity an athlete could face in this time. Or anyone could face.

Caitlin: Anyone, yeah. Anybody. And so we’ll wrap up Althea Gibson with kind of that legacy that she leaves. So not only did she go on and pioneer in tennis as a Black woman, she also was the first ever Black woman to play in the LPGA Tour. In 1964, about 36 years old, six years after winning those back-to-back Wimbledon championships, she becomes the first Black woman to play on the pro golf tour. And I think it feels pretty inherent to me that Althea Gibson would be central to the inspiration for extra famous tennis players like the Williams sisters. Now we have Coco Gauff, American superstar right now. Victoria Mboko is a teenager, a young Black woman from Canada who’s coming up. You think about it, the representation that Althea provided really swung that door more open. Not all the way, as we’ll talk about, but more open for those women.

Alex: Yeah. And I think that the other interesting thing that we’re going to touch on here is that there were multiple women that knocked down some of these doors who played multiple sports, which is actually kind of insane. So more power to them. Do we have an Althea Gibson of today’s women’s sports, or is this kind of like its own special story?

Caitlin: So I think a little bit of Laila Edwards, who we just saw become the first Black American woman play hockey and represent the United States, which seems crazy. It’s 2026 and this is the first time that we’ve done that. Now, I would say that has a little bit of a different tenor to it, because a lot of times for these sports, it’s not necessarily segregation that was keeping her out or other Black women out of hockey. Oftentimes it’s the cost. And hockey we’ve talked about before on the pod is very expensive, very affluent, very localized. Hockey isn’t as widespread as some other sports. So I think she’s pioneering in her own right. I think in terms of like facing the same kind of challenges, no, because we are not qualified to speak on those challenges at all. And so I can’t really compare her to anyone else right now.

Alex: Yeah, that’s valid.

Caitlin: Yeah. But history is still being made. Proof and point with Laila Edwards.

Wilma Rudolph: From Polio to Olympic Gold

Caitlin: So staying in this chapter of proving your existence. We’re going to move to probably a better known name for the audience if you’re a sports head generally. Wilma Rudolph. Wilma Rudolph is really an incredible story and another one of resilience and refusing to quit. Doctors said that she would never walk normally. Her mother said otherwise. So Wilma Rudolph was born prematurely in 1940 in Clarksville, Tennessee, of 22, you heard me, children.

Alex: Poor parents.

Caitlin: Her mom. Snaps for her mom. And she spent the first decade of her life in a body that just kind of refused to work. She had double pneumonia, scarlet fever. She survived polio and ended up with a brace on her left leg for almost seven years after that. So this was all before she turned five. Like somebody was telling her to quit. And her mom was like, heck to the no. You’re going to live, you’re going to thrive, Wilma. So she actually had her two dozen brothers and sisters take turns. Her mom set up a rotation schedule for them to massage her leg to keep the blood flowing and things that are really important when you have an injury like that. And one day she’s 12 years old, she walks into church one Sunday, no leg brace. Never put it back on.

Alex: Never put it back on.

Caitlin: Never put it back on. So she’s 12 years old when that happened. And then it was like, all bets are off. I’m throwing myself in every single sport they’ll let me play. So she played basketball, she ran track in high school. She once scored 803 points in a season for high school basketball, which set a state record at the time. And then she was discovered by this man named Ed Temple, who ran the Tiger Belles track and field program at Tennessee State University. And so she gets discovered there at the age of 16. Before she would have graduated high school, she goes and competes at her first Olympics. She’s out in Melbourne in 1956 Olympics. She wins a bronze medal in the 4x100 meter relay. And you’re kind of like, wow, incredible. This girl literally just got out of a leg brace four years ago. And she didn’t stop there.

Alex: Yeah. She just kept going. Overcoming the odds. What an origin story for you to basically be like, I was in this leg brace. I refused to give up. We made it work and I got out of it. And I’m just going to continue to push it from there the whole way.

Caitlin: Yes. I would be so fascinated to learn more about the therapy because you also have to imagine that her mom was a genius, realizing that essentially what she created for Wilma was physical therapy. And she did it probably without really knowing what she was doing. It was just like, this seems to help lessen her pain, and let’s do something better than doing nothing.

Alex: Right.

Caitlin: And so it’s really incredible. And you can sort of see where Wilma probably got her stick-to-itiveness.

Caitlin: So we win the bronze medal in the 1956 Olympics. We go four years ahead to the Rome Olympics in 1960. Wilma’s competing on a sprained ankle. That happened in an accident the day before she’s supposed to race. We already know this girl’s a badass. She’s going to do just fine on a sprained ankle. Polio couldn’t take her down. Sprained ankle’s not going to hurt her. She wins gold in the 200 meter race individual. She wins gold in the 100 meter individual race. And then fumbles the baton a couple of times, but still manages to win gold anchoring the 4x100 meter relay team. So that’s three golds in one Olympics. This has never been done by any American woman, Black, white, no one. And the European press famously called her the fastest woman in the world. And as she’s walking around Rome, she’s getting mobbed by fans because now you’re one of the most recognizable athletes there. If you watch the Summer Olympics, you know that track and field is one of the marquee events of the Olympics. It’s one of the oldest ones, has been around since it started.

Alex: Right.

Caitlin: So you can imagine what that sudden celebrity created. And remind you guys, she’s 20 years old at this time.

Alex: I think it’s totally, hindsight’s 20/20, but you learn about her origin story and then she gets a sprained ankle and you’re like, this ain’t slowing her down. She’s still going to go out.

Caitlin: That’s not even the most impressive part of her story. So she comes home to Clarksville, she’s got her three golds. They want to celebrate her. They want to throw this victory parade and a banquet and say, woo woo, you’re great. And we claim you. We want you to represent us. And of course, remind you, we’re in the 1960s. So as Alex mentioned before, we had had legal movement to end segregation, but the societal movement to end segregation was not happening yet. So Wilma does what Wilma does. And she’s like, I’m not coming unless it’s integrated. I’m just not going to show up. And the city was like, all right, we’ll integrate this. Because again, they wanted to capitalize on the celebrity and the notoriety, which we’re going to see as a theme too here. And so that homecoming parade became one of the first integrated public events in the country and was the first integrated public event there in Clarksville, Tennessee. Again, I want to remind everybody she was 20.

Alex: Years old.

Caitlin: And understood the power she had in that moment.

Alex: We have a lot of different themes that exist in the different stories we have here. And this is one that will come up a lot as well, is where these women also used their sudden celebrity to further something that’s bigger than them. And we’ve got a couple of really good ones coming up.

Caitlin: For sure. So just wrapping up with her legacy, she actually retired from competition two years later at 22. She’s like, I’m good. I’ve won. I’m going to go out on top and move on to the next thing in my life. And a little bit later, she founded the Wilma Rudolph Foundation, where they go in and mentor and coach underprivileged youth. So again, understanding her value and being able to use that for good in her community is a theme throughout Rudolph’s life. She was also, like Althea Gibson, named AP Female Athlete of the Year two times in a row and has of course been inducted to the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Hall of Fame. And her story has inspired the likes of Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Florence Griffith Joyner, Sha’Carri Richardson of this day and age, Allyson Felix, there’s a whole host of Black women who demonstrate their excellence in track and field that we’ve grown up with now. And that’s a direct result of what Wilma did.

Unfortunately she did pass away in 1994, pretty young, 54, from cancer. But her legacy certainly lives on through her foundation and those that she’s inspired with her story.

Alex: Yeah, it’s an interesting story of from a young age having obstacles and just never learning to say, sure, yeah, I’ll just deal. She just stood up to every single one. The leg brace, the sprained ankle, the city who didn’t want to integrate. Everything. Just a super cool story.

Patsy Mink and Title IX

Alex: All right. So we’re going to move on here to Patsy Mink. So every time a girl steps onto a soccer field, a basketball court, or a college track, every time a scholarship gets awarded, a woman’s team gets funded, a locker room gets built, there is a name most of them will never know. Patsy Takemoto Mink. She didn’t set a world record. She didn’t win a gold medal. She did what was harder. She walked into the most powerful legislative body in the world and rewrote the rules. And it started with a rejection letter.

Caitlin: Of course.

Alex: She was born December 6th, 1927 in Maui, Hawaii, third-generation Japanese American.

Caitlin: Tough time to be a Japanese American.

Alex: Especially growing up under the shadow of World War II. Japanese Americans faced a ton of discrimination, suspicion, all that during and after the war. She excelled academically, valedictorian of her high school class and deeply passionate about medicine. Applied to medical schools across the country after graduating from the University of Hawaii and was rejected from everyone explicitly because she was a woman and a woman of color.

Caitlin: Not because she wasn’t qualified.

Alex: Because she had two strikes against her starting out. One school told her directly they did not accept women and others just didn’t respond. The door gets slammed in your face. And this was really slammed in her face. This was her dream. She really wanted to do it. And she was literally told that because of things she literally cannot control.

Caitlin: Everything she could control, she did. Things she couldn’t control, she was not allowed.

Alex: So she had a pivot. Unable to enter medicine, Mink enrolled in the University of Chicago Law School and graduated in 1951, one of very few women in the class and the only Japanese American in the class. And she returned to Hawaii and was initially denied admission to the Hawaii bar because she was not yet a resident. And she fought that and won.

Caitlin: This theme of fighting.

Alex: She built a legal and political career in Hawaii, becoming a prominent voice for civil rights and equality, and in 1964 was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, the first woman of color ever elected to Congress.

Caitlin: And she’s like 37 years old, so pretty young for Congress.

Alex: And she carried with her every single day the memory of every door that had been closed.

Caitlin: Yeah, I think this is where it’s like, where’s that pivot away from the door that got closed and where’s that door that is open, and then I’m actually going to lean into that door and say what avenue can I take to ensure that other door doesn’t get closed on other women.

Alex: And so now we get into probably something that everyone is somewhat familiar with here. So throughout the late 1960s, she witnessed firsthand the systemic exclusion of women from education and athletics. Women were routinely denied admission to universities, professional programs, and athletic opportunities on the basis of sex. Mink became a lead architect and champion of the Education Amendments of 1972. And we’re going to talk here about Title IX and I thought probably best to just read it. It’s 37 words. No person in the United States shall on the basis of sex be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. And this was signed into law on June 23, 1972, by President Nixon. At the time of passage, fewer than 1 in 27 girls played high school sports in America.

Caitlin: It’s gut wrenching to hear.

Alex: She understood that equal education meant equal access to everything, including athletics.

Caitlin: It’s really crazy to think that something so brief can have the impact. I mean, there is no greater moment for women’s sports than this. I was able to play high school sports because of this legislation. Because you had to create equal opportunity if you were receiving federal funding, which all public schools receive. Thank you to Patsy Mink on behalf of women everywhere. And I love that she sort of went at it through policy, which in some ways can be more lasting, has had a more lasting impact in a very hard to change way.

Alex: So we’re going to fast forward 50 years. Can you guess the number of girls who play high school sports? 1 in 27 in 1972, in 2022, 1 in 2. Half. Half of all girls play high school sports now.

Caitlin: Yeah, that’s amazing. It’s also amazing because you’ve probably seen statistics on women who do play sports in high school, the further you go, the more success you have in your professional career. They talk about how almost all women in C-suites played at a varsity level. So these opportunities aren’t just important for athletic careers. They’re important for building skills that carry well over to any kind of job.

Alex: Women’s collegiate athletic participation also increased by more than 600% in the decades following the passage of Title IX. Title IX created the pipeline that built the NWSL, the WNBA, PWHL, and every women’s professional league that exists today. The 1999 U.S. Women’s World Cup team, the moment that changed women’s soccer globally, was entirely a Title IX generation. Megan Rapinoe, Caitlin Clark, A’ja Wilson, Hilary Knight, all Title IX daughters. And in 2002, the law was officially renamed the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act, one month after her death. Looking back at her overall legacy, she served in Congress for a total of 12 terms across two stints, one of the longest serving Asian American lawmakers in history. Ran for president in 1972, the first woman of color to seek a major party presidential nomination. And remained in Congress until her death on September 28, 2002. Posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014. And her legacy lives not in stadiums or record books, but in the infrastructure of opportunity itself.

Caitlin: Yeah, I think there’s no greater pivot point or change that gets us to where we are now. There’s still a ton more progress to be made, but at least we have that foundation and the numbers sort of speak for themselves.

Alex: Yeah, and I also think it’s crazy that she ran for president in ‘72, which is almost 50 years before it would even be considered semi-normal to be a candidate for president.

Caitlin: Right, when did Hillary run? 2016. As a full party candidate. So that was 40 years later. Insane. So she is certainly one that I knew about Title IX but I didn’t know who was behind it.

Alex: I didn’t really know either.

Caitlin: And I should. So now we know. Now we all know.

Billie Jean King: Equal Pay and the Battle of the Sexes

Caitlin: So we’re going to move forward into yet another chapter here. We’re going to pair a couple of pioneers together. And this is really two very different stories, but focused on fighting to be taken seriously. So now we’re in the sort of post, around the Title IX era. So keeping all of that in mind, we are going to jump into our story on September 20th, 1973. We’re in the Houston Astrodome. There are 30,000 people there. There are 90 million people watching from home, around the world. And what they’re watching is Bobby Riggs, 55-year-old former Wimbledon champion. And self-proclaimed male chauvinist has spent months publicly declaring that women’s tennis is inferior. He says that no woman could beat a top male player and that women belonged in the kitchen and the bedroom. He said it, not on the court.

Enter Billie Jean King, 29-year-old from Long Beach, California, walks into that arena, carried on a golden throne by four men, accepted a live piglet from Riggs. And then she whooped his ass. She beat him in straight sets. They played by the men’s rules. So the men play five sets in their matches. And she beat him three sets in a row. But the highlight reel of that story doesn’t really give the full picture of what she had to fight through.

Billie Jean was born in 1943 in Long Beach, California. She picked up a tennis racket at the age of 11 and immediately they knew she was special. She quickly discovered that tennis is a country club sport.

Alex: Speaking of affluent sports.

Caitlin: Speaking of affluent sports, it’s very white, it’s very wealthy, and it is deeply unwelcoming to people who are not in the club. So we’re up against that. She decided she doesn’t really care. She’s like, I’m good at tennis, I’m going to play tennis. So she wins her first Wimbledon in 1966. She’s 23, wins Wimbledon, and it begins this dominant run for King that spans decades. 39 Grand Slam titles total. Despite that dominance though, women’s players at the time were paid a fraction of what the men’s players were paid. So I think one example of this is in 1970, at the Italian Open, the men’s champion is paid $3,500. The women’s champion is paid $700. So they’re literally paid five times more, the men are. And so she decides, I’m not down with this. I’m not going to stand for this. I’m bringing in the same people, they’re coming to watch me as they’re watching the men. And we’re at the same level of entertainment and skill. We deserve equal pay.

Alex: Imagine being the best, the absolute best at your job and you’re getting paid a fifth of what some other person who’s also good but not great is getting.

Caitlin: I’m sure we’ve all probably have experienced that at some form in our jobs. So she’s on this mission now. Not only am I going to be the top tennis player in the world, I am also going to fight for equal pay. So we’re in 1970. Right after this Italian Open, Billie Jean King and eight other women decide to sign $1 contracts with a fledgling women’s tennis tour. Basically an open defiance of the establishment world. And so the Virginia Slims Circuit is begun.

Alex: What goes together better than tennis and cigarettes.

Caitlin: It became the foundation of what would become today’s Women’s Tennis Association. So the WTA. King actually formally co-founded the WTA in 1973. And with the WTA’s inception, they created the first professional tour designed specifically for women athletes. She also co-founded Women’s Sports Magazine and the Women’s Sports Foundation. So she was like, I’m going to go media, and I’m going to go advocacy infrastructure alongside building this administrative piece here, because if I can get the stories out that are accurate and representative of what’s going on in women’s tennis, and if I have a foundation that is doing research and probably doing some lobbying, that’s going to help open doors like Patsy Mink did, I’m going to be that much more successful.

She sort of had this understanding from the start that winning a bunch of tennis matches really didn’t matter if you weren’t reaping the benefit from that. And we’re seeing that right now with the WNBA CBA. They’re like, we’re good. We’re not getting paid our worth.

Alex: It’s an ongoing legacy of hers. It’s paid out billions of dollars to these players and it all started with her at this point in time.

Caitlin: Right. So King is the most prominent vocal advocate for equal prize money at Grand Slam events. In 1973, shortly after she co-founded the WTA officially, the U.S. Open became the first Grand Slam event to offer equal prize money to men and women. And actually it’s interesting because tennis has long been a sport that has been sort of ahead of the curve from an equal pay perspective versus some of the other team sports. I’ll mention it here, it would take Wimbledon until 2007 and the French Open until 2006, due in large part to one of our other pioneers, Venus Williams. But they have been doing equal pay. We just got an equal pay piece of legislation for U.S. Soccer in 2022. So almost 20 years before, tennis was paying their competitors equally, regardless of gender. She also went through periods of threatening to boycott, similar to Wilma Rudolph, recognizing that she’s a draw, there’s probably money to be made if she’s there. And so if she doesn’t show up, she’s going to leverage that power.

Alex: Yeah, I’ve got this power to take money out of your pockets. Why are you taking money out of mine?

Caitlin: And so then that leads to what was famously known as the Battle of the Sexes. I’m not going to rehash it because I think you got the picture. We’ll talk more about it when we deep dive on Billie Jean King. But I just want to repeat that she did wipe the floor with this guy. And it was interesting because clearly people wanted that spectacle. They were interested. And I think there’s probably a curiosity of like, can she back it up? And boy, did she.

So full picture for her. I already mentioned she won 39 Grand Slam titles across singles, doubles, and mixed doubles. Six-time Wimbledon singles champion, four-time U.S. Open singles titles. She’s arguably one of the best to ever play. Now, another challenge that Billie Jean has faced is she came out as gay in 1981. She was one of the first major professional athletes to do that. This was well before it was even safe in a lot of ways to do that. And as a result of that, she lost almost all of her endorsements overnight. Another example of the bravery to live unapologetically as yourself in a world that you know is going to push back against that.

Alex: For a lot of people it would be a lot easier to just continue to hide that. And she was like, no, that’s not me.

Caitlin: I mean, she was almost 40 at this point. You kind of wonder like, why wouldn’t you? Isn’t it just easier? And I think for all queer people, to hide a part of yourself feels not good. She’s then gone on to be a really prominent LGBTQ advocate, which is great because we need more of that representation. She’s been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama in 2009. And she’s been named one of the 100 most important Americans of the 20th century by Life magazine. And I got to add here, she is also the co-founder, strategic advisor, and advocate for the PWHL. And she actually has the MVP trophy named after her. It’s the Billie Jean King MVP trophy or award for the best player in the league.

Alex: Yeah. A couple things. One, it was really cool. She got to say “let’s play hockey” at one of the finals games we went to, which was really fun. But as much as she was a dominating force on the court, the amount of institutions that she’s leaving behind, like an insane legacy, both on and off the court.

Donna Lopiano: Building the Blueprint at Texas

Caitlin: All right. So the next pioneer in this chapter, very different kind of path than Billie Jean King. But it is Donna Lopiano. So probably not a name that many people know. I learned a lot reading up on her. She’s an administrator. So we’re going to talk about this again, kind of like Patsy Mink, leading not with athleticism, but with legislation.

Alex: Yeah.

Caitlin: Donna Lopiano actually was both. So we’ll talk a little bit about her backstory, but to start us off, we’re going to start Donna’s story in 1975. So around the time that early after Title IX, and Billie Jean King is doing the equal pay thing, she started the WTA, right? There’s some momentum here. But we’re at the University of Texas. The Women’s Athletic Program had a budget of $57,000 for the whole program, for the whole year.

Alex: That’s not much.

Caitlin: The men’s side of athletics is millions. Even in the ’70s. They don’t have any scholarships. They don’t have facilities, at least not really worth mentioning. They don’t have a national profile. Think of the University of Texas at Austin without a national profile for women’s sports. They are dominant now in volleyball, track and field, swimming. Basketball, they are in the Sweet 16 tomorrow.

So Donna Lopiano arrives as the athletic director that year, 1975, with a legal pad, a vision, and an almost unreasonable belief that women’s athletics deserved to be taken seriously. 18 years later, she left behind the most decorated women’s athletic program in the country. 18 national championships across multiple sports, a scholarship infrastructure, and a model that every major university would eventually try to replicate. She did not just build a program, she built a blueprint for how this should be done.

So her origin story. She was born on September 11th, 1946, in Stamford, Connecticut. She was a gifted multi-sport athlete. She played all the sports: baseball, basketball, softball, volleyball. She was often not allowed to participate because she was a girl. She didn’t let the rejection break her. She went on to be one of the greatest softball players in American history. When I was reading about this, you kind of wonder about timing and how if she had been playing now, there’s a league she could have played in. And she is one of the ones that made leagues like Athletes Unlimited Softball League possible.

Alex: The important part here is that she experienced some of these things firsthand. And sometimes you need someone in administration that has dealt with those types of things in order to make the changes necessary.

Caitlin: Totally. So she went on to earn a doctorate in physical education at the University of Southern California. And then in 1975, she was hired as the AD for the University of Texas. If you’re doing the math, she’s 29, so she’s very young to be taking on that role.

She’s taking over this program that has $57,000 to millions of dollars on the men’s side. No athletic scholarships exist. Title IX had passed in 1972. But as with anything, it just takes time to infiltrate and to actually make societal change. So she gets there and immediately begins pushing for scholarships, elite coaches, facilities. She’s like, we need all of these things. We cannot expect this to be successful without this infrastructure. She of course faced significant internal resistance from university administration. Donna kept a copy of Title IX on her desk and she used it as both a legal tool and a moral argument.

Alex: It’s really interesting. How was Title IX enforced? Because it seemed like some of these things should not be as much of a fight.

Caitlin: Yeah, it probably wasn’t enforced. And actually in some of my reading up on her, that was part of her challenge. There wasn’t really support from the federal level to go into schools and say, you’re not enforcing this. And she actually now, post her athletic director days, she runs a foundation or research association where she’ll help support ensuring that it is being used appropriately.

So we talked about the 18 national championships in 18 years. Dominant programs in swimming and dive, track and field, softball, volleyball, tennis, basketball, golf. She grew that women’s athletic budget from $57,000 to over $4 million in 18 years. And she was able to establish full scholarship programs across women’s sports, which gave female athletes the same foundational support as their male counterparts. And she was also able to recruit and retain elite coaches as a result of this, which then draws athletes. There’s kind of a flywheel that happens there. And Texas athletics really became the national model for how these programs should be structured in the wake of Title IX. This proof of concept that she created of fully investing in women breeds success. She proved that out over 18 years.

Alex: Yeah. I mean, we just talked about this last week on our podcast. You invest and look what happens like every time. And this is 50 years ago. We’re still talking about it.

Caitlin: So in 1992, she left Texas to become the CEO of the Women’s Sports Foundation. That sounds familiar. It’s because Billie Jean King co-founded the Women’s Sports Foundation in 1973-ish, ‘74. So she served as CEO for the Women’s Sports Foundation for 15 years, really transforming the WSF into the most prominent policy and research voice for women’s sports across the country. She became one of the leading national experts on Title IX compliance and enforcement. She actually is probably the one that has written process and policy to help enforce it. She testified before Congress, consulted with universities, and pushed universities to stop treating Title IX as a liability, which a lot of them were saying it was at the time, and start treating it as an opportunity.

Alex: For those of you not in sales, opportunity means dollar signs.

Caitlin: She then went on after that 15 years at Women’s Sports Foundation to found Sports Management Resources in 2007 to consult directly with athletic departments on gender equity strategy. And she has spent decades arguing that the gap between men’s and women’s athletic investment is not inevitable, that it’s a choice and it can be unmade. So she’s been inducted into the National Sports Hall of Fame and the Women’s Sports Foundation International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame. She’s a recipient of numerous lifetime achievement awards. The infrastructure she built at Texas really is the blueprint that so many other universities follow and has set the baseline for Power 5 institutions. And her tenure proved that when women are properly resourced and properly supported, they are successful.

Alex: Yeah, it’s part breaking down a door, but part pouring the foundation. Like for everything we have right now.

Part 2 Preview and Outro

Caitlin: So we’ve learned so much hearing about these five women. We have six more to bring to you. We’re going to do that in a special Part 2. We’ll pull back some of the themes that we’ve talked about here, thread those through the narratives, and we’re going to launch ahead into featured characters who are going to be born in more of like the ’70s or more modern era. Names you’ve probably heard. We’ve mentioned Venus Williams already. We’re going to talk a little bit about Simone Biles, Megan Rapinoe.

Alex: Yeah, for the people who are our age-ish, they’re going to be people that you heard of growing up, your entire childhood.

Caitlin: Absolutely. So we’re excited to bring Part 2 to you guys. We’re probably going to do a little special out-of-cycle drop for that, just so we can get it to you a little bit quicker. But let us know your thoughts.

Alex: Yeah, this is, I almost like doing this a little bit more than some of the headlines sometimes because I love just, this is like a history lesson and I love history, so this is fun for me.

Caitlin: All right, well, we will talk to y’all next time.

Alex: Yeah, be sure to follow us, @rtg_pod on Threads and Instagram. rtgpod.com for our website. Make sure to subscribe to the Substack if you want a Friday morning kind of just rehash on what we talked about, things coming up throughout the weekend, stuff like that.

Caitlin: Yeah, until next time. Bye.