SCORECARD
14 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED | SI.COM
’VE SAVED just about
everything. Since my
journey in sports began
almost exactly in parallel with
the passage of Title IX 50 years
ago, my souvenir collection has
grown: newspaper clippings; cards;
photos; game credentials; speeches
I gave as the first president of the
WNBA, the first woman to serve
as president of USA Basketball
and now commissioner of the
Big East Conference; drawings that
little girls in the stands handed me
of their favorite WNBA stars—all
that and more is stuffed in drawers,
mounted in scrapbooks and piled
up in boxes in my attic.
It’s a little painful to go through
some of it because the bits and
pieces bring back such intense
memories. Not necessarily bad
memories but just such powerful
memories of what we did (and
how I was part of it), what we
created, how far we’ve comeand how far we have left to go.
I was 12 when Title IX went into
effect. Old enough to have already
spent years shooting baskets and
tossing footballs and baseballs
in the yard with my dad and just
young enough to have barely felt
the brunt of the sexism that the law
was designed to combat. My mom
and dad offered strong, unqualified
support at every turn. When it
came to the pursuit of our dreams,
they treated my younger brother
and me the same.
I competed in swim meets at the
community pool in my hometown,
but my sports opportunities
otherwise were limited. In my
junior high school, the only team
offered for a sports-minded girl like
me was cheerleading, and I didn’t
make the squad. I use it now as
material in my speeches—“Haha,
I’m just a frustrated cheerleader”—
but it was humiliating at the time.
Then Title IX came to be. I startedI
THE BIG EAST COMMISSIONER—WHO PLAYED HOOPS
AT VIRGINIA AND LATER WAS THE WNBA’S FIRST
PRESIDENT—HAS SEEN THE IMPACT OF THE LEGISLATIONTITLE IX AND ME
BY VAL ACKERMANhigh school, where my dad was
the athletic director. It took little
prompting for him to support and
create girls teams. I played field
hockey and basketball and ran
track, and the landscape started
to change.
When I arrived at the University
of Virginia in 1977, seven years
after the school began accepting
women, it was harder to ignore the
inequities that Title IX had only
barely begun to correct. I was one
of two partial-scholarship players
my first year, because in those days
the women’s basketball team had
only one full scholarship available
for the entire team. We had little
else: concrete locker-room f loors,
garish uniforms, no pregame
meals, no air travel and only a
handful of fans at our games.
But it was a stepping stone for
me to play professional basketball
in France after graduation, go on
to law school and eventually work
for the NBA as a staff attorney,
my first job in sports. That’s what
not enough people talk about with
Title IX: My debt-free education
at a prestigious university and the
career that followed were made
possible by this transformational
law, just like the educations and
careers of thousands of female
athletes in the decades that
followed. In my current role
in college sports, I cherish theGAMEPLAN p. 18 FULL FRAME p. 20 SI EATS p. 22 FACES IN THE CROWD p. 24VIR
GIN
IA
AT
HL
ET
IC
CO
MM
UN
ICA
TIO
NS