What the Women Who Came Before You Built

The fact that you are here — on this team, with this scholarship, in this facility, competing in this program — is not accidental.

Fifty years ago, almost none of this existed for female athletes at scale. The legal frameworks, the institutional investment, the cultural legitimacy of women’s sport at the level you are competing at — these were built by people who didn’t benefit from them. They fought for something they would never fully experience themselves.

Read this passage slowly.

Let that sit for a second before you move.

None of them received what had been promised — yet they were commended for their faith. The Hebrews 11 passage is about a generation that built something they didn’t live to see. The completion came later, in people who stood on what the earlier generation built without fully knowing what they had received.

The women who advocated for Title IX, who fought for equal treatment of female athletes in institutional settings, who competed with excellence in programs that had a fraction of the support and attention you have now — most of them competed without the full fruit of what they were building. They built it anyway. For you.

The weight of that is not guilt. It is gratitude and obligation. Gratitude for the gift of the opportunity. Obligation to compete in a way that honors what it cost to build it — not just to enjoy it. The female athlete who is indifferent to the history of her sport, who takes the access for granted without understanding what it took to create it, is a less complete athlete than the one who knows what she’s standing on.

Know the history. Compete with awareness of it. Build what comes after you with the same faithfulness.

The first question may reveal significant gaps in historical knowledge. Consider bringing a brief factual summary of the program’s history to this gathering.