Opinion: NWSL players show the power women in sports have, but it's still not enough
We’re going to be hearing quite a bit about Title IX over the next nine months as one of the most important laws of this or any era turns 50 on June 23, 2022.
If you want to gauge the success of this law that opened the floodgates for women and girls to play sports, there are countless places to look, from corporate board rooms to the U.S. House and Senate to the playing fields you drive by every day.
There also were three soccer stadiums across the nation Wednesday night where six National Women’s Soccer League teams stopped playing at the six-minute mark of each of their three games to protest the six years it took for the awful stories of sexual harassment and abuse of their fellow players to finally be heard and taken seriously.
Take a peek inside those stadiums, look at the videos from the gatherings of teammates and opponents linked arm in arm, and there you see it: Title IX.
Confident, strong, intelligent and athletic women, taking matters into their own hands after realizing no one was going to protect them but themselves.
Brave heroes for our time, saying enough is enough, beginning to wrest control of their league from those who have betrayed them.
Daughters of Title IX all (even if they started out in another country), finding their collective and formidable voice, calling for the removal of failed leaders and accountability and transparency for all.
While this has been years in the making, the pace has quickened with revelations that have rocked the league, causing it to go dark last weekend after former players Mana Shim and Sinead Farrelly told The Athletic about the sexual harassment and coercion of North Carolina Courage coach Paul Riley, who denied the claims but was fired nonetheless.
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Washington Spirit coach Richie Burke was fired too over allegations of verbal and emotional abuse, NWSL commissioner Lisa Baird resigned and, among other developments, the Spirit players called upon owner Steve Baldwin to sell his majority stake in the club to co-owner Y. Michele Kang.
“You have always said you intended to hand the team over to female ownership,” the players wrote. “That moment is now.”
It certainly is.
How many times do we have to witness massive, organizational abuse before we can’t stand it anymore? Just as with the hundreds of gymnasts who were sexually abused by Larry Nassar, we must ask again: How do we as a nation still allow a sports power structure to take the best of us — our young, vibrant athletes — and render them so powerless to abuse, be it verbal, physical, mental or sexual?
It’s just terrible that this keeps happening. Look at soccer. It’s the first sport almost every child plays. It’s the activity that puts out the athletic welcome mat for our daughters, granddaughters, sisters and nieces. Then, cruelly, as we have seen with the NWSL scandal, it turns on them when they reach the pinnacle.
That’s not where this story ends, however. It turns out the soccer players wield plenty of power, just how this nation raised them thanks to Title IX. They learned not only how to win at a young age, they learned how to lose. They were taught the value of teamwork, sportsmanship and leadership. For generations, the United States offered those life lessons only to boys and men. Look what happens when you give them to girls and women too.
Moving forward, it’s not going to be easy for these players and their league. The old boys must go, forever. New, diverse faces must take over. Some of this will happen overnight, some of it will take time.
But the players and their allies can do it. Of course they can. They have received a lifetime of preparation for this moment in all the most familiar places: in every game they’ve played, in every gym they’ve entered, on every field they’ve touched.