On June 23, 1972, President Nixon signed Title IX of the Education Amendments into law, prohibiting sex discrimination in any educational program receiving federal funding.

The law was 37 words. It said nothing about sports specifically. The words "athletics" and "sports" do not appear in the text.

What followed was two decades of litigation, regulation, resistance, and rollback. Universities did not immediately give women's teams equal budgets, equal facilities, or equal scholarships. The NCAA fought against applying Title IX to athletics for years. Schools closed women's teams rather than equalize men's.

The women who made Title IX mean something were the coaches, athletes, and lawyers who sued. Billie Jean King, who had testified before Congress in support of the bill, continued fighting for equal prize money in tennis. Ann Meyers fought for women's basketball. Donna Lopiano spent decades forcing universities to actually comply.

Between 1972 and 2022, the number of girls playing high school sports rose from 300,000 to 3.4 million. Women's college sports programs grew from a few hundred to thousands.

The law did it. The enforcement did it. The women who refused to accept "technically legal but actually not honored" did it.