HARRIS: Schools didn't have to follow the law overnight. Girls and women were being left out systematically. HARRIS: Representative Patsy Mink of Hawaii, the first woman of color elected to Congress, had introduced it to solve what she saw as a pretty basic problem. PATSY MINK: Although we had statutes on the books about equality and opportunity for everyone. Title IX bans sex discrimination in education, including sports. Inequities in college sports were supposed to have been fixed 50 years ago by Title IX. HARRIS: You might say that a lot of people have been a part of the problem for a long time. PRINCE: If you aren't upset about this problem, then you're a part of it. Ultimately, it helped expose a long list of inequities in the way the NCAA treats men's and women's teams. It's been viewed at least 12 million times. PRINCE: Here's our practice court, right? And then here's that weight room. The contrast with that stack of a dozen hand weights is crystal clear. Workers are setting up even more equipment. HARRIS: Her video cuts to a spacious room with a bunch of racks and benches and barbells for the men's teams. PRINCE: Let me show y'all the men's weight room. HARRIS: University of Oregon basketball player Sedona Prince is on TikTok, showing her fans a small rack of light dumbbells. SEDONA PRINCE: I got something to show y'all.ĮMILY HARRIS, BYLINE: It's the middle of March last year at the NCAA college basketball championship tournament. Coming up, Benching the Patriarchy - the story of one woman who pushed to make that promise come true. This is UP FIRST Sunday, and today we're thinking about Title IX. It needs people to pull it to make it real. Title IX, after all, is just a law - a lever. All this didn't happen quickly, obviously, and it didn't happen by chance. The coach is paid a million dollars a year, and star players can go pro in the WNBA. Oregon women's basketball plays in a state-of-the-art arena. Peg didn't want to go back in the basement, but she had to wait. Women had been denied athletic opportunities for so long because of claims ranging from, hey, it's unattractive to watch women play sports to it's just unsafe. MARTIN: The words in the law are, quote, "no discrimination," but what Peg felt and realized is the heart and soul of Title IX. It made me realize I had physical abilities I didn't know I had before. And it changed the way I played the game. I was not a great runner, and I felt like when they came out of their seats for me, I could run all night. REES: I remember the experience and the reaction I had to having 8,000 people cheer when I made a basket. MARTIN: Peg doesn't remember who her team was playing or even if they won, but she remembers what it felt like. I'm 22 at this point and experiencing a crowd's impact on a competition, really, for the first time in my life. REES: By the time we were done with our game, thousands of people were in the gym, and it was electric. MARTIN: Green and yellow, of course, are the University of Oregon colors. So we played a game at 5 o'clock, as the fans are pouring in over the next two hours and just starting to cheer for a random team that they don't know wearing green and yellow. REES: So they said, let's put the women there. But one night, the JV squad was on the road. Usually the men's JV team started before the wildly popular varsity team. MARTIN: By chance, in her freshman year, Peg's team got an opportunity to play at McArthur Court. UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: Nice pass (inaudible). It had room for 9,000 fans but was still so intimate that the roar of a packed house could make the basket rim start to quiver. It was bigger and better by far than the women's court. MARTIN: Male basketball players at the U of O had their own playing space - McArthur Court. REES: I just loved the dynamic of being a part of a team. Peg joined the brand-new varsity women's basketball team. It was just one year after Congress passed the federal law requiring equity in educational settings - Title IX. She came to U of O as a freshman in 1973. MARTIN: Peg Rees spent hours in that gym. PEG REES: Basically, a one-basketball-court-sized gym that seated maybe a hundred people on some pull-out bleachers. It's in the basement of a University of Oregon PE building, between a cemetery and the university's main library. In Eugene, Ore., there's a gym that was built in 1969 exclusively for women.
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