The most consequential piece of sports legislation in American history does not mention sports whatsoever. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 — signed into law by Richard Nixon on June 23rd of that year— is just 37 words long: 

“No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” 

There is nothing in there about soccer. It was, mostly, about graduate-school admissions.

And yet, before Title IX, fewer than 30,000 women competed in college athletics in the United States. Today, that number exceeds 215,000. The law did not only open a door, but built a development system, layer by layer, season by season. Youth leagues feeding high-school programs feeding college rosters feeding, eventually, something that had never existed before: a professional pipeline for women athletes in this country. 

The U.S. Women’s National Team, the one that turned World Cup finals into national heroes, did not emerge from nowhere.

Biggest Women’s Sporting Event in NYC History

On July 15th, Gotham FC hosts the Washington Spirit at Citi Field with the goal to bring the largest crowd ever to watch a women’s sporting event in New York City history.

The story of women’s soccer in America is usually told through its icons — Mia Hamm in the nineties, Megan Rapinoe two decades later. Julie Foudy, who captained the ’99 World Cup team and later became one of Title IX’s most vocal defenders, understood that the icons were only possible because of the infrastructure beneath them. 

But between the icons were tens of thousands of Saturday mornings: club registrations, volunteer coaches, folding tables at field complexes, parents learning the offside rule against their will. 

Every record-breaking crowd at the professional level sends a signal downward through the system Title IX built — to the youth clubs and local leagues where the next 200,000 college athletes are currently eight years old and learning to trap a ball. 

When Gotham FC takes the pitch amidst the World Cup, the crowd will include people for whom the evening is a celebration, and people for whom it is a memory — women who played college soccer when the locker room was a repurposed closet, who can do the math on what thirty-seven words made possible. 

It will also include, somewhere in the stands, the people building what comes next: the club directors and league operators and youth-sports organizers whose unglamorous work is the reason the pipeline keeps flowing.

The remarkable thing is not that it took this long, but that we are still nearer the beginning of this story than the end.

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