 Hello, good afternoon. I'm Melissa Lubke and I used to be a baseball reporter with Sports Illustrated Magazine. That was back in the 70s. And used to be means that my time around baseball about four decades in the rear view mirror. It was then that I wore this press credential pass that you're seeing and I wore it at the 1977 World Series. And that is the World Series where I ended up becoming a plaintiff in the federal court case that battled commissioner Bowie Kuhn in a women's rights case. In the end, it gave female writers the equal access that they needed to interview players alongside their male colleagues. Yes, they interviewed them in the locker room. This is the kind of comic strips and cartoonist vision of my story at that time that I became quite familiar with. It obviously brought up the question of whether he actually understood whose equal rights were in question. I'm grateful today to be moderating this conversation that's convened by my friends at the National Archives who are taking such loving care of the documents from my legal case, Ludkey V. Kuhn. I'm also thrilled that the National Archives has invited four women, myself included, to lead off its conversations about its new exhibit, All American, the Power of Sports. This exhibit just opened last Friday. It will be open until January 2024 and you can visit it in Washington, D.C. until then. You can also visit it in a 10 minute wonderful YouTube video that's been put together on the exhibit and we will put that link in the chat. We know that documents breathe life into our history as we can revisit long ago written words and feel sometimes as though we're touching those events. Today, we will use our voices to breathe life into the past and the present and look ahead to the future experiences of women in sports by speaking to the challenging issues that are still in play as women compete at the highest global levels of athletic performance. With increasing visibility, with increasing financial backing, though let's be clear why gender gaps still remain. To do this, I am joined by three women who apply their talents and their temperaments to the job of telling stories about how sports are played and also explore sports vital role in propelling societal change. Let me briefly introduce each one of them. I'm joined by Claire Smith, who is the director of the Claire Smith Center for Sports Media, a former baseball writer and as such the first and only woman ever inducted in to the Hall of Fame. There is also I'm joined by Iliana Limon Romero, who is the assistant managing editor for sports at the LA Times. She also is the chair of the Association for Women in Sports Media and the co-chair of the National Association of Hispanic Journalist Sports Task Force. Carrie Stett is a writer and athlete and she has most recently directed the Turner Broadcasting System feature film, Title IX, 37 Words That Changed America. She also has done a short documentary called First Down, an award-winning film about an underdog team in America of the first female youth tackle football league for girls. Okay, I'm gonna start with Carrie. And what I'm gonna ask you is in your visual explorations, you looked at the evolving impacts of Title IX, whose 50 years as a powerful level for gender equality we celebrate this year. You tell the stories about women in sports as a filmmaker and for your recent film, Title IX, 37 Words, you trace the evolution of Title IX through the life-altering sports experiences of basketball star, Candace Parker. Here you are interviewing her for that film. So here we go. As many of you know, the word sports is not included in Title IX, 37 Words, yet arguably sports is used by many Americans, if not most, to measure the progress that women and girls are making towards equality. So Carrie, I'm gonna ask you to remind us of the one word that is written into Title IX that did enable girls and women to pry open this education law to enable the courts to intervene when student athletes don't receive equal treatment. The word is activity. That one word changed everything and enabled sports to be part of the conversation. It did take years for that to happen, but now we have so much change that's been enacted over the last 50 years because of that one word. That's fantastic. Let us look at this point. I'm gonna ask you to leap ahead across Title IX, half-century of really transformational change to give us a sense, a sort of setting up a foundational sense of the distance that girls and women still have to go in achieving the equal treatment that this law carved out as its mission 50 years ago. So are you asking how far we've come or how far we still have to go? Well, it's sort of a mix of the two. I really wanted you, what I know in like 40 seconds, right? To tell us the whole societal change. Basically, I'd like you to sort of take us from where we are and but give us a sense of how we got there and also a little sense of what challenges we still have ahead of us. We'll dig into these a lot more as we go ahead. But if you can kind of set that framework for us, I'd really appreciate it. I would say, you know, here's an example is that when I was an athlete, we were issued men's sized clothing to wear. That most likely is not happening today. But that's an example of we, in the beginning we were lucky to be there and now today we're there but it's still not quite the same. And so how do we then lay the groundwork for girls and women of color? And everyone, there's the question of trans athletes. There's so many more ways that we need to push for equality, equal playing fields, literally. This happens most often in softball versus baseball, things like that. So it's sort of, we've come a long way. We have opportunities for sure. But are they equal? Are they meeting Title IX standards and our girls being given the same amount of opportunities to play from grade school up? It's not just about college. And so I think there's still a lot more work to do. You know, I'm looking right now as is everyone else at this picture of you filming a girl's wrestling practice or meet. It looks to me like it might be a practice. Could you give us a sense of why you chose to focus on girls, it looks like high school, girls wrestling as an example in your film of showing the evolving story of Title IX? Yeah, absolutely. I was really thinking about where are the areas that we, you know, that are not quite, you know, where girls haven't been able to have, you know, years and years of a foundation of teams and access. And that's why, you know, I focused on tackle football and other films, but in for the Title IX film, wrestling is an area that's right now having a huge growth spurt for girls. And so they are in, you know, in a situation where they are breaking barriers, the girls that wanna play, whereas, you know, the sport of tennis, for example, has already been through that. Each sport is now going through their own trajectory and wrestling is one of the, you know, most, you know, fastest growing sports for high school girls right now. So I, you know, threw out the idea that we go visit a team at a high school in Chicago. We took Candace there and it was an incredible experience. I think, you know, she was inspired by them almost more than they were inspired by her. We were all quite moved at what it meant to them to be able to play and what it did for their confidence and how it was improving their lives beyond just, just, you know, when they were there playing sport. And so you see that time and time again that they should have the opportunity. Girls wanna play. They actually don't know that they can wrestle. And that's where the state of affairs right now for many wrestling programs. Thanks, Carrie. We'll come back and maybe talk a little bit more about wrestling later, because I know that in states like Texas and the rest where girls have not had a wrestling team at their high school, there's been a great controversy. There about whether they can in fact wrestle with the men's team, et cetera. So we'll come back to that in a little bit. But Claire, I wanna turn to you next as I let our viewers know what you said from the stage at Cooperstown on the hot July afternoon when you became the first woman ever in our nation's history to be inducted into Baseball's Hall of Fame. So I'm gonna read your words as we look at a photo, another photo of you taken that day. In fact, I took this photo because you were generous enough to invite me to be your guest at this incredible occasion and took a picture of you with Rachel Robinson, the widow of Jackie Robinson, who was the first black to play in the major leagues. So let me just read briefly the some words from that talk, the speech that you gave. You said, today I humbly stand on this stage on behalf of every single person in my profession, in baseball and beyond, who was stung by racism, sexism, and other insidious biases, but persevered. You are unbreakable and you make me proud. So let me just begin by saying we know that girls and women have used Title IX as an essential lever in pressing for equal treatment. But in our shared journeys as sports writers, we relied on a different lever, the Constitution's 14th Amendment, while at the same time, we're lying on the collective strength of social movements happening in our lifetime, the civil rights movement and the women's movement. I'd like to ask you to speak for a moment to the ways in which racism and sexism have shaped and continue to challenge the opportunities and experiences that girls and women have when it comes to sports. Claire? Are you there? So if you can- Hello, yes. Let me start first referring to something that was said already, and that's about being handed men's clothing to play sports. And everything that's old is new again. I think back to the Olympics and the controversy over bathing caps that were better suited for women of color, given our hair types, textures, lengths and everything, and how the International Olympic Committee and others, their first reaction was to immediately outlaw something that made it more palatable, if you will, for women of color to swim. It's not that the bathing caps after test, after test, after test gave us an edge. It just allowed us to shove all of this into a bathing cap. Our hair is thicker and at times our styles are longer and jumping into a pool just didn't seem like a good idea if you couldn't protect your hair. So it's like whack-a-mole. You can go decade to decade to decade. You can think that you've buried one issue only to find something awfully similar popping up out of another hole. Are we told to go to the back of the bus? No, but the WNBA players, unlike their brothers in the NBA, hadn't until now had access to charter planes. They were walking through airports and running like OJ after planes and hoping not to miss their flights. That hasn't happened in the four major sports, men's sports in forever, okay? So it's just always equal treatment doesn't always necessarily mean dollars. It doesn't always necessarily mean that a front office isn't integrated or look like it has women in very important roles. But if you put all the women and all of your former players who are black in human relations and public relations, they're not necessarily helping you form the product on the field. And that's another subliminal way of saying you're not smart enough to play in this playpen with us. So just skate your lane and be grateful you're still in the game or you're in the game at all. We'll give you a forward facing desk so everybody will be really proud of us as to how many black faces or brown faces or females or transgender we have. But please don't try to push into the inner offices where the big boys play. Same with newspapers, same with the media. We do a great job of telling the sports that we cover what they should look like without looking in the mirror and seeing what we look like. So we've changed a lot. There are no Larry Dobies in fear of their life if they insist on eating at the lunch counter in Woolworths. Nobody with a badge is going to come and haul them off to jail. But there are just other ways and I think they call them microaggressions that just eat at your heart and soul often. We fight that with allyship. We fight it with people who might have bigger voices than ours at the time and we get those allies. LeBron James speaking again and again and again on behalf of Brittany Greiner means the world. But I think that there were more LeBron James is speaking out when George Floyd was murdered. So getting the same attention focused on women is hard, harder work, but it's not impossible. So to make tomorrow's list of grievances less compelling than the ones you hear today or in 1947 or 1907. It's just you have to keep working at it. And that's hopefully what we do through lessons like this. We inspire people to keep working at it. Great, thanks Claire. You're wrong, sorry. We're gonna circle back to many of the themes that you so wonderfully kind of brought to the fore. But let's bring Iliana in. Iliana, you're the first Mexican-American and the first woman to head the LA Times Sports Section in a city that is 40% Latino. And you are remain as the only Latina sports editor at a major US newspaper. So I went back, I listened to a podcast interview that you did this year and you observed that without representation such as yours in the newsroom, in journalism, vital stories are being missed. And as even as I say this, let's remember that it was just one week ago that the Tampa Bay Rays fielded an all Latino lineup of hitters, a first in Major League Baseball. So in that interview, you also said, for me it's class, race, gender representation across the board. Like we've had gatekeepers against class because access to this has been hard. We've had race issues and we've had gender issues. And you know, as much as we've made strides we have issues in all of these places. So just as I've asked your fellow panel members to help us in setting the foundation for our discussion about women in sports, I'm asking you if you'd give us a sense, again of the major challenges that women still confront in sports media, the place that you show up every day to tell these stories. Along with telling us how the larger presence of women and particularly women of color in print and broadcast sports media today affects the coverage of women athletes. So Ileana, please join us in setting that foundation for us. Thank you so much for having me and for the wonderful question. A colleague of ours, a friend of mine, Sarah Spain really put this eloquently and I continue to refer back to it. The ceiling has never been higher. We've punched through. We've had so many different opportunities. I have the opportunity that I have and we're seeing more and more positions open up. We're seeing more and more open up in terms of the storytelling that's happening across all platforms and in different ways. But the basement's never been lower in some cases because there are so many different challenges that do exist that suggestion that we're done, we're good. Everybody has the things that they need that we don't need to progress or continue the conversation. I think we have to look at how new media have impacted the way that we do our jobs, the impact of social media and the level of great autonomy for women being able to use those platforms to tell their stories. It's been great for female athletes but also the vitriol that was lobbed in different ways in the past is just so much stronger and so much more intense in some cases for some women working in all areas of sport. It's really challenging. So we have this great pride, this great joy that we look at to our veterans who have punched through and helped lead the way open doors for us. And then we have many others who are thriving who are being very successful. We see women representation gaining and we celebrate each of those wins. I think we have to, we have to sort of emphasize that and unite together in that way but there certainly are limitations. And when we do studies, when we do surveys and we've had more and more media companies declined to participate in these studies because they don't help. The numbers are not positive but the demographics has definitely showed that at best we've been stagnant and at worst we continue to decline in representation for women and journalists of color across all journalistic platforms. So why is that? Why are we seeing people plateau? Those are the things that I continue to work on each day and the statistics that you named as the only Latina sports editor in the United States. It's been like that for a while. I previously was a sports editor of the Orlando Sentinel. I took a deputy sports editor job at the Los Angeles Times and there were none. And then I got promoted and there was one again. And I am actively working to change that because we're missing out. Our, the media companies are missing out. It's to their detriment. The audience is finding other ways to engage with voices that better reflect their communities. They're finding other pathways and we're really, really missing out. To the detriment of legacy media not to understand this and to offer equity across the board. Terrific. Your answer is sparking in me. Just wanted to do kind of a quick lightning round perhaps and see if each of us can think of examples to bring forward the story that Iliana is beginning to tell us but focus it perhaps on women and see if you can think of an example that would tell a story of why it's mattered that a woman is the one telling the story about sports because as I found in my day back in the 70s when I had my lawsuit that was actually an equal rights lawsuit it was never, I was never able to tell the story because the men who held the megaphone back then told my story and they wanted to tell a story about leering women and naked men and that was really their only way of telling it. Not one of them showed up at the legal case at the hearing that this whole thing was about. So I often say that I very much lost that case in the court of public opinion and I was very fortunate to win it in a court of law. So what difference has it made that more women are now the storytellers at this time was we'd look at through the lens of sports at some of these broader issues. So let me mix it up a little bit. We started with Carrie last time. So let's start with Claire and we'll kind of go around in a counterclockwise here. Claire, you need to unmute, unmute. My class is so relevant to have to put it on mute. Over the years, the numbers have mounted and that is so gratifying. It used to be that I could count the number of women covering baseball encounters on one hand and have a couple of fingers left over. It's very important when you hit crisis, but it's exhausting if you're doing it in linear fashion and you find yourself in 2022 still being the go-to person because of incidents like yours. No, you can't do this and that and you're living history. So you're always asked to do the oral history or account for being the first or only one as Ileana. It'll be great when that isn't the second phrase in your future obituary was the first da-da-da-da-da because there are 20, 30, 40 others who've come along and made that non-essential in the explanation. They can concentrate on your work, not on the color of your skin. On the other hand, diversity matters. It really does and you get a lot of hints at the way people react to you and the kinds of questions that you put forward. I was told when I started that my worst enemies would be the wives of the men that I covered because we were going to be leering women in the locker rooms with their naked husbands. I found that to be so incredibly untrue that I actually asked the wife of a player that I covered for decades, Gretchen Randolph, wife of Willie Randolph. I was just curious why that never, never occurred that I always had wonderful working relationships with the wives and they were more than helpful, didn't hesitate at all to hand the phone over to their husbands when I called their homes and all. And she said, well, when you call Claire, you ask how I am, you ask how my children are and how their health is. They had some children with some physical ailments. You say that you hope that you weren't interrupting dinner or it wasn't too late. And she said, and then when the men call, it's Willie there. So maybe having a different kind of lens where we go through that kitchen and we're wishing we had, working women have wives or whatever and we're putting the children to bed and burying them to school and everything no matter our job. Maybe it's a different way of looking at things that the men pick up on too. We're not competing with them. We're not saying in deep down inside, damn, why does he get to make the money if the scout had only been there the day I was throwing then maybe I would have been there or that manager's an idiot, I can manage his team better than him. Things you hear in press boxes all the time. Maybe we just look at it differently and that's an important quality to take into any situation. In these rooms, on the news side, sports side, entertainment side. So that's the way I feel it. I hope I answered your question, Melissa. Yeah, so Ileana pick up, Claire's gotten us through the phone call and the wives and the stuff and giving us a good insiders view on some of the myths that she broke down and realized weren't true to start with. Do you have a sense on this that you wanna take us in maybe a different direction with this question on what differences it make that women are part of this mix in sports media? Sure, I think there's twofold. First, it'll threaten the lives or others. I just wanna say that hasn't gone away. Sadly, we still continue to hear that barb. We still continue to hear that attack of women who are taking up space where they're unexpected by some. So that is just an ongoing challenge. It's sort of the hidden extra work that is part of the privilege of being a woman covering sports today. In terms of what we bring, I think our background and our experiences shape each of us and we ask questions in a different way. We bring different thoughts and indirectly end up searing our coverage and by having diverse voices asking questions, you get a fuller picture of the community. You get a fuller picture of sport and you get a fuller picture of impact. That's just on a broader day-to-day basis. And as Claire touched on, when there are more significant issues that do pop up, when you have unquestionably sexual violence in sport, unfortunately have become more and more part of the new cycle. It has continued to be an issue. And when you have people who have a background that's slightly different, pause to ask questions, ask and really look at the assumptions that are made from people who come from different backgrounds and can ask questions any meaningful way, then you unlock and get a fuller, more nuanced picture. I also think it's important to recognize the demographics of fans, that there is a perception that's male dominated, but in many cases, as much as half of the NFL's audience is women. There are women who participate, there are women who watch, there are women who are ardent fans and who have high expectations. And so if you're trying to reach all these different groups answering these different ways, you need a broad cross-section of people to help come together and help tell that story. Great. Carrie, you wanna pick up? You might have a Candace Parker story to share with us or something else. No, I just, I mean, 100% on what you both have said, I think in the space of filmmaking and telling those stories, you know, there's a lot of work to do. We're fighting the same battle on behind the lens, right? So we have that happening too. I know that the film that I did when I first came on, there was a male director that was going to tell the Title IX story. And it ended up changing. And I directed the film, but I think that's just a good example of, you know, as filmmakers, we're not saying necessarily, we're saying we bring something different. I'm bringing a different perspective, especially to this topic, you know, than someone else. But as director and storyteller, you're also trying to show that I can do it just as well. We're just trying to get to, hey, I could do it just as well. So there's that. I don't even need to bring in something different. I just wanna be it to be understood that I could do it just as well. And I think that's the base level that we still don't have in my industry and it's getting there. But so, you know, I would say in the Title IX film, I definitely brought that perspective. I'm a Title IX baby. I lived it as an athlete. And, you know, I asked different questions than someone who didn't understand that would have asked. I was able to, you know, dig into the history and unlock, you know, ideas and topics that I just don't know how, you know, someone that hadn't been involved or is so passionate about it would have caught a lot of the detail. And the feeling behind it, the emotion from everyone that we interviewed. Right, right. And Melissa, could I just say one thing to that? It's not just about gender. It's about if you're background, if you're Italian or Hispanic or Irish or black or black African as opposed to black American, black Caribbean, African Caribbean as opposed to African American, you see things that the person next to you who you could call brother or sister just didn't grow up in a culture where it mattered. One example, quickly. Basketball player up in Connecticut, missed a shot, college kid. And the writer's first graph was so-and-so will be lucky if when the team's plane lands in Hartford, there isn't a mob waiting with a rope. The kid was black. I was the only African American in the sports department. And I went, I took the paper to the sports editor and I said, did you see this lead? And he said he had, and I said, do you know what hanging there for lynching means to black people in this country? And he was just dumbfounded. I never thought of that. He said, oh my goodness, oh my goodness. Well, that's what divert, why would he think of that? That's not his culture. That's not his great grandfather running from a mob. So that's what the diversity adds to every aspect of our lives. I'm gonna just add a very quick story, Claire, that you made me just think of. Nothing that has quite the resonance of the one you told, but it may shed some light on this in terms of the kind of stories that we also choose to do. And the ones we see as you pointed out. But when I was a rookie reporter for baseball and I would go up to the field, I had no idea sort of how things work. There were no other women I could go through to ask and the men didn't seem to want to have much to do with me. They didn't kind of want me there and made that pretty evident. So kind of had to feel my way around. So I decided that I would just kind of hang on the periphery of the various different circles of when they'd talk to managers, et cetera, or players and try to learn from listening to them and watching their back and forth to how to kind of do this. And what I came to learn over many, many, many months of doing this and then kind of trying it out on my own is that the question the men were asking just didn't interest me that much. I had different questions that I wanted to ask. And one of the results of that realization that I was seeing some things and interested in things that maybe they weren't as interested in was when I had an exchange with Johnny Bench one time, the All-Star Catcher. And Johnny Bench was just telling me what he, I guess was a funny story at the time about an exchange he'd had with a home plate umpire the night before. And from that, I decided that, well, has anyone ever looked at these exchanges that probably every catcher has with home plate umpires? And it became this very relational story of this game that was played behind the plate that no one has led into in which the catcher's job is to try to make the strike zone work for his picture, et cetera. And so the rest of that whole season, all I did was go and talk to the visiting catchers that were coming into Yankee Stadium or Shea Stadium because I was based in New York. And then I would go and talk with the umpire crews. And over that winter, I wrote a story. I went and checked and I'd never seen anyone write anything about this. I didn't want to tell anyone about it because I thought it would be taken away from me by one of the writers. And so I just said, okay, let me see how it goes. And it ended up being the feature story in Sports Illustrated and their Spring Baseball issue. And they hired artists to do the work with it and stuff. And in fact, the story had never been told. And I often think one reason it had never been told is that there hadn't been really women hanging around baseball that had an interest in this kind of relational story of a game within a game. So I bring that up in the context of these stories that we may sort of have rise to the surface. Aside from the more evident ones, Iliana, that you talked about and sort of the unwillingness of us to sit by and not tell the stories of the things that are happening to us, whether it be abuse or harassment. So anyway, anyone else have something to add to that before I move on a little bit, although not too much? Okay, so one of the things that we're seeing today across sports, whether it's on the college level, but I guess more, I would argue probably on the professional level, is the willingness of athletes to take their brands and they do have brands now, they have brands they can even sell, but to take their brand and be willing to spend that brand in fighting for causes they believe in and speaking out on things that they see as societal injustices. I'm wondering if each of you, again, we can go around and maybe you can focus our attention on one particular athlete or instance of this that you've seen that might or might not remind you of what existed in sports in the past that might be featured in this exhibit. I know obviously Claire's affection and following of Jackie Robinson is a story that we remembered in its 75th anniversary this year, but let's go around and see if we can talk about maybe some examples of women in particular, the WNBA comes most to mind of these people who have been willing to stand up and speak out for about societal injustice. So let's start maybe with Carrie this time or Carrie, if you were still thinking. Well, you mean societal injustice, not necessarily within their sport. Oh, no, you can do within their sport too. Sometimes it is obviously within the sport, but other times it can be like the player, I can't remember her last name, but Maya who took a year off from playing in the NBA to go to bat for the man who would become her husband when she freed him from jail. So we can go whatever way you feel you wanna go on this. It's not a constricted question. So yeah, because I mean, the first thing that came to mind for me was the original nine, which Billie Jean King was one of the nine in tennis. And at the time they really realized that there was no real path for professionalism in tennis. And so they organized and made it happen, made a league and started getting paid. Payments were made under the table and it was sort of like shame at your tourism to get paid. So I think that in the world of like taking a stand on something that's something that just comes to my mind as something that's impacted us today. I know it's not a recent example, but I think it still matters today and the equal pay, the agreement that the women's soccer team or women's soccer was able to get recently, I think is related to, you know, 50 years ago. Okay. Iliana, let's go to you next. Yeah, there's just so many different really touch points that have happened. And we look at just from the Los Angeles area and in Southern California, I think, you know, obviously getting back to the Mexico Olympics, that protest and the really extreme backlash that existed and then how the climate has changed. And each time we like to think like, oh, it's so much better now, it's easier. Someone for like, Bron James, Serena Williams, others, you know, the US women's national team that was mentioned, the 99 World Cup winners who decided to come together and help finance the Angel City FC and national women's soccer league team and said, we wanna create the team that we never had. But each time these people speak out either about sport or externally to a person, they say it's still hard. It is still really difficult that there are still criticism, that there's still fear and anxiety over loss of sponsors. There's still great concern and there's still harassment. So taking a stand is becoming more and more normal and more and more celebrated, both internally and externally, but agitation still has consequences and they're not universal across the board, depending on the person's race, gender, ethnicity, class, all of those things come into play in terms of how it lands and how it's received. And athletes know that. And even those who come from the most privileged of backgrounds are still nervous because there's still some uncertainty of how will this land, how will this impact my future wages? What will this do? Will I be able to continue to participate? So before I come to you, Claire, I wanna just echo what you're saying. And that's one reason why I'm perhaps so heartened when I begin to see these protests or these sort of callouts to issues that are looking at social injustice. When I see an entire team doing it together or when I see a league like the WNBA supporting their players from the start in terms of shirts that they are going to be wearing that are going to be about particular issues. Obviously it's gonna help enormously if in doing so, you have the support of your teammates and you have the support ultimately of the league, it's gonna be a less threatening situation, but there are certainly individuals who are still speaking out without any of those you know, kind of guarantees. So I certainly take your point. Claire, great place to pick up with you. Yes, back in the summer of George Floyd, the NBA obviously jumped to and the WNBA jumped to and I covered a sport where I had absolutely zero expectations of baseball following those leagues. The reason being that African American numbers have dwindled to the point where it's almost back to just a couple of years after Jackie Robinson came in and 47 a couple of years ago, there were 11 teams that had one or fewer African Americans. That doesn't mean the league isn't diverse, it's more diverse than it's ever been. It's just that the people of color that you see don't necessarily come from America. So they're not going to readily relate to George Floyd and the African American male African American experience in dealing with police officers or the law or the court system. So Adam Jones, who was on the Orioles was asked, why don't you take a knee? Which is an easy question for the person with the notebook to ask, but Adam was honest. He said, because they can make us disappear. And he said, besides, who am I going to talk to in my clubhouse where I'm the only African American? So George Floyd and some other unfortunate people were shot and or killed that summer and this movement, it awakened in baseball and it started with an outfielder here in Philadelphia, Andrew McCutcheon, who wrote a letter to his young son having the conversation, what do you do when you stop? This is a child and he's Andrew McCutcheon and he's having this conversation with a little boy because he knows he'll have to have it in 10 years with a teenager. And he, someone published the letter and the letter came to the attention of Curtis Granderson and out of that germ of an idea came the Players Alliance and a group of African American players, many from past, some from the present, the past outnumbering the present, but they formed an organization and they said, baseball, you have to do something. And since then, baseball has poured literally hundreds of millions of dollars into its relationship, not only with the Players Alliance, but the union. And they are planting seeds all over the country, whether it be refurbishing fields, putting in educational components in what they call underserved communities, i.e. way out in the sticks or in the very, very parts of the inner cities where scouts stopped going many years ago. And you're seeing these partnerships, the union and management pretty much at each other, but on this they agree. And in total transparency, this Claire Smith Center wouldn't exist if it weren't now for that partnership because there are major funders to get this center up and running. So I do have to say that and Temple's grateful for that, but you see out of one letter can come an amazing impactful moment or moments. And we're lucky to witness that through the decades. Through the decades. Well, I don't think we can leave here without talking about women's soccer, U.S. women's soccer, because I can look at Kerry and I can think about Title IX. And I think arguably Title IX is responsible for the fact that we have had a U.S. women's soccer team that as far back as the 90s literally won the World Championships and has continued to play on a global stage with great results. And aside from that, those women have been relentless. And again, I go back to Kerry's bringing us back to the question of equal pay. Equal pay is something they have just completed. I would say it's probably been a three or four year very, very strong campaign that has taken them into court against the people who are their federation. Against their own leadership, they've taken them to court. And they have used social media and they have spoken out in ways that are blunt and to the point and certainly haven't held back in their criticism of the people who are running their game. And in the end, they have won and they have signed the first contract that gives equal pay to both the men and the women who are playing on an international fields in soccer. This was thought years ago to be an impossible battle for them to fight. So again, we don't have a lot of time but I'd like to go around and see if any of you, each of you may have a thought on sort of call out about what's women's soccer has taught us through Title IX and also through their own incredible efforts to persevere and to win in this case. Kerry, you wanna start with Title IX and- Yeah. I think what they've taught us is to speak up. I think when there's something wrong, we get used to it. We think, oh, I'm lucky to be here, right? But if there's something wrong, you can speak up and Title IX gives you the backup to go and do something about it. And I think that women's soccer is going to change everything but the mom that we interviewed of a softball player in Georgia whose field was unsafe at her school fought to get changes made to the field and for a high school girls softball team that now can play safely without holes with protection against the dugout, things like that, that they just accept it as okay but now the changes are made. I think she said it well. She said, my daughter may not be a professional softball player but she is going to be a professional and she needs to know that it's not okay to accept that. And so I think that for the Title IX example, whatever that wrong is that we're experiencing or we're seeing that we should speak up about it and we do have the ability to, the right and the ability to do so, whatever that is. Great, thanks for getting us going on this. So who wants to go next? Do Vianna, Claire? Yeah, yeah, I'm happy to chime in. I happened to have worked in markets where Alex Morgan was as part of the equal pay fight spelled out, she was in Orlando and I was in Orlando at the time. You know, this was a hard journey for her. It was a hard journey for a lot of the team. It's really calling into question like as you push back on this how is this fundamentally going to impact your wages? The structure that existed in some ways had some advantages for the women that were important. This was really key on their salary structure in between, even though it was not equal, it was substantial and significant important and to kick that hornet's nest and to not know which direction it was gonna go was a really difficult thing and it was a heavy burden to carry while pursuing a World Cup. And this was not something that came very easily and I have seen for Alex in particular watching how she's gained confidence in each step, how the feedback that she's gotten, how the social and political climate in our country has just kind of continued to embolden her, the banding together of players to push back against sexual harassment within their own domestic league, you know, pushing back against those who violated boundaries and were inappropriate and then for Alex that she became a mom, how that changed again and just made her digging even more because she was inspired by her own daughter. So I think that journey is kind of mirrored across the entire team and I think the lesson that I can see from it is like, it's not easy and it's hard, but if you do hard things, there can be tremendous rewards and that is how we move forward. And so those are the lessons that I think are kind of reverberating across all sport for women and equally for the women who are covering them. Like these things are not easy and that's okay, but we have to push through and there are great rewards if we do. Great. Claire, why don't you close us out on this one and then I'm gonna begin to wind us down. So go ahead. Well, when I think about the bravery, this sheer tenacity of the women, I also think of the larger backdrop, they were doing this often speaking, answering back, pushing back against the president of the United States who had probably single-handedly made Colin Kaepernick disappear, as Andrew Jones said. So it was kind of a fight or die thing with the middle being surrender and go and accept shut up and dribble, shut up and kick, but they were braver than that and they were tougher than that. And I think the country really picked up on that and had their backs, not the way that probably a lot of more conservative types wanted to see it go. And they won, they won out, it wasn't a tie, it wasn't nil-nil, they flat out won. And if you can't point to that and show your little girls and your granddaughters and your grandsons and your little boys what bravery and tenacity is about, then you have to open your eyes wider. Yeah. Well, evidently everyone opened their eyes wide when we started this, but I made a technical error. So I am going to now call on the tech people to walk us through the slides that I referenced when I was introducing our wonderful panel. And I think now that you know them and you have a feel for them I'm gonna just narrate them very quickly as I turn this over to the actual people who know how to do this as opposed to me. And then we'll come back and have a brief goodbye to all of you, but let's look at those pictures and just walk us through very quickly what we missed earlier. So as soon as they start coming up I'll give you the heads up.