Season 4: Life Long Play

Right, right.

And it's such a rich history.

And I have to say, before I answer that question, I just went to the memorial event for a woman in her early 80s.

And the entire event, the entire memorial, all the conversations were about her involvement in sport.

What other generation would you have seen an 80-year-old woman, right, being remembered for how she was a coach and a referee and a player and traveled for sport? So Title IX made such an impact when it came to, yes, of course, these are all mothers and grandmothers and aunts and neighbors of kids who were playing, of girls who were playing.

So seeing girls out there, taking them to the registration, sitting and watching their games, a hundred percent that created this open space for women in their thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties.

And, and those are the women playing at older ages now are ones who didn't start, you know, again with title nine, there were women born before that, that never had that opportunity.

So if you're, if you're under, you know, 55 for sure, but 60, there was a good chance you didn't have sport available to you at all as a girl, or it was, you know, volleyball, you know, a few, you know, non-contact sports, things like that.

So and I do hear the story pretty regularly that women were sitting, you know, women in their 30s, you know, maybe late 20s, 30s in that generation, having children younger was was more normal.

And so sitting there on the sidelines and yelling out commands to their, you know, their daughters or sons at soccer.

And I know one woman tells a story about how the coach came over and said.

OK, moms, you're saying the wrong things like that's not even how we play the sport.

You need to learn the game.

And they were like, well, teach us.

So this concept of, you know, we want to be there for our kids and we want to be present and supportive.

But maybe maybe we could learn the game for that.

But then maybe we could actually learn and just play ourselves.

So it was a combination.

And I do have to recognize that there's there's a huge population of women who who weren't in the conventional space of being, you know, mothers who were in the conventional space of even being, you know, straight women that were already taking part in sport in this, again, kind of.

you know, non-traditional space and don't get the same acknowledgement because it wasn't until the suburban, you know, kind of women who, you know, had the ability and had the resources and had the connections to be able to get in there and, you know, create the leagues and the tournaments and everything else.

So it's kind of mixed, but I will say in general, these communities are all one.

So that's a good thing about it.

Yeah.

Yeah.