Muffet McGraw served as the head coach of women's basketball at Notre Dame from 1987 to 2020. During her tenure, she led the University to 26 NCAA tournaments, including 7 championship game appearances. In 2011, McGraw was inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame.
Title IX, the federal law that requires schools to provide equal funding for male and female athletic teams, is more than 50 years old, and yet girls and women have still not achieved equity in sports. Participation numbers for girls and women continually lag behind boys and men. Especially at the high school level, where girls have 1.3 million fewer opportunities than boys to play sports.
Given the disparity of opportunity, funding, marketing, promotions and support you would think that those interested in protecting and advancing women’s sports would focus on the one thing that would truly help women’s sports at every level. Funding.
But instead, some elected officials focus on legislation like the poorly named ‘Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025’ at the national level and, here in Indiana, the innocuously named ‘Student Eligibility in Interscholastic Sports.’
The only concern of the legislators proposing these bills is to keep transgender athletes out of girls and women’s sports. According to the NCAA, there are fewer than 10 transgender athletes out of the 500,000 collegiate athletes presently competing. And only 35 out of six million high school athletes. Why aren’t these legislators more concerned with what is happening to the millions of girls and women who are not receiving the benefits of Title IX that they are entitled to?
And, unfortunately, it isn’t just legislators. The NCAA moved with atypical lighting speed to fall in line with a federal mandate to ban transgender women in college sports without even mustering an argument. Yet, close to 90% of their universities are not in compliance with Title IX. The recent settlement in the House class action lawsuit, and the current NCAA rules related to name, image, and likeness (NIL) are putting women even further behind men in the pursuit of equity.
You would think that elected officials in Congress and the Indiana Statehouse who want to “protect women’s sports” would do something about the growing financial equity. Instead, they are too busy keeping transgender athletes out of women’s sports to actually do something that meaningfully benefits women’s sports.
