Promote, support, and champion women…every day, not just on International Women’s Day or Women’s History Month.

I’m thinking much about these points, wowed by the progress that women in sports have accomplished since the earliest days of my career, while still asking “why has it taken this long?”

One of the things I’m greatly encouraged by is how the way we tell the stories about women’s sports is evolving. And while much of this rests on how societies are rethinking the role, import, and investment in women’s sports, it’s also highly dependent upon access: to present-day sources but also, vitally, to past accounts, statistics, and more.

When I began work on my PhD thesis, which became my first book, The Making of Les Bleus: Sport in France, 1958-2010, I had to decide how to treat this issue. Given my funding, geography, and time limitations—as a U.S.-based graduate student who worked full time, I could not do it all—I opted to focus on the youth development systems for boys that developed in France since the 1970s for football (with a secondary focus on basketball). Government archives that included policy-making documents and reports served as one key backbone of my work; another were the French Football Federation’s governance reports for its professional clubs’ youth academies; a third pillar were reports in national press archives.  

There were mentions of girls’ sports programs, notably among the government materials that focused on the creation of sport-study sections within schools for both sexes in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I included such information when available, but more often than not there were more questions about sport for women and girls than there were answers. The press archives provided an even more dismal scenario, with very little coverage (if at all) of women’s sports. And what little existed was often relegated to a scant 1-2 paragraphs. There was not enough material available in the archives I had access to to craft a more fulsome picture.

While I could have written one chapter at the end that addressed the issue, I decided not to. Personally, at the time, I perceived such a move as ghettoizing the women’s game and programs, consigning them to a separate “other” chapter as an afterthought.

Nearly twenty years later, things have changed, sources have changed, access to certain types of archival material has changed, and I have changed, too. Critically, digitization has enabled more specialty press to be accessible from the Internet, while YouTube provides access to archival games (or parts therein). Of equal importance: the ways our digitally connected 2020s world facilitates and embraces connections and conversations across time zones and continents. Social media, Zoom, WhatsApp are key tools that I did not have access to for the first book.

My current in-process book project, with a working title of Basketball Empire: A Hidden Story of the (WN)NBA’s Globalization, takes a different track. Admittedly it’s been much delayed, the result of professional work commitments and the market; but it has benefitted from the time. The rebooted project, as the title suggests, takes a holistic approach to the question of how and why France became a main pipeline for international talent into the world’s elite professional leagues.

The narrative evolves around the larger story, of how women’s and men’s basketball have evolved—albeit differently—to feed into the big-picture context. This is something that, despite the extra time it’s taking, I’m fiercely proud of. Because, as I’ve delved into the stories of women’s basketball in France, I’m discovering how much their game and experiences influenced key male trailblazers.  

Part of it is the way the game has long been considered a sport that girls could play, just as much as boys (unlike football, which was long stigmatized as too masculine, too physical, and too “other” for women). But much more of it is about the role models.  

It’s the sons who grew up in the heart of the women’s game, tagging along at their mothers’ practices and competitions; it’s young men who observed what killer female players did on and off court; it’s also the women’s national team who, before their male counterparts, won the country’s first FIBA World Cup medal and European championship titles.

There’s your sneak peak of this project.  

As you watch tonight’s NCAA Championship Final between the University of Connecticut and University of South Carolina, think about how many current and rising generation players, male and female, are being inspired to the game thanks to players like Paige Bueckers and coaches like Dawn Staley.

For now, I leave you with my recent Sport Integrity Journal piece (p74-77) on how sports diplomacy can empower female leadership in sports.