Title IX Opens the Door
June 1972. A US law that changed girls' and women's basketball
In the early 1970s, girls in the United States had few chances to play school sports. In 1972, only about 295,000 girls played high school sports, about 7% of all high school athletes.
On 23 June 1972, President Richard Nixon signed Title IX into law. It says that no person in the United States may, because of their sex, be shut out of any education program that receives federal money. The law never mentions sports, but rules published in 1975 spelled out how it applied to school and college sports.
The numbers changed fast. By the 2018 to 2019 school year, 3.4 million girls played high school sports, and the number of women playing college sports had grown about seven times. College women's basketball grew with it: the AIAW ran national tournaments from 1972, and the NCAA held its first women's championship in 1982.
What changed
With teams, coaches and scholarships open to them, far more girls started playing young and kept playing. The talent pool for college teams, the national team and later the professional leagues grew many times over.