No doubt female athletes have to be strong AF.
They climb mountains, perform back flips on four-inch-wide beams, run an entire damn marathon at a five-and-a-half-minute-mile clip. Heck, Serena Williams even won a Grand Slam in her first trimester of pregnancy.
So what’s a few extra barriers to bust through, really?
When they’re not becoming the first woman to hold a full-time coaching position with an MLB squad (hey, Alyssa Nakken!) or fighting to net the same payday as their male, arguably less successful, counterparts (oh, hiiiii four-time World Cup-winning U.S. women’s national soccer team), they’re simply hustling for some damn recognition.
After then-University of Oregon star Sabrina Ionescu scored a triple-double in the 2019 NCAA tournament, she was surprised to see ESPN fixate only on the men who had reached the same heights. “They had posted something about Ja Morant getting one and said that there was only eight or seven people that ever got one in the NCAA tournament, and they listed all the men that had gotten a triple-double,” she later explained to the network’s magazine. “And so I was like, ‘All right, well this is my chance, I’m going to say something.'”
Her post-game snipe: “It probably still won’t get recognized because ESPN never recognizes women’s sports.”