Another contributor, Mariah Burton Nelson, has written elsewhere of feeling in the early 1980s that she had to invent how to write about personal experiences in women's sport because so little was then being published on the subject. The more than two hundred responses amazed and delighted us. Their open exuberance, intensity, and, yes, pain surpassed our largest hopes. The works women sent us, written primarily since the 1970s, eschewed charm-school ambiguity and evasion. Each told sportswomen's, as distinct from sport power's, personal story.
Sportswomen take themselves seriously enough today to tell their stories out loud.
It's time for the rest of us to listen. Across that line lie women's rights to be fully who we are and to tell it like it is. Don't bet against us. Sportswomen are athletes, trained to succeed. We're ready to do whatever it takes.