From the Field to the Future

January 21, 2021

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Pictured: Alexa Zartman-Ball

The U.S women’s soccer team last won the World Cup on July 7, 2019. As a viewer and college athlete myself, watching these elite female athletes dominate the field was one of the most exciting moments of my lifetime. Even more exhilarating than the event, to me, was the international conversation about equal pay and treatment that this team’s fourth World Cup win initiated.

While these games were being played, a class-action lawsuit was pending against the United States Soccer Federation claiming unequal pay and gender-based discrimination. Despite what seemed like a strong case, a federal judge ruled against the Women’s National Team members in May 2020, throwing out the key equal pay and discrimination claims (other claims in the lawsuit were allowed to move forward to trial).

Like many of the players on the U.S. women’s soccer team, I, too, was recruited as a collegiate athlete. Also, like them, I faced a discriminatory undergraduate athletic experience in which men’s teams are treated differently than the women’s in terms of budgets, staffing, and support. Like many female athletes before us, my teammates and I push for internal change only to be met with resistance and a substandard response.

Beginning my athletic career at The Madeira School, I never knew such a biased environment for women’s sports existed beyond my girls’ high school. My girls’ school athletic community was full of supportive women, coaches, and mentors who continually ingrained in us that the only thing stopping us from greatness was ourselves. I experienced women lifting up other women, the game stands full of supportive parents and female mentors, and a safe environment in which to grow stronger. I believed my next athletic venture on the collegiate softball field would be the same.

I quickly realized after beginning my college career, however, that women have to fight twice as hard for some of the same opportunities afforded to men in a coed environment. Although I have benefitted from great head coaches who supported me in college, I have also experienced first-hand women’s teams having to fight for gym time, trainers being consistently absent during practice times, and requests to have a female coach / representative included among the coaching / athletic training staffs ignored. While conversations have begun this year regarding the lack of gender equity and diversity in our athletic department, we have yet to see change.

I know I am not alone in recognizing the gender inequity in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), which determines the rules and policies surrounding university athletics in the United States. Nor am I the first female athlete at my college who has identified areas in need of improvement. The ultimate question is, what will finally prompt the long-overdue change? The answer lies in role models such as the women on the U.S. national soccer team who inspired me to advocate for change. The next generation of female athletes entering universities will need to see the women who came before them in order to take the lead.

Madeira’s motto is, “Launching the women who change the world.” While I have always strived to be a woman creating change, be it at my college or within my athletics department, we need the next generation of female leaders to continue the fight. To all the girls’ school athletes, I say cherish the time you have in your school’s athletic departments. Use that time of support and growth to become the leaders we need to continue changing the world to be more fair and equitable for all.

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Alexa Zartman-Ball has been the Research Intern for NCGS since 2019. She is a member of The Madeira School Class of 2017 and Sarah Lawrence College Class of 2021.