In June of 1972, when I was seven, President Nixon signed a set of education laws, and in them was a short section called Title IX. It says, more or less, that no school or college that takes federal money can shut anybody out of its programs because she's a girl. It's only a sentence or two long. Nobody on my street had heard of it. I certainly hadn't. But it's the reason I got to play.

It didn't happen overnight. When I started high school outside Richmond there was no girls' soccer team, so I played on the boys' junior varsity my freshman year and sat on the bench for most of it. A girls' team started my sophomore year: fourteen of us, a volunteer coach who was somebody's dad, and the practice field behind the band's practice field. We didn't care. We were a team.

In college I played four years at a small school in the Shenandoah Valley. No scholarship. We rode to away games in two vans, our uniforms were the men's team's old ones from a few years back, and we played our home games on the men's field after the men were done with it. My best friend on that team, Brenda Bourne, played the whole season one fall on a sprained ankle because we only had fifteen players and if she sat out we'd have to play short. Our crowd, as I said, was parents and a dog.

I'm not complaining. I loved every minute. I'm telling you so you can understand what it was like to sit in my living room this July and watch ninety thousand people stand up for women.

Three years ago, the same team won the gold medal at the Olympics in Athens, Georgia, in front of more than seventy-five thousand people. I found out the score in the newspaper the next morning, because hardly any of it was on television. I remember being so angry I couldn't finish my coffee. They'd won the Olympics and you had to go looking for it.

This summer nobody had to go looking. It was on the network, it was on the front page, it was on every magazine in the checkout line. My girls didn't go looking for those women. Those women came into my living room and found them.

Here's what this summer did to sixteen girls in Virginia Beach. I'm only giving first names. Their parents know who they are.

And the rest of them, all sixteen, have stopped asking me whether girls' games get the good field. They just walk out onto it.

When I was eleven, I didn't know a single woman who played a sport for a living. My girls know twenty by name. They'll grow up thinking a stadium full of people watching women play is normal, and they'll be right, and they'll never know it wasn't always so unless somebody tells them. So I'm telling them. That's what this page is for, partly.

There's talk of a professional league for women now. I'll believe it when I see it. But I believed in a lot of things this summer I wouldn't have believed in June.

Title IX opened the door. This summer, twenty women ran through it, and a whole country full of little girls ran right in behind them. Sixteen of them are mine. Fall season's started. We're 2-1-1. Practice is Tuesday and Thursday, and yes, Kylie, you can play goal.