I once did a lesson where I showed my classes slides with photos of the interscholastic sports teams from when I was a student at their high school, Arroyo Grande, in the 1960s. I’d show the varsity football team, then the girls varsity soccer team. That was a blank slide. Then I’d show the boys varsity basketball team—it was a good one, coached by Mario Pecile, who became a legend—then the girls b-ball team. Blank slide.

I was making a point.

There were not girls’ interscholastic sports when I was in high school. They had Aqua Festival, which featured synchronized swimming. There were intramural sports, and one of the biggest clubs on campus was the Girls’ Athletic Association, but it if someone had asked you in 1968, “Are you going to the girls’ varsity game tonight in San Luis?” in 1968, you would have thought them insane.

That athletic desert for young women persisted until Title IX was passed in 1972, mandating that schools provide young women equal opportunity to participate in interscholastic sports.

There was no Title IX in 1910, but Arroyo Grande Union High School did have a women’s basketball team. The were 4-0–not, not a big season, and the scores indicate that the baskebtball spent a lot of time on the ground (“ground,” not “floor.” No AGUHS gym until 1937), but they had uniforms and they had a reputation and the newspapers covered their games. And we have this marvelous photo from the Bennett-Loomis Archives.

I don’t know what happened between 1910 and Title IX, but it was a tragic waste in human potential. Young women, to borrow a line from On the Waterfront, should’ve been contenders. A young woman and former student, Sarah—a fellow Basset Hound lover–put me in mind of this. She posted a picture of herself scaling a climbing gym’s wall and it looked as if she wasn’t having much trouble at all. Sarah is a terrific athlete, a gymnast, small but powerful, and flexible, too, in ways I haven’t been since I was a baby and could put my foot in my own mouth, a habit that continued, figuratively, long into adulthood.

So, thinking of Sarah and other women athletes I, of course, made a little video.

I follow Women’s NCAA basketball now and again, and so Caitlin Clark’s in here. Nelly Korda’s clubhead points directly at the target in her follow-through, and you have to be about a flexible as Baby Me to do that. Her swing is both fluid and immnesely powerful. Tia Jones—okay, I’ll admit it, she is beautiful, she reminds of FloJo, whom I adored—but I don’t see how anybody can leap hurdles, let alone the way she does in the clip.

And, of course, Simone Biles is my hero because she has both the courage of a champion and the kind of honesty that requires far more courage. She risked a storm of condemnation when she admitted her vulnerablity, her emotional exhaustion, at the last Olympics, and withdrew from some events. She’s back. The video clip of her tumbling run is from last fall.

All four have one more trait that makes them great athletes. They are a joy to watch. I’m looking forward to the Paris Olympics because of young American women.