Female athletes at every level should be celebrating today – it’s the 40th anniversary of Title IX.

The law was enacted to ensure that male and female students would have equal opportunities in every area offered by educational institutions that received government funding, and it made immediate impact. According to an Associated Press story, less than 300,000 girls were participating in high school sports prior to 1972. Two years later the total skyrocketed to 1.3 million.

Today more than 3 million are participating and thriving, many of them never knowing the long journey it took to put them on equal footing with boys sports.

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