As Congress Works to Protect College Sports, Women Shouldn’t Pay the Price

When a piece of legislation includes the word “protect” in its title, most people assume it does what it says. But after years of fighting for fairness in women’s athletics—on the track, in the courtroom, and all the way to the Supreme Court—I’ve learned to read the fine print.

The Protect College Sports Act as currently drafted is not what it sounds like. Unclear language could be misused to dismantle the very state laws women like me fought for—laws that ensure female athletes compete against other females, not against men.

I know what unfairness looks like because I lived it. My freshman year at Idaho State University, I competed in track and cross-country against a male athlete who had been cleared to run in women’s events. Race after race, my teammates and I trained harder, pushed ourselves further, and he still beat us every single time.

The frustration was crushing. College athletics are about increasing one’s chances to beat the odds and get closer to victory. As collegiate athletes, we don’t train and sacrifice daily for a participation trophy. We want to win, we aim to win, we compete to win.

That truth for myself and other young women is why I refused to stay silent. My attorneys with Alliance Defending Freedom helped me intervene in Little v. Hecox to stand against the American Civil Liberties Union’s challenge to Idaho’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act—the first state law of its kind in the nation. We carried that case through years of litigation, all the way to the Supreme Court. This past June, we won. The high court upheld Idaho’s law, affirming that every state has the right to protect women’s athletic competition from male intrusion.

Twenty-seven states now have laws protecting women’s sports. Female athletes in those states can compete knowing the rules are fair. The Protect College Sports Act could put all of that at risk. It limits state authority over eligibility rules—which I fear would include laws saying men aren’t eligible for women’s teams. And that could throw open the door to even more years of litigation. The same lawyers who spent years trying to strike down Idaho’s law in my case could misuse this bill to take another run at it.

We cannot afford to risk going backward. The frustration, the defeat, the sense of being abandoned by the institutions that were supposed to protect us—I felt all of it. I don’t want the next generation of female athletes to endure it.

If you care about women’s sports, call your senators and your representative. Tell them to fix this bill before it reaches a vote. Demand that any legislation claiming to protect college sports actually protects all college athletes—including the women who have been fighting for years to compete on a level playing field.

I did not take my case to the Supreme Court just to watch Congress needlessly risk what we accomplished. Women’s sports are worth defending, and I intend to keep defending them.

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