From Title IX trailblazer to Valkyries superfan: Lucy Bledsoe's full-circle basketball journey

CBS News

14 hours ago

Back in the 1970s, when Lucy Bledsoe was a teenager, her high school didn't even have a girls' basketball team.
"Luckily, my brothers had coached me a whole lot growing up. I have one brother in particular who just really loved drilling me over and over and over and over on everything from my layups, my shot but there was no team to play on and that always really disappointed me," she said.
Bledsoe said that for a while there, she just played tennis because that was the only sport offered to girls. But she never quite got over the fact that basketball was her true love.
Then, Gloria Steinem came to town.
"I learned a couple of really huge things. One, I learned that Title IX was a law that had been passed two years previously, which said I had a right to a basketball team at my high school," Bledsoe said.
So, Bledsoe got straight to work on getting a women's basketball team at her school.
"We began petitioning the Portland Public School Boards as well as going down to the Oregon state legislature in Salem about bringing Oregon into compliance with Title IX," Bledsoe said.
Bledsoe said she truly believed the process would be easy but then the blowback came.
"The boys basketball coach literally found me in a dark hall by myself, this is literally true, pushed me against the wall and said if you don't shut up, you'll be sorry," Bledsoe said.
Still, Bledsoe didn't let that stop her, and by her senior year, she won, successfully getting a team at her school. And, as if out of a movie, that team went on to win the state championship.
"It was really a fun story that had this wonderful ending with lots of yeah," Bledsoe said.
But of course, that storybook ending wasn't the end of Lucy Bledsoe. She moved to the Bay Area for college and never left, becoming a writer and publishing several novels, including one based on that high school experience.
"I thought, wow, I didn't realize what I had been through because I was just trying to get through as a 16, 17,18 year old, so it was very emotional writing it," Bledsoe said.
Bledsoe has traveled the country telling her story. One of the more satisfying things she says is to see just how far women's basketball has come.
"I love the WNBA. I love the sisterhood of it. I love the differences in women's basketball and men's basketball," she said.
Bledsoe, like thousands of others here in the Bay, has become a diehard Valkyries fan.
She's so excited to see the support the team is getting from the community, and while there is still a way to go in getting true equality for female athletes, she's happy to have helped pave the way for these elite basketball players.
"It's amazing and yeah, we do have a ways to go, but I think we're on a good trajectory," Bledsoe said.