We were the pinney generation. This is a pinney. This is how you put it on, sort of like an apron, with the strings in front. Then you tie it in the back – but half the time, when we wore these things over our white t-shirts, during a game the tie would come loose and the pinney would fly up in front of our faces. So, if you look at our stats and they don’t look too impressive, keep in mind that half the time, we were shooting blind.

We wore pinnies in the days before Stanford issued practice jerseys – or, for that matter, real uniforms or warmups. Until 1977, there were no scholarships. We didn’t travel to Hawaii or Italy or France; our big trip each year was a bus ride to Reno, Nevada.

We were the pinney generation and because of those pinnies and everything they represented, we were the angry generation. Until 1976, we weren't allowed in Maples Pavilion, but instead had to play across campus in Roble – which is now a yoga studio. The Stanford men did not have to play in the yoga studio. But we did.

My teammates Sonia Jarvis, Stephanie Erickson, and I spent our free time in the athletic director’s office, insisting that he being to implement Title IX. That hugely influential law had passed in 1972, two years before I arrived on campus, but we were smart Stanford students, so we knew about Title IX, and knew that it required schools to provide equal opportunity to women. After a while the athletic director refused to meet with us anymore, so we staged very small sit-ins outside of his office.

We were the pinney generation and we were the angry generation, but we were also the grateful generation, because throughout most of the seventies, we had coaches who volunteered their time to teach us how to win. How to lose, too – athletes always learn that one way or another – but those coaches taught us that victory was worth striving for, and they showed us how to achieve it. They taught us what Stanford professor Sandra Bem, who popularized the word androgyny, also taught us: that sex roles are bogus, that women need not be dainty, delicate, decorative, or deferential. No need to limit ourselves to traditional feminine games. These coaches gave us permission to be outstanding: to be strong, to be aggressive, to be competitive, to embrace victory unapologetically. Even today, I think it takes courage for women to be outstanding.

Eventually, tired of hearing us rant and rave about inequality, the Stanford athletic director hired two fulltime coaches, Dotty McCrea and Sue Rojcewicz. Our team finally moved out of the yoga studio and into Maples Pavilion. We received real uniforms. We began to travel. Fans began to arrive in the stands. Now, as you know, the Stanford women's basketball program has won two national championships, and produced two Olympic athletes, all under the leadership of their one Olympic coach: Tara VanDerveer. I know I speak for all of the players on Stanford’s early basketball teams when I say we are grateful to Tara and her teams for making us proud to tell people that we are former Stanford basketball players.

Nowadays there are oodles of books about female athletes on the bookshelves, but when I attended Stanford, there were zero. As an aspiring sportswriter interested in the experiences of female athletes, I had zero role models. Then Gay Coburn, my first Stanford basketball coach, arranged for me to have lunch with one of the only women in the country who was writing about her own sports experience, a poet named Barbara Lamblin. That meeting helped me begin to conceive of a career writing about women's sports, which I've been doing for the past 20 years. So, thank you, Gay, for caring about me as a whole person, and for taking the time to help me imagine my own future.

My second Stanford basketball coach, Dotty McCrea, came to Stanford from Immaculata College, in Pennsylvania. There, as the assistant, she had helped them win three national championships. One of the many enduring lessons I learned from Dotty was how (and why) to stand my ground. She and her fabulous assistant, Sue Rojcewicz – who helped the United States earn a silver medal in 1976, the first time women’s basketball was in the Olympics – taught me that I had a right to be there, on the court. They taught me not to let anyone push me around. This is a valuable life lesson, too – not only for basketball players but for all women – not only then, but now.

Pinnies are like aprons: symbolic of a time when women had limited choices: we were expected to stay in the kitchen; stay in subservient roles; stay in Roble Gym. Nowadays, we have many more choices, and much more freedom.

In closing, I’d like to encourage you to pursue your goals, no matter what they might be, even if you have no role models, no one showing you the way. I’d like to encourage you to stand your ground, and not let anyone push you around. Keep your eye on your goal, and never let anything obstruct your view of that goal: not discrimination, not self-doubt, not antiquated pressures to be dainty, delicate, or deferential – and certainly not, never again, a simple red pinney.

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Mariah Burton Nelson is the author of The Stronger Women Get, The More Men Love Football. One of her rebounding records at Stanford remained unbroken for 24 years.