Title IX at the Net: How One Law Built a Sport

In January 1986, Flo Hyman collapsed on a bench in Matsue City, Japan. She was 31 years old. She had spent the last year of her life traveling between professional matches overseas and congressional hearing rooms back home, fighting for a law she believed would change everything for the girls who came after her.

Forty years later, 16,838 people showed up to a regular-season professional volleyball match in Omaha, Nebraska. Most of them were women. And almost none of them knew they were sitting inside a building that Flo Hyman helped construct.

Not the arena. The audience.

The Law and the Pipeline

Title IX passed on June 23, 1972. Flo Hyman was eighteen years old that summer, about to leave El Camino College for the University of Houston, where she would become the first female scholarship athlete in school history. She was already 6'5". She already had the spike they would call the Flying Clutchman. What she did not yet have was any guarantee that the sport she loved would survive long enough for another generation to play it.

Before Title IX, fewer than 295,000 girls played high school sports in the entire country. Volleyball barely registered. In 1971, just 17,952 girls played high school volleyball nationwide. There were almost no college volleyball scholarships. The women who played did so largely without funding, without facilities, without institutional support.

Then the law changed. And the numbers started climbing.

What Flo Fought For

Hyman did not just benefit from Title IX. She fought to protect it. After leading Team USA to its first Olympic volleyball medal at the 1984 Los Angeles Games, she could have simply gone to Japan to play professionally and collected her paycheck. She did go to Japan. But she kept coming home.

Before leaving the country, she joined forces with Coretta Scott King, Geraldine Ferraro, and Sally Ride to lobby for the Civil Rights Restoration Act, which would strengthen Title IX after a Supreme Court decision had gutted its enforcement. She testified before Congress. She used the platform her spike had built to argue that girls deserved the same chance to play that boys had always been given.

Her teammate Ruth Nelson said it plainly: "Flo didn't just play for us. She played for everybody."

Hyman died in January 1986, before the Restoration Act passed. She never saw it become law in 1988. She never saw what it produced.

The Explosion

Here is what Title IX produced.

By 1990, high school girls' volleyball participation had jumped from 17,952 to over 300,000. By 2023, it had reached 470,488, making volleyball the most popular team sport for high school girls in America. More girls now play volleyball than basketball.

At the college level, NCAA Division I women's volleyball grew from almost nothing in the early 1970s to 347 programs by 2024. Each of those programs can offer 12 full scholarships. That is over 4,000 full rides available every year, in a sport that barely existed at the collegiate level when Flo Hyman was growing up in Inglewood.

USA Volleyball membership hit 408,000 in 2023, a 9.6% jump in a single year. Junior girls' registration alone reached 333,208, a 40% increase over ten years. The number of clubs registered with USA Volleyball nearly doubled in less than a decade.

And then there is the attendance. On August 30, 2023, Nebraska packed 92,003 fans into Memorial Stadium for a volleyball match against Omaha. It broke the world record for attendance at a women's sporting event. Not a women's volleyball event. A women's sporting event. Period.

These are not random numbers. They are a pipeline. Title IX created girls' programs. Girls' programs created club volleyball. Club volleyball created college scholarships. College scholarships created the most popular women's NCAA sport in the country. And that sport created a generation of adults who did not just watch volleyball. They identified with it.

The Audience That Did Not Exist

This is the part that most people miss when they talk about professional volleyball finally working in America.

The first Major League Volleyball launched in 1987, one year after Hyman's death. Six teams. Games on ESPN. It folded mid-season in 1989. Then came the USPV in 2002. Four teams. One season. Gone. Then the Premier Volleyball League from 2012 to 2017. Discontinued. Every single attempt at professional women's volleyball in this country collapsed within three years.

The easy explanation was always money. But the real problem was simpler and deeper. The audience did not exist.

In 1987, the first generation of Title IX girls was barely out of college. They had not yet built careers, families, disposable income. They had not yet become the demographic that buys season tickets and watches ESPN on Thursday nights and drives their daughters to club practice at 6 AM on Saturdays.

By the 2020s, that generation had arrived. And their daughters had arrived behind them.

The women filling arenas in Omaha and Austin and Grand Rapids for MLV and LOVB matches are not casual fans who wandered in. They are women who grew up playing. Who went to college on volleyball scholarships, or wished they had. Who coached their kids' club teams. Who understand the difference between a 5-1 and a 6-2. They are the first generation in American history for whom organized volleyball was a birthright, not an accident.

LOVB understood this instinctively. Before the league ever played a professional match, it built 58 youth clubs with over 16,000 athletes across 26 states. It did not start at the top and hope fans would show up. It started at the bottom, inside the pipeline that Title IX built, and grew upward.

The Straight Line

I think about this when I am standing courtside with my camera. I think about the 14-year-old in the stands wearing a LOVB Houston jersey who has no idea that the reason she is sitting in that seat, watching Olympians play professional volleyball in her city, traces directly back to a law passed before her grandmother graduated high school.

The line is straight, even if nobody draws it.

Title IX to Flo Hyman's scholarship at Houston. Flo Hyman's advocacy to the Civil Rights Restoration Act. The Restoration Act to the enforcement that kept college programs funded. Funded programs to 347 Division I teams and 4,000 scholarships. Scholarships to a generation of women who built their identity around the sport. That generation to the 16,838 people in Omaha, the 92,003 in Lincoln, the sold-out pro matches in cities that never had a professional volleyball team before 2024.

Flo Hyman did not live to see any of it. She died on a bench in Japan at 31, fighting for a sport she believed deserved more. She was right. The proof is not in the record books. It is in the arenas, every single night, in the faces of women who grew up playing the sport she helped make possible.

She played for everybody. Everybody finally showed up.

Matt Powell is a professional sports content creator who crafts creative assets that drive athlete and team branding strategies.