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On the cusp of induction to the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in Knoxville, Dr. Donna Lopiano took time to speak student athletes at Walters State Community College Thursday.

For Lopiano, who has been recognized among the most powerful people in sports by organizations like Fox News and The Sporting News, it could be as many as her 14th induction into various halls of fame.

But this one is special, at least in part because it’s in the home of the late legend Pat Summitt.

“Another accident of history was growing up in the era of Pat Summitt and Jody Conradt and some of these first women’s basketball icons. I was fortunate enough to have close relationships with Joan Cronan, Chris(tine) Grant at Iowa, and it’s like we are this little club of lucky women at places where we were fairly powerful within our institutions because we were pretty outspoken and expected certain things,” she said.

Lopiano was born in Southern Connecticut where she was a standout multi-sport athlete. Lopiano participated in 26 national championships in four sports and was a nine-time All-American at four different positions in softball, a sport in which she played on six national championship teams.

She coached men’s and women’s volleyball, women’s basketball and softball and coached the Italian national women’s softball team.

But it wasn’t her playing nor her coaching that earned her induction into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame where she was picked for her contributions to the game.

She served for 18 years as the University of Texas at Austin Director of Women’s Athletics and is a past-president of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women.

During her tenure at Texas, she constructed what many believed to be the premiere women’s athletics program in the country; twice earning the top program in the nation award.

All eight University of Texas sports were consistently ranked in the nation’s top ten in Division I where they earned 18 national championships in six different sports, produced 51 individual sport national champion athletes, 57 Southwest Conference championships and 395 All-American athletes, dozens among them Olympians and world champions.

“It was an adventure of a lifetime,” she said. “It was an accident of history. Who would have thought that my first gig would be at a separate athletic department, not under the thumb of men’s football or basketball.

“There were only nine other schools in the country to be under that culture and you made the culture what it should be instead of what the men did.”

Lopiano is nationally recognized as an expert on gender equity in sports and has tesitified before congress on Title IX and gener equity.

She went on to serve as the CEO of the Women’s Sports Foundation.

She says that Title IX – the Federal civil rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in education programs and activities – must still be fought for and protected.

“One of my good friends at Texas was Barbara Jordan (the first African American woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives), the wisest ethicist I’ve ever known,” Lopiano said. “And she would always say, ‘In a Democracy, you always have to stick up for your rights and each generation forgets the lessons of the generation before them.’”

Lopiano said one of the most surprising things on the 50th anniversary of Title IX was the number of people who didn’t know what Title IX was.

“Now, there’s a generation of parents and kids who take it for granted and they’re not going to learn until it’s too late,” she said.

She said that despite the massive strides in women’s sports under Title IX, it’s not surprising that the law remains at risk.

“None of this surprises me because the leadership of athletics has not changed,” she said. “It’s not interested in affording women equal opportunity. It was against Title IX. It took over women’s sports, became the ADs over men and women so they could control the money.

“If money was going to come into women’s sports, (they’re) going to control it.

“What we’re seeing now is a terrible failure in leadership. You would think that all these dads with daughters would have gotten it, right?”

Lopiano said Title IX itself is a 37-word law, the rest is regulation and interpretation which means – especially with a literalist Supreme Court – Title IX can be vulnerable.

“They’re regulations. They’re non-statutory,” she said. “If you have a Supreme Court that is – as this Supreme Court is – literal. Then show me the statute where it says single-sex sport is allowed. Then you know there is a high risk.”

She said what the court might do if faced with a transgender-related sports issue would also be interesting.

“At the time Title IX passed, nobody had ever heard gender identity,” she said.

Lopiano said there’s an issue that women are still not getting equal opportunity but face losing athletic opportunities or scholarship to someone who was born – and went through puberty – with a male body.

“To me the larger issue is, gender identity is fluid, you can change it whenever you want and to discriminate on the basis of sex or the basis of physical disability is based on immutable characteristics: the biological difference between sexes and the fact that the disabled athlete cannot compete fairly,” she said. “You can’t say gender identity is immutable. There is such a thing as gender fluid. There is such a thing as non-bianary. The whole concept of gender identity is not immutable. You can only deal with what you have which is a male body or a female body.”

She says eventually she believes that there will be a third category of competition – maybe more – for transgender athletes to compete on a level playing field like weight classes in boxing or wrestling.

“I’ve been working on this issue for the last three years and waiting for people to start talking to each other in a sane tone and figuring out what the proper way is to include transgender individuals,” she said.”We’re not even talking about these things that are difficult to talk about, right? We’ve gotta figure it out. Nobody’s even sitting down across the table.

“It’s a tough one.”

Another area that is going to have to be figured out is Name, Image and Likenss and the collectives that are forming outside of college to pay players, Lopiano said.

The NIL allows college players to receive compensation for their Name, Image or Likeness and currently it’s not being handled in a manner that’s Title IX compliant, she said.

“Something is going to happen in that space,” she said, adding the NCAA has abdicated its authority on the matter, waiting for Congress to step in.

“The NCAA is not enforcing its rules,” she said.

Lopiano was among five inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in Knoxville Saturday night. Among the five was Jefferson County native Carolyn Peck.