Three years ago, I did something that changed the trajectory of my life: I spoke out.
When Lia Thomas joined my swim team at the University of Pennsylvania, I became the first member of that team to go public, first anonymously and then by name, about what we were experiencing. I testified before Congress. I traveled the country. I gave hundreds of interviews and sat across from senators, journalists, and coaches and told the truth about what it felt like to be a female athlete whose concerns were dismissed, whose privacy was violated, and whose institution looked us in the eye and told us their decision was “non-negotiable.”
I was not prepared for how isolating it would be to do the right thing with nobody standing beside you.
What followed those three years was extraordinary, and also clarifying. I watched a movement grow. I watched lawmakers pass legislation. I watched public opinion shift. And I watched organization after organization enter the women’s sports space: advocacy groups, legal coalitions, political campaigns, each one focused almost entirely on a single issue.
That work matters. I have been part of it, I am still a part of it, and I believe in it.
But somewhere in those three years of being inside this fight, I started to notice something that no one was talking about: the female athlete herself. Not the policy. Not the headline. Her.
She is underfunded and under-supported. She is navigating the recruiting process with no roadmap. She is trying to figure out who she is outside of her sport with no one to help her build that identity. She is being told by her coaches and her institutions to stay quiet, fall in line, and be grateful for what she has. And when she does speak up, about anything, not just the issues that make the news, she finds out fast that she is alone.
That is why I built Athletes for Action, alongside several other amazing women who saw the same gap and refused to let it stay empty.
I have spent three years in and around women’s sports advocacy, and I can tell you: there is no shortage of organizations fighting for female athletes. But I could not find a single one that was building for her. Building the community, the knowledge, the skills, and the platform she needs to advocate for herself in every room she walks into, in every chapter of her athletic life and her life after.
That is the gap Athletes for Action exists to fill, and it is the reason I built it.
We started close to home. Our first chapter launched in Pennsylvania, the state where my story began, because that felt right. We are now in Colorado as well, and we have a national chapter open to any high school athlete in the country who wants to be part of this. Because this problem is not regional. It is everywhere.
Athletes for Action is built on one belief: “The biggest thing missing in women’s sports right now is not another advocacy campaign. It is community.”
A4A is not a one-issue organization. Yes, I know that issue intimately, and we are not afraid of it. But female athletes deserve more than a movement that shows up only when the news cycle demands it. They deserve an organization that is there for the whole ride. Through recruiting, through Title IX violations that never make the news, through the moment they cross the finish line of their last race and have to figure out who they are next.
We are building that through local and national chapters, a six-unit curriculum that covers everything from Title IX law to the science of sport to how to actually change a policy at your school. We are building it through mentorship programs, scholarship resources, mental performance training, and a community of women who have been where you are and came out the other side ready to lead.
Because here is what three years taught me: the silence is the problem. Not just the silence my teammates kept. The silence that the entire sports world keeps about everything a female athlete actually goes through.
We are ending that silence. One athlete, one chapter, one conversation at a time.
No female athlete should have to fight alone. I know what that costs. And I am not building another organization that shows up for the controversy and disappears for everything else.
We are here for all of it.
Paula Scanlan Co-Founder and Executive Director, Athletes for Action
