On May 11, 2023, Ellerie Ulfers was pitching for Washburn High School against district rival Southwest in a varsity softball game in Minneapolis, Minn. The start time had been moved back 15 minutes, to 3:45 p.m., to accommodate an umpire’s schedule. But Ulfers shook it off; she was used to pitching under pressure and in less-than-ideal conditions—she’d been on the varsity team since the year before, as an eighth grader. (In Minneapolis, since most middle school sports were cut due to budget shortfalls in 2015, middle schoolers play on high school teams.)

The game was tense, with the lead going back and forth, and by the end of the sixth inning, the score was tight: Southwest 15–Washburn 13.
But instead of getting another chance to bat and close out the game, Ulfers and all the other athletes were told to go home. “These slow-pitch people just showed up, and our umpire just walked off the field,” Ulfers said. “They just came in and started warming up and essentially kicked us off the field.”

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Ulfers having her varsity game suspended by a slow-pitch league in the sixth inning, one year after Lawless filed her Title IX complaint, neatly sums up how slow and halting the battle for equality in women’s sports can be. It’s not that anyone ever outright says girls sports deserve less support, so much as that bureaucracy, local politics, funding struggles, and a lack of oversight can make securing a regulation field and enough time to play a whole game practically impossible.

And that was before Donald Trump took office and turned Title IX, one of the crown jewels of gender-equality law, into little more than a weapon in the culture wars.