Nancy Hogshead-Makar: A ‘privilege’ in fighting for the rights of girls and women in sports

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Nancy Hogshead-Makar would love to quit her job.

That would mean equality for women in sports and education had been achieved and that the law of Title IX was followed right down to the letter. If there were no more worries about sexual abuse in sports, then Hogshead could retire and know that her life’s work was complete and the world was a better, more equal field for women.

“I love what I do. I have donors that believe in what I do. I honestly can’t imagine doing anything else,” said Hogshead. “I really appreciate the privilege of making life better for girls, for women, forever. It’s not easy. Like my mom used to say, if it’s easy, it would have already been done.”

The work is far from complete which is why Hogshead, arguably the most prominent female athlete in area history, won’t stop. She can’t. There’s even more work to be done now than ever before for Hogshead, a four-time Olympic swimming medalist and Episcopal graduate who would grace any top 10 list among athletes from Northeast Florida.

She could have faded into the background once her competitive days ended after the 1984 Olympics, but Hogshead’s work was just then getting started. She’s a civil rights attorney and advocate for equality in girls and women’s sports that runs the gamut from Title IX and ending sexual abuse in sports, to being an ambassador for sex segregation in athletics. Hogshead survived a rape in college and used that to fuel her drive competitively, personally and professionally.

Hogshead has been the CEO of the Champion Women organization since it was founded in 2014 and navigated the ever-changing and thorny landscape of athletics in the process. She’s been the face and the voice for equality and for change, even becoming the subject of a $250 million lawsuit for sounding the alarm on a suspended volleyball coach still being permitted to coach young girls.

“After I got raped, I understood on this profound level I couldn’t personally achieve in a world that is hostile to women,” she said. “No matter how smart I was, no matter how my grades were, I was already a teenage Olympian, no matter how fast I ran or swam, sexism was going to be there.”

It has been Hogshead’s life’s work to try and face that sexism head-on.

In her time with Champion Women, Hogshead has spoken out very publicly about the need to keep men’s and women’s sports separate. Hogshead has data point after data point on men and women being biologically different, even men who have undergone hormone therapy or even full gender reassignment surgery. She threw her weight behind the 2017 Safe Sport Act, which was designed to have an independent body investigate complaints and help keep organizations compliant. Hogshead is perhaps the most prominent Title IX watchdog there is and ever will be, filing hundreds of complaints annually against entities like colleges that aren’t in line with the law.

‘I didn’t do anything wrong’

Hogshead was on a jog on campus at Duke University in the fall of 1981, running the same path on Campus Drive between the east and west parts of the school that she had countless times before. It was a day like so many others for Hogshead, who was 19 at the time.

The unthinkable happened next.

Hogshead was snatched off the path and dragged into the woods by an assailant, beaten and raped, a two-and-a-half-hour rollercoaster of trauma that she didn’t think she’d live through. News4JAX does not name sexual assault victims, but Hogshead has publicly spoken about it for decades and says that it’s a vital part of her story.

Hogshead said the weeks and months after the assault were jarring because she couldn’t rationally talk herself into calming down. In 1981, post-traumatic stress wasn’t as understood as it is today. So, she put a pause on swimming while she dealt with the ongoing trauma from the assault.

“Imagine not being able to do that [calm down]. Intellectually, I knew I was in a safe space. I’d say, ‘calm down, Nancy, you’re fine.’ And not being able to calm yourself down, I’d never experienced anything like that before. There was no outthinking it, if you will,” she said.

Hogshead said her parents and the university were ultra-supportive, but there was a feeling that avoidance of the topic was best. Hogshead doesn’t operate that way. As uncomfortable as things may be, Hogshead prefers it out in the open. Make the uncomfortable comfortable. She didn’t reveal that assault publicly until years and years later, but she has since shared her story of that very private moment, and knows that it has helped other women who have endured that while suffering in silence.

“They thought the best thing to do was not talk about it; they were ashamed for me,” she said. “This was somehow a shameful thing that happened. I didn’t do anything wrong. I was just out for a run on a very public street. I wasn’t someplace I wasn’t supposed to be. I wanted to make a dent in that in whatever way I could.”

Hogshead worked through her grief and PTSD in a way that felt comfortable. Being still was when the challenges popped up. When Hogshead needed to grieve, she went to work.

So, she practiced. Worked out. Ran. When the time was right, Hogshead got back in the pool, trained, and competed.

Hogshead qualified for the Olympics in 1980, but the United States and 65 other invited nations boycotted the Games in Moscow due to the 1979 Soviet-Afghan War. In the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, Hogshead was spectacular. She won gold in the 100 free, the 4x100 free relay, and the 4x100 medley relay. Hogshead also took silver in the 200 individual medley.

“Swimming is the perfect sport because you can cry and get mad under the water, and it makes you go faster; I faced this guy under the water 10,000 times, but I won this time,” she said. “And that is how you deal, is by going towards it, not away from it. I would go towards it...then I figured out, this is making me go faster, this is a source of energy and power, and to use that power in sport, in practice.”

That’s how Hogshead has faced life after the pool, too.

A bigger calling

Hogshead remains one of the most accomplished high school swimmers ever. A 2007 Florida High School Athletic Association Hall of Fame inductee, Hogshead’s credentials are platinum. She was the world’s No. 1-ranked 14-year-old swimmer at Episcopal. She won four individual state championships in high school and was on two other championship relay teams. She has been inducted into 11 halls of fame. In 1999, Sports Illustrated listed Hogshead as the 13th-best athlete from Florida in the 20th century. She was the No. 3-ranked female from the state, trailing only tennis stars Chris Evert and Doris Hart, icons who combined for 53 Grand Slam championships.

Hogshead’s resume lacks nothing.

Hogshead said that she already had somewhat of a feminist mindset before she went to Duke. By the time she left to go train for the 1984 Olympics, Hogshead knew that she had to do something bigger.

There were myriad things that led to a focus on wanting to help do something bigger once her competitive days were over. Hogshead said that Duke bent over backward to help her through the mental struggles after surviving the sexual assault and helped tailor summer classes for her. Hogshead said her instructor for those classes, Jean O’Barr, was pivotal in helping her through teaching, so much that she devoted a part of the foreword in her book, “Equal Play: Title IX and Social Change,” to her college professor.

Something else that was revealing to Hogshead — how easily she was overpowered during the sexual assault. At 5-10 and already an Olympic athlete in elite physical condition, Hogshead said that her attacker was an average-sized man and that she didn’t stand a chance because of his power. She fought back against her attacker, but Hogshead was simply overpowered. The assailant has never been caught.

There are so many women in far more vulnerable positions in the world who can’t put up a fight. And some assailants don’t come like Hogshead’s did, in an ambush-type attack. Others come even more stealth, dressed as doctors or coaches or people in positions of power.

A fight for victims, equality

Situations like that of disgraced Dr. Larry Nassar are one of those that Hogshead has sought to get ahead of. Nassar is the former U.S. Gymnastics team doctor who was convicted of numerous accounts of sexual assault and possessing child pornography. Reports of Nassar’s sexual assaults were said to have begun as early as 1994, with no action taken against him until 2015.

There were multiple instances of athletes making complaints to USA Gymnastics and Michigan State, where Nassar worked, and no action was taken until the Indianapolis Star blew the lid off the story with an explosive report in 2016 where former gymnast Rachael Denhollander went on the record about the abuse.

Nassar was sentenced to 60 years in federal prison in late 2017, followed by two other sentences in Michigan prison in 2018. Those are an additional 40 to 175 years in one case involving a guilty plea for seven counts of sexual assault and 40 to 125 years in another case where he pled guilty to three other sexual assault charges.

Speaking out and going public carries a cost, too. USA Gymnastics called the Indy Star’s two-year investigation into Nassar a “witch hunt” before the scandal became too big to try and suppress with press releases and a smear campaign against the reporters. It remains some of the most significant reporting of the 21st century.

Hogshead and Champion Women also spoke out against Rick Butler, a volleyball coach who was handed a lifetime suspension by USA Volleyball in rulings in 2017 and ‘18. The U.S. Center for Safe Sport issued its ruling on Dec. 11, 2017, for sexual misconduct involving a minor.

Butler, his wife, Cheryl, and his volleyball club, GLV, filed a $250 million lawsuit against Hogshead, Champion Women and Deborah Dimatteo, who is with USA Volleyball’s Great Lakes Region, saying, in part, that the “allegations against Rick and USAV’s findings to fabricate a narrative to “destroy the Butlers’ professional reputations and permanently harm GLV’s business relationships until they are put out of business.” That case is still in the court system and depositions have recently been taken.

The Nassar case is where safeguards that should have helped failed repeatedly. Hogshead has also waded into the very public battle of transgender athletes competing in sports, such is the case of former University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, who has been brought back up in recent days. Last week, the Trump administration suspended $175 million in federal funding to Penn over Thomas. Trump also signed an executive order last February banning transgender athletes in women’s sports.

“If you’re not willing to speak truth to power then you’re not going to get very much done. If you’re only ‘happy, happy, joy, joy,’ you’re not going to make such a big difference,” she said. “You might ride a cultural wave for a while…but you can’t just put Larry Nassar in prison and you’re done. He’s a symptom. He’s a tip of the iceberg. It’s not about Lia Thomas. It’s not about one particular athlete. It’s about women having access.”

So much work to do

Equal rights and opportunities are Hogshead’s passion and life work, and the breadth of data that Champion Women’s data has put together is both vast and jarring. The group compiles annual reports on the true work that remains to be done, and it’s broken down into the most granular of data points. There are bar graphs and pie graphs and line graphs, big numbers in black and white and lots and lots of words, all detailing the work that must happen for things to really be equal. Title IX, the landmark law that passed in 1972 and prevented sex-based discrimination in education programs and activities that receive federal funding, became a massive focus for Hogshead.

Title IX just celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2022, and Hogshead said that there is still a chasm between what Title IX intended and what it is doing. She throws out the data without even looking at her notes, including more than 120 complaints in 2023 against colleges or universities that were not in line with the law.

Title IX is also misunderstood. Without getting too immersed in legal jargon, the law requires two main things: quantitative and qualitative components.

It doesn’t mean that if a college has a football team for men it has to create one for women. One simple way to understand Title IX is that if there are 300 athletic scholarships available for male athletes, then there must be an equal number available (in both the number of scholarships and financial dollars) for female athletes. There is also a three-pronged policy interpretation set by the Department of Education in 1979 that maps out ways for schools to show compliance.

That still falls woefully short, Hogshead said.

“We sent letters to every congressperson in every state,” she said. “Under the Biden administration, they didn’t do a single thing. It [the work and data] did not result in a single new team being added. These are long-term efforts in every way to increase opportunities for women in sports.”

In the group’s 2023 report, the most out-of-line college in the the state, Florida State, ranks as the 24th worst (out of 2,028 schools in the report) when it comes to the amount doled out in female athletic scholarships compared to those of male scholarships. The gap is $4,592,986. FSU needs to add 195 athletic opportunities for female athletes (ranking 65th out of 2,028) to become balanced. Other prominent schools like North Carolina, Texas, Virginia, Mississippi, Michigan, Baylor and Wake Forest are even higher on that list than Florida State is.

“We’ve got to get Title IX compliance. Can you imagine what it would mean for the whole country if we had 250,000 more women playing college sports? If they had regular remedies to handle abuse, for culture change...That right there would do more than anything.”