As a child growing up in Attleboro, Massachusetts - about 30 minutes south of Boston - Bren Stevens clutched tightly to her dream of being on the high school hockey team with her older brothers.
When Stevens entered the 10th grade, it was her time.
Or so she thought.
"I was told by the coach that they don't have girls on the boys team," said Stevens, the athletic director at the University of Charleston. "I was devastated."
The land of opportunity has long been slow to live up to that billing, especially for women in sports. But, with Sunday being the 42nd anniversary of Billie Jean King's straight-set win against Bobby Riggs in the "Battle of the Sexes" tennis match, it's time to recognize women are sledgehammering their way through another glass ceiling.
Finally, women are occupying positions forever reserved by men.
In 2015, there are female assistant coaches in the NBA, another in the NFL and a woman coaching one of the world's top male tennis players.
It's long overdue, but decision-makers in sports are realizing they should hire the best person, not just the best man.
On Aug. 5, 2014, San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, a five-time NBA champion as a head coach, hired Becky Hammon as the first full-time, salaried assistant coach in NBA history. The Sacramento Kings followed the lead of "Pops," hiring Nancy Lieberman as a full-time assistant in July.
Also in July, the NFL's Arizona Cardinals hired Jen Welter to help coach inside linebackers as a training camp intern - believed to be the first female NFL coach. Welter, 37, enjoyed a 14-year career with the Dallas Diamonds of the Women's Football Alliance, and broke ground as the first female coach in a men's professional league and first female to play a non-kicking position when she did both with the Texas Revolution of the Champions Indoor League in February.
Andy Murray, the No. 3 men's tennis player in the world, hired former women's top-ranked player Amelie Mauresmo as his coach. He'd slipped to No. 11 in the world before blazing his own path and hiring a female coach, and then he reached the Australian Open finals and semis at the French Open and Wimbledon this year with Mauresmo at his side.
"Women are judged by a different stick, that's for sure," tennis great Martina Navratilova said in a July interview. "If it didn't succeed, they'd say women can't coach men."
Danielle Lickey, 30, is an assistant volleyball coach at the University of Charleston. She has years of experience coaching males in the sport because she saw an opportunity there to have more of an impact as a coach.
"After working with females, I wanted to see the other side of it," she said. "Volleyball is such a fundamentally driven sport and I saw, just watching, a lack of those fundamentals being taught on the men's side.
"Women are focused on doing the right thing," she added. "Men are physically so much more able to react quickly, stronger, so they are able to perform those skills with less focus."
Lickey said it didn't take long for men to take to her coaching style.
"I love coaching and I love coaching these girls, but my passion is really in coaching men," she said. "Men, surprisingly, really respond to a female coach once they have earned some respect."
Lickey said the number of females coaching men's collegiate volleyball teams are on the rise, so there's hope.
"It's going to be really tough," she said, "but why can't I make this a career?"
Yes ... why not?
Hammon guided the Spurs to the NBA's Las Vegas Summer League title. Bruce Arians, the coach of the Arizona Cardinals who brought in Welter to help out his team, seemed almost flummoxed by how gender could influence a coach's qualifications.
"The minute they can prove they can make a player better," he said last month, "they'll be hired."
Thankfully, women have extraordinary resolve. Not much held Bren Stevens back after her dream died on the ice.
She arrived at what was then Morris Harvey College in 1976, became a star volleyball player and one of the winningest volleyball coaches in Division II history, and then climbed the athletic department ladder. She was an assistant professor of sports administration in 2000 and became the associate athletic director in 2005.
She has been UC's athletic director since 2012.
"It's such groundbreaking territory and I'm excited about that," Stevens said. "I think the mindset is starting to change a little bit. You don't have to have played football to be an administrator or coach, and I think that's really fantastic.
"It's going to be great for our young women."