My name is Miranda Hill. I'm a tall, slender and deliciously big-bottomed, forty-something Black woman living in the Back Bay area of Boston, Massachusetts. After many years as a WNBA superstar, I left the fast-growing world of women's professional sports and returned to college. I wanted to mentor young women, especially young Black women. I felt there was a lot I could share with them. So I became a professor at Kennedy College, one of the most diverse private schools in the Boston area. A school where students of African-American, Asian, Hispanic or Native American descent make up around forty percent of the population. I liked that about the school.
After a few years as a college professor, I became the Dean of Students Affairs and a special advisor to Scholar-Athletes. I liked my new job. The students liked me because I was friendly, smart and could relate to them. Making one hundred and thirty grand a year after taxes wasn't bad, especially in a recession. Life was good, until the day I met the lovely Georgia Antoine. Captain of the Kennedy College women's wrestling program. She came into my office one day, demanding answers about the athletic department's practices. I was stunned by this brash, sexy young Black woman. She was so beautiful. The kind of natural beauty only Black women can have. I was smitten with her from the get-go, but decided to play it cool.
I explained collegiate athletics to her, and she understood how the game was played. There's a lot of racism and sexism in college sports. Sometimes it works in reverse. Quite often, college men lose their sports teams in the name of politically correct Title IX and its rigid, outdated gender quotas. That's unfair but happens very often these days. Other times, the sexism in college sports works the usual way. Women athletes weren't taken too seriously by many college coaches and athletic directors. The women's sports teams often had a smaller fan base. All that proved very frustrating for many female college athletes. I understood all sides of this game. Many private schools try to recruit students of color, but mostly athletes. They often only did so because they were under political pressure to diversify their lily-white student body profiles. Hypocrisy is alive and well in collegiate America.