Ashton Washington was promoted to a full-time scout for the Bears, making her the first female scout in the history of the team. Washington joined the Bears as part of the Bill Walsh Diversity Coaching Fellowship earlier this summer.

Girls soccer players, in particular, have been found to be about as likely to suffer concussions as boys football players—and three times more likely than boys soccer players. But very little is known about what that means for the future, because researchers are hardly studying the long-term consequences of repetitive hits over time in women.

"Valentina was a brave little girl," Fedotov told UFC.com's Thomas Gerbasi in 2017. "She could fight without fear with girls and boys who were heavier and more experienced. Sometimes, a strong punch could stop her, but she would stand up and start to fight again. Sometimes, she was crying but still fighting again and again with the same intensity."

After Hawaii’s first female starting varsity quarterback broke her collarbone, New Orleans Saints. quarterback Drew Brees reached out to tell her that she’d bounce back better than ever. “I’m definitely coming back next season,” she says. “I don’t how my parents feel about it yet, but I will definitely be back. Hopefully stronger than ever. To show everybody what a girl can do.”

The San Antonio Spurs announced Wednesday that assistant coach Becky Hammon has been promoted. As ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski put it, Hammon was promoted to the "front of the bench." Hammon will assume the role vacated by James Borrego, who was hired to be the Charlotte Hornets' new head coach.

"She basically wanted to do everything that her brother could do," says Delino Sr., a bunting and baserunning instructor in the Cincinnati Reds farm system, of his daughter. "You could see the competitiveness in her really early." One of his favorite memories is when Diamond's mother tried to sign her up for cheerleading—she was around five. In no time at all, she'd accessorized her cheerleading uniform with a baseball glove on one hand and a football in the other. "I was just like, you know you're wasting your time, right?" he remembers, laughing. "She's not going to be holding pompoms. She's going to be playing ball."

Gambling is one more potential answer to the unfortunately evergreen question of how to get consistent support for women's basketball from fans and media.

Becky Hammon was only the beginning. Over the past few years, women have slowly moved into positions of power within NBA front offices. There's still a ways to go, but for the female decision-makers already in place, the possibility that they could run a franchise themselves isn't just a theory anymore.

"You could really tell that she played the game and is so curious about basketball," Nets forward Rondae Hollis-Jefferson says. But there was more behind the respect she earned among Hollis-Jefferson and his teammates. "Something that always stood out with Sarah was just, kind of like, she has this natural energy," he adds. "She just cares about people—you can tell."

“I don't think it's coincidental that the dunk becomes emblematic of men's basketball—and supposedly what makes men's basketball exciting—right at the moment the women's game is ascendent,” says Michael Messner, a professor of sociology and gender studies at USC and co-author of the upcoming book No Slam Dunk: Gender, Sport and the Unevenness of Social Change.