"It was incredibly refreshing not to be the only person viewing this game at face value, to see other hockey fans -- male hockey fans -- enjoying the action on the ice rather than sizing up the players based on attractiveness or comparisons to their male counterparts. For at least one game, these fans saw past gender to view these women as the athletes they are."

Telling the truth has allowed her to push for the passage of no fewer than seven pieces of legislation in Oregon and has helped untold numbers of sexual assault survivors. She has routinely been interviewed and has spoken at dozens of colleges across the country.

When she was younger, 30-year-old Ayesha McGowan looked up to African-American sports heroes like Venus and Serena Williams, Florence Griffith Joyner and Jackie Joyner-Kersee. But she never saw female African-American cyclists. "To me, pro cycling was the Tour de France," McGowan says. "White males, a very limiting image that keeps those who would be interested in the sport to a very small pool of humans."

"Sometimes you can hear it. Sometimes you can smell it. This one, you can feel. The tide is turning. What started as a slow, steady howl has grown into a guttural growl. It was the year of the awoken dragon, and women are breathing fire. On a global scale, national women's soccer teams and players came together to say enough. To say, we deserve better. To say, we too deserve to be supported, we too deserve to be paid more, we too deserve better facilities, we too deserve respect. Call it courageous or call it long overdue, but the movement is on."

The responsibility she feels as a highly visible woman in the sport is partially why Shofner took a lead in organizing the boycott of participating in or watching AUDL games, which became public this week. The boycott has already prompted the AUDL to outline what it calls a "gender equity plan," which would promote a handful of separate women's games over the year. But Shofner, Chastain and the others don't want separate games -- they want equal promotion of women's sports. That's why they pushed USA Ultimate to change its deal with ESPN so that both women's and men's games during the national championships are televised and the prime-time spots get rotated. And it's why Shofner doesn't plan on being quiet any time soon, even if it makes things tough sometimes.

Growing up, Bseiso did not have an Arab woman role model in the field of sports. That changed during the London Olympics in 2012 when all 200 countries participating sent female athletes. She watched strong Arab women competing at the highest level. "And now, I am the first Arab woman to sign with the WWE -- this is so out of the box for the region that I think for everything in between now, the door has officially opened," Bseiso said.

"People want to support capital projects or they want to give to football or men's basketball. But drawing attention to these female sports is really great. ... There have been gifts to that [soccer] endowment program, but they've never had a family step forward and fully establish an endowment toward the team."