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When I was growing up, you didn't know there was a women's national team. Now girls grow up dreaming of playing for Canada.

In recent generations, women's sports have been a blessing. Some of us can remember the bad old days in the '50s, when we would discover in casual schoolyard play that a girl could outrun most of us or hold her own in basketball or hit a softball - but there were no teams, no coaches, for girls.

I don't think there's anything that is a greater area of discrimination against women today than the fact that nowhere in the world is there a female role model in team sports that more than half of a general audience would recognize.

Tennis has been around for so long - women have been playing the majors since the 1800s. Other sports have not had professional leagues for women for as long.

But the reason that women's football is still unknown is because it's not on television and not widely publicised for a wide majority of the leagues in the world.

In the men's game, there are three, four, five dominant players who pretty much win everything, but in the women's, anyone can.

I literally couldn't get anyone to hire me. Having a woman do sports was seen as too risky.

When I was really young, the women's national team wasn't on a grand media stage, so my role models were male basketball and male American football players.