By Alberto Amalfi | @Tennis_Now | Friday, October 13, 2024
US Open Event Director Stacey Allaster has honored Billie Jean King on courtroom in Arthur Ashe Stadium.
Final evening, Corridor of Famer King helped honor Allaster.
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USTA Chief Government, Skilled Tennis Allaster receivedd the Billie Jean King Management Award finally evening’s Girls’s Sports activities Basis Annual Salute to Girls in Sports activities in New York Metropolis.
In partnership with the Billie Jean King Management Initiative, the Billie Jean King Management Award, introduced by Darcie Glazer Kassewitz and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers Basis, acknowledges a person or group who demonstrates excellent management and makes vital contributions to the development of girls by achievements in sport and the office.
For over 30 years, Allaster has been a passionate and decided advocate for gender equality in tennis — from the $1 billion she generated for feminine gamers as chairman and CEO of the Girls’s Tennis Affiliation, to her good management as the primary girl event director of the US Open in its greater than 140-year historical past – paving a path to the C-suite that different ladies can observe.
Billed as “the most important evening in ladies’s sports activities,” the occasion’s programming appeared forward to the group’s fiftieth anniversary in 2024, honored trailblazers within the battle for gender fairness, and celebrated a 12 months of main milestones in ladies’s sports activities.
Honored at WSF’s signature Salute awards have been the US Tennis Affiliation’s (USTA) Chief Government, Skilled Tennis, and US Open Event Director, Allaster, College of Washington runner and Indigenous Peoples’ advocate, Rosalie Fish, Athletes Limitless Co-founders, Jon Patricof and Jonathan Soros, four-time Paralympian in Wheelchair Basketball, Natalie Schneider and Girls’s Undisputed Middleweight World Champion Boxer, Claressa Shields.
The Salute was held at Cipriani Wall Avenue in New York Metropolis. For the primary time, WSF supplied a Childcare Zone in partnership with &Mom that offered childcare and lactation assist for mom-athletes.
This 12 months’s Annual Salute commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of a number of vital milestones in WSF Founder Billie Jean King’s battle for gender fairness in sports activities, together with: 50 years of equal prize cash on the US Open; the creation of the Girls’s Tennis Affiliation; and Billie Jean’s victory over Bobby Riggs within the iconic “Battle of the Sexes.”
Billie Jean King’s seismic affect in sports activities and society, set the trail to fairness for women and girls that we profit from to at the present time. From the NCAA Girls’s Basketball March Insanity Event’s record-breaking viewership to the FIFA Girls’s World Cup setting a brand new all-time attendance benchmark to the Nebraska Cornhuskers ladies’s volleyball match breaking the world file for ladies’s sports activities attendance – Billie Jean King’s imaginative and prescient for a extra equitable future 50 years in the past is permitting women and girls in sport to reside out their athletic desires immediately.
“Practically 50 years in the past, I based the Girls’s Sports activities Basis to guard Title IX and to battle for gender equality in sports activities – from the grassroots to collegiate {and professional} ranges – so that each one women and girls can profit from sport and its transformative energy,” stated King. “We should all the time problem and try to vary the established order. I’m inspired to see this 12 months’s honorees who’re breaking data, eliminating limitations, and empowering future generations to maintain enjoying.”
Photograph credit score: Getty for Girls’s Sports activities Basis Annual Salute to Girls in Sports activities®