The Archdiocese of Philadelphia’s Catholic Youth Organization banned 11-year-old Caroline Pla from playing in a boy’s football league earlier this year, even though she had played in the same league for more than two years and had been voted onto the league’s all-star team after the 2012 season. Last week, the CYO reaffirmed that decision, upholding its ban on female participants in grades 5 through 8.

The original ban was about safety, the CYO explained then, even if there were no indications that Pla was in any more danger than any of the 11-year-old boys playing football. When they upheld the ban, the reasoning shifted to fears of “inappropriate contact” between male and female players, even though neither Pla nor her family had ever given thought to such an issue before.

At nearly the same time, a football league far larger than the Catholic Youth Organization took a step in the opposite direction. In 2012, the National Football League formally instituted a rule allowing women to participate in its league, and next week, the annual regional scouting combines for amateur players will feature its first female participant.

Lauren Silberman, a 28-year-old former college club soccer player, is attending a regional combine with the hope of becoming the first woman to play in the NFL. The odds that Silberman, a kicker, will make a team are longer-than-long, but that doesn’t matter: the NFL provided a path for women to participate, and for the first time, one will. There are more than 1,600 girls playing on boys’ high school football teams, and multiple women have played college football, so Silberman almost surely won’t be the last woman to go out for the team.

But these stories aren’t as much about football and making the team as they are about just having the chance to play. Women now enjoy far more access to sports than they did 40 years ago, when Title IX became law, but female participation still doesn’t match that of men. Neither does funding, even though sports participation has substantial health, education, and economic benefits for the women and girls who participate. It’s wonderful that the NFL is expanding access to women, but those efforts are undermined when youth leagues like the CYO, where there are more girls who want to play and fewer who have access, refuse to let the Caroline Plas of the world play the games they love.

Playing off its popular “30 for 30″ series of sports documentaries, ESPN Films this week rolled out “Nine For IX,” a series of nine documentaries that will celebrate the legacy of Title IX by telling the stories of female athletes and examining many of the issues women in sports still face today. Its films will explore racial and sexual identities of women in sports, the exploitation of female athletes as sex objects, discrimination faced by female reporters in male lockerrooms, and other issues that aren’t necessarily unique to women athletes, like disability, homosexuality, and the glory and heartbreak that come just from playing sports.

As great as the Nine for IX series will be and as positive as it is that ESPN is shining a bright light on the issues that affect women in sports every day, though, the series somehow manages to reinforce that there is still a wall between the games women play and those played by men. All nine films in the Nine for IX series, which will air from July 2 to August 27 on ESPN, were directed by women. And obviously, all nine are about women. Compare that to the 30 for 30 series, now in its third season. Just four of its 51 films have featured a female director or co-director, and just three have told the stories of female athletes. None of the series’ 10 short features that has aired or is in production is about women, and only one was directed by a woman.

What Nine for IX makes evident is that both stories about women in sports and female directors are readily available. Venus Williams beating racial discrimination, Audrey Mestre overcoming disability, and the U.S. Women’s National Team’s 1999 World Cup victory aren’t just great women-in-sports stories, they are great sports stories. They aren’t just triumphs of great women, they are triumphs of great athletes. The Nine for IX series is aiming to produce the same sort of informative, humanizing, and provocative films 30 for 30 is known for, and it is using the same type of high-quality directors that have made 30 for 30 a success so far, which only makes it more baffling that stories about women in sports and films directed by women have been so absent from the series since it began in 2010.

It seems that ESPN has determined, perhaps unintentionally, that the best way to tell stories about women in sports and the best way to utilize female directors is to tie them to a transformative event that will broadly appeal to women. But while ESPN has taken many positive steps to boost women’s sports and the roles of women in sports, and while it is rightly celebrating the success of Title IX, it shouldn’t need a special anniversary to talk about women in sports and the challenges they still face. And it shouldn’t need a special event to turn the cameras over to female directors. That it does serves as yet another indication of how far women in the world of sports have to go, even four decades after Title IX became law.

The recent decision by college football’s biggest schools to institute an end-of-season playoff to determine its champion will no doubt generate millions of dollars in additional revenue for the sport and its participating schools, and it has added fuel to a growing debate about whether the people who make it all possible — the thousands of players at colleges and universities across the country — should get a piece of the pie.

For a brief moment, the NCAA thought they should. Last year, the organization that oversees college sports initially gave conferences and schools the right to give a $2,000-a-year stipend but delayed the proposal shortly thereafter due to concerns about its implementation. Recently, college football’s most prominent coaches, including the University of Texas’ Mack Brown and all 14 coaches in the Southeastern Conference, have revived the idea, backing the idea that if a playoff is going to help make bowl executives, coaches, athletics directors, and even the NCAA president rich, the players ought to get a cut too.

To traditionalists who value “amateurism,” the idea of paying college football players is absurd. To author and civil rights historian Taylor Branch, though, it is a matter of human rights.

“My concern is not ensuring that the athletes get paid, but ensuring that they get their rights,” Branch told me in an interview. The fight to reform the NCAA and make it more equitable for athletes, he says, isn’t just about compensation, but about giving the players bargaining rights and making them consenting participants in the system. “If you are a grad student at the University of Texas,” Branch added, “you can bargain for how much you get paid as a teaching assistant.” If you’re a college athlete, no such rights exist.

The stipend, as proposed, is a complicated issue, Branch said, since it doesn’t appear to change that. “They’re still within the framework of the old system,” Branch said. “The coaches and athletics directors decide (how much they get paid). This is like a tip a waiter gets. You can’t get market values, and you can’t object to it without being called unethical.”

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The ultra-conservative attempt to push women out of the public sphere has a new frontier: the Arizona Charter Athletic Association. Our Lady of Sorrows, a school run by a breakaway Catholic sect, has forfeited the league’s high school baseball championship rather than put their team up against a squad that includes a girl named Paige Sultzbach—a team they already played and lost to twice during the regular season.

Our Lady of Sorrows gave a statement to ESPN explaining that the school bans co-ed sports and will not play a co-ed team because “proper boundaries can only be respected with difficulty” under those circumstances. Despite the fact that it takes a lot of imagination to imagine boys and girls getting frisky on the basepaths or across vast swaths of outfield in full view of the public, Sultzbach and her team have been more considerate of Our Lady of Sorrows’ views than they have been of her rights to participate in sports programs under Title IX:

From early on, Paige tried to blend in, her mother said. When the coach referred to the kids as “guys and gals,” Paige spoke up and said that they all wear the same uniform, so the coach should just call them all guys.

Her teammates have stood up for her.

During Mesa Prep’s two previous games with Our Lady of Sorrows, Paige didn’t play out of respect for the opposing team’s beliefs, but that wasn’t going to be an option this time, Pamela said.

“We respected their school rule … but she took it hard,” Pamela said. “She didn’t like it and neither did her teammates. They went out and played the best they could because they wanted to prove a point.”

As depressing as this story is, it’s encouraging that Sultzbach’s teammates have supported her. The reason it’s important to let girls try out for their high school baseball teams, to have women in all arenas in public life, is not just because it’s nice for women. When 15-year-old girls play second base for championship teams, edit magazines and hold high office, sometimes men find that they like having women there. The more boys figure this out, and the more feminism becomes their cause too, the harder it will be for anyone go give credence to the idea that girls don’t belong on baseball fields or anywhere else in the public square.