The long game

Leigh Ernst Friestedt ’85 is using her on-field intuition to challenge a multibillion-dollar NCAA settlement— and defend the future of Title IX

“We’re advocating for an equal opportunity for women and girls—and not just the current women who are playing sports but the future women as well,” Leigh told the court. “I think that it makes a huge statement when we say that the women are worth $102 million and that the men are worth $2.4 billion.” 

Though few in the courtroom knew it, Leigh’s statements that day marked her first-ever appearance as a lawyer before the court. But it was a moment she had been—quite unintentionally—training for her entire life.

I am a Title IX kid,Leigh says. She was born two years before the Education Amendments Act of 1972 was signed. That omnibus bill included Title IX, a small, largely unnoticed section that prohibited sex-based discrimination in any educational program receiving federal funding. Drafters had crafted the 37-word provision to expand on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which addressed sex-based discrimination in employment but did not apply to education. There was no specific mention of sports in the new law, but by the time Leigh started hitting a tennis ball off the wall of the garage at her home in Bethesda, Maryland, at the age of five, it had already become clear that Title IX would shape her scholastic athletic career.

Leigh was a natural athlete. She wasn’t the fastest on the court, but she had exceptional hand-eye coordination, which distinguished her even when she was so small that the wooden handle of a tennis racket had to be whittled down to fit her grasp. At The Potomac School, she discovered another advantage on the soccer field—her “game sense.” “I never ran to where the ball was,” she remembers. “I looked at the ten kids on the ball and thought, I don’t want to be in that pile. I want to be where the ball is going to be.” In seventh grade, Leigh transferred to Holton-Arms School, where she played soccer, basketball, and lacrosse and was a nationally ranked tennis player. “Being a student- athlete has been the cornerstone of my identity,” Leigh says.

At the time, Leigh didn’t realize that the athletic experiences that she now credits with giving her confidence in the classroom and, later, in her career may not have been available to her at all if she had been born a decade earlier. In 1970, before Title IX, about 300,000 girls in the United States participated in high school sports, compared to 3.7 million boys. By 1980, girls accounted for almost one in every three high- school athletes. (Today, about 44 percent of high school athletes are girls.)

Despite the increasing numbers, inequalities in sports remained, as Leigh saw firsthand when she was recruited to play Division 1 women’s lacrosse at Brown University in the 1990s. The top 10 team shared both its coaches and its uniforms with the school’s field hockey team. “We all understood that the men’s lacrosse team was getting cleats and sticks and nice gear, and we had these stupid little gray [uniforms] that we would wear to practice,” she says. “We knew those things, and we actually just kind of laughed at them.”

As a college student, Leigh found it hard to see a path to remedying this imbalance, even as fellow Brown University student-athlete and gymnast Amy Cohen sued the school under Title IX after it cut funding for some women’s teams. Leigh went off to law school at Vanderbilt University with an eye toward becoming a sports agent, but ultimately decided to pursue a career in investment banking—an experience she now sees as key to understanding the financial model underlying the House settlement terms. After two decades in that field, she returned to sports, launching a digital media company during the 2008 economic downturn. Back on the field, covering college athletes as a member of the media, Leigh saw the same disparity in investment between men’s and women’s sports that she remembered from her playing days, but through a different lens. “It was eye-opening,” she says.

Through the 2010s, with the public popularity of women’s sports on the rise, it became increasingly clear to Leigh that there were legal remedies available to women athletes and a need for more Title IX attorneys who understood the current state of play in college sports, on and off the field. There was only one problem: Leigh was not a lawyer. She had never taken the bar.

The pandemic gave her the opportunity to change that. When COVID-19 curtailed college sports, Leigh decided to get her law license. She studied for the bar while working with Simpson Thacher & Bartlett on a Title IX case that resulted in a settlement to increase opportunities for girls’ sports at Hawaii’s largest high school. Leigh was sworn in to the New York bar in June 2024, mere weeks after the House settlement agreement was announced.

Representing student-athletes who objected to the settlement—including her niece, Katherine McCabe Ernst, a draw specialist on the Vanderbilt women’s lacrosse team that Leigh helped to establish in the 1990s—would become the new lawyer’s primary focus.

Among those Leigh represents in this issue are several women athletes from California Polytechnic State University who have Title IX claims. The university cut its entire swimming program in 2025, citing the impending costs of the House settlement. She also represents male student-athletes in Olympic sports who are seeking to protect their participation opportunities and promised scholarships, which have been reduced or withdrawn as schools reallocate resources in response to the settlement.

“This is a long-term process,” says Leigh, who is pursuing these cases pro bono with help from students at Vanderbilt Law School. It could take years, but she sees a path to stronger Title IX protections and greater equality in collegiate sports as clearly as she saw an attack opportunity on the lacrosse field. “I use my game sense every single day. I’m constantly feeling out what’s going on in the field, trying to anticipate what’s going to happen,” she says.

Even as she files briefs and prepares for potential oral arguments before the Ninth Circuit, Leigh is anticipating these issues will be settled by the country’s highest court. “Everything that I do is positioned to go to the Supreme Court,” she says.

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