Raising Her Game covers a lot of historical and theoretical ground. We had a lot of threads to tie together and we needed to figure out what happened in the worlds of soccer and women’s sport from the present day back to more than a century ago.

The first source comes from interviews we conducted. People like Moira Kelly, Jody Conradt, Dave Simeone, Karla Thompson, Chris Plonsky, Anson Dorrance can convey first-hand what they’ve witnessed, as Conradt and Plonsky did when talking about letters from athletes to congresspeople we noticed hanging on Chris’s office wall (sometimes the research comes to you).

Libraries play a big role. We visited repositories in Dallas, Arlington, Fort Worth, and Bedford, but spent a whole lot of hours at tables in multiple University of Texas facilities.

We enjoyed multiple days at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, located in the building across Manor Road from Mike A. Myers Stadium and Soccer Field. Their collections include lots of materials related to the university’s history, including its department of women’s intercollegiate athletics and its predecessors.

We also spent a number of hours at the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports. We recommend checking out their public-facing exhibits located on the fifth floor of the north end zone office building in Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium. After we strolled through those, however, we focused on their archival collections. They have looked to document much of the history of athletics at Texas.

When one does research at Briscoe and Stark, one looks at primary sources, like photos and internal memos. One can also look at secondary source material, like newspaper clippings saved for their relevance to subjects that might affect the university.

What form do these materials take? Boxes, folders, and paper, mostly. Intrepid librarians have cataloged as much of it as they can, but it is mostly up to the researcher to look through boxes and see what’s there. The Briscoe Center’s collections include so much material that they have to store most of it offsite, necessitating a few days’ lead time to get it delivered to their reading room for viewing.

We consult most of these sources for background learning that we can use to phrase interview questions or narration. But we also found some visuals at libraries. Patty McCain at the Stark Center dug through boxes to retrieve a photo of women playing sports at the Anna Hiss Gym, among other finds. And Marisa Jefferson at the Briscoe Center found for us a document that we could use to show how seriously soccer was taken in the 1960s (not very).

In conjunction with the primary source materials, we also reference secondary sources, notably books and magazines. We found a lot of these at the Perry-Castañeda Library, located a couple of blocks southeast of the University of Texas Tower. Perry-Castañeda’s extensive holdings helped us not only with UT-related background info but details on soccer and athletics generally (they have a lot of books in there). UT scholars have researched some of these topics through the years, so having access to doctoral dissertations and master’s theses proved valuable.

We also checked, as you can imagine, innumerable online sources with info on RHG topics. One source we use to look for images and video clips related to topics of national interest is presidential libraries. RHG covers issues beyond sports, but U.S. presidents also tend to interact with championship teams as well. A find of which we’re especially excited came from the Gerald Ford Presidential Library. After Chris Plonsky mentioned in her interview that college football coaches went to Washington, D.C. in the mid-1970s to try to dilute the effects of Title IX, we discovered photos of the meeting she referenced, including Darrell Royal front and center next to President Ford. We also found that Ford had spoken to the NCAA’s annual meeting in 1975 and that original film existed of it. They were able to transfer it to 4K video for us and we used a clip in RHG. Our contact at the library thinks there’s a good chance nobody has ever shown this film publicly before.

We got help from lots of folks directly, too, including sports information and media relations folks at tons of schools and sports-related entities including, certainly, UT’s soccer SID, Chris Brown.

Speaking of UT, Caten Hyde and his staff who handle video and photos were incredibly helpful in sourcing visuals. We could not have done it without them.