Hope Bender was racing motorcycles by the time she turned 5.
Paige Hauschild wasn’t much older when she began lifeguard training.
The sporting world may have waited ages before giving girls a chance, but these local Olympic hopefuls didn’t hesitate to get started.
Their stories were among the testimonials recorded by the Santa Barbara Athletic Round Table in podcasts commemorating the 50th anniversary of Title IX. The clause that guaranteed gender equity in school-sanctioned sports was signed into law on June 23, 1972, as part of the federal Education Amendments.
“I wouldn’t be where I am today if it weren’t for the opportunities it provided me,” Hauschild said.
She won a gold medal in water polo at last summer’s Olympic Games in Tokyo, just five years after her graduation from San Marcos High School.
Bender, a four-time All-American for the UC Santa Barbara track and field team, took her first steps toward scaling Olympian heights when she placed ninth in the heptathlon at the 2021 U.S. Olympic Trials.
“I’ve just followed this very natural progression, following my love for track,” she said.
Bender and Hauschild are among five women featured on the podcasts. It was produced in lieu of the Round Table’s annual Women & Girls in Sports Luncheon, which was canceled for the second-straight year because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The others appearing on the podcast are UCSB interim athletic director Kelly Barsky, the first woman to ever head the Gauchos’ athletic program; Jaclyn Rosen, the first woman to serve as head coach of both the men’s and women’s swimming programs at UCSB; and former U.S. National Team soccer star Julie Foudy.
Mother of Invention
Bender and Hauschild are second-generation descendants of June 1972, long removed from the June Cleaver era when the CIF and NCAA organized sports for only males. Their mothers comprised the first generation.
Hauschild’s father, Dwayne, played volleyball at Long Beach State and has coached high school girls for many years at both Dos Pueblos and San Marcos high schools. But Paige also wanted to be like her mother, Jenni.
“Growing up, my mom was really competitive … She’s an athletic lady,” she said. “She’s very caring and puts so much passion and love into everything she does and everyone she meets, and so that’s something I really hope to emulate.”
Bender, the daughter of Lynn and Steve Bender, was also motivated by her mom, a collegiate athlete who competed in volleyball, basketball and track while in high school.
“While growing up, she told me, ‘You’re going to do track … You’re going to do track one day,’” Bender recalled. “And I was like, ‘No, Mom, I’m not going to do track. That’s not for me.’
“Then high school rolled around and, ‘You know, maybe I’m going to do track.’ With her encouragement, I jumped in during my freshman year and built from there. I started out as a sprinter, transitioned over to hurdles near the end of high school, and then was like, ‘Oh, I’ve got to check out this heptathlon thing.’”
She wound up winning six individual Big West Conference titles at UCSB. She set the conference meet record in the 400-meter hurdles and placed fourth in the heptathlon at the 2019 NCAA Championships with a score of 5,955.
But the journey wasn’t easy for either athlete.
A Hauschild Prodigy
(Santa Barbara Athletic Round Table video)
Hauschild, who started playing water polo at age 8, was still a teenager when she got her feet wet with the U.S. National Senior Team. She played in the 2017 FINA World League Intercontinental Tournament barely two months after leading San Marcos to the CIF-Southern Section Division finals.
“All the other girls were so much older and experienced, and it took me a while to adjust,” she admitted. “It wasn’t like I jumped in and kicked butt right away. It’s been a gradual process.”
She had to sit out much of the 2019 Pan American Games after a tragic incident in South Korea following the team’s gold-medal victory over Spain at the FINA World Championships. Hauschild, teammate Kaleigh Gilchrist, and two members of the U.S. men’s team were injured in the collapse of a nightclub balcony. Two South Koreans were killed.
Hauschild suffered multiple lacerations, which included a deep gash on her right leg that required eight stitches.
“It was a real scary event,” she said. “Luckily, most of our teammates had already gone home. A few of them were out front waiting for a cab but we were the only ones on the balcony.
“We were actually very lucky, considering that people were killed. It makes you that much more thankful for what you have.”
Hauschild’s career took another detour when the 2020 Olympics were postponed a year by COVID-19. It forced her to sit out two consecutive seasons at USC while she trained with the national team.
“It adds to the journey,” she said.
Hauschild, who led the Trojans to the 2018 NCAA Championship as a freshman, was a finalist for the Peter J. Cutino National Player of the Year Award during her first two seasons at USC.
She’s making a good case for her candidacy this year, scoring twice in the Trojans’ 10-8 win at No. 1 Stanford on Saturday. The victory put No. 3 USC (14-2) into first place in the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation standings.
Her 150 career goals leave her just two behind former Santa Barbara High star Kami Craig on USC’s all-time scoring list and 24 away from cracking the school’s all-time Top 10. Craig, who won two Olympic gold medals and one silver, is the only women’s water polo player to ever win the Cutino Award in back-to-back seasons (2009 and 2010).
“(Title IX) just created so many amazing female athletes for me to look up to,” Hauschild said.
She became one of those role models when she led Team USA to an Olympic gold medal last August, beating Russia 15-11 in the semifinals and Spain 14-5 in the final.
“I don’t think I’ll ever forget standing on the top of the podium listening to the national anthem with some of my best friends and teammates alongside me,” Hauschild said. “That was a moment that I’ve dreamt of since I was a little girl.”
Hope Springs Eternal
(Santa Barbara Athletic Round Table video)
Bender competed in her first heptathlon shortly after her graduation from Newport Harbor High School. She did hit some bumps in the road at UCSB, failing to make the first height in the high jump at the Big West Conference heptathlon championships during her sophomore season of 2017.
One of her coaches even suggested that she quit the heptathlon to concentrate on the hurdle events.
“I was like, ‘No! No! Give me another chance! I promise this is going to be special,’” Bender recalled.
She always did relish a challenge. After racing motorcycles, she began training show-jumping horses at age 9. She joked that track and field was the first sport where she “had to run on my own legs.”
“The level of aggression and fearlessness that you have to take onto the motorcycle, and onto the horses, has carried over,” Bender said. “It just made me really willing to attack any situation.
“I don’t see myself as someone who backs down from anything, ever. I think I learned a lot of that in those two sports.”
She did have to shrug off several scary moments.
“I got launched off a couple of horses and flipped a motorcycle once or twice,” Bender said. “But I consider myself incredibly lucky by pretty much escaping unscathed.”
UCSB brought her back this year to serve as an assistant track and field coach. She also plans another Olympic attempt in the heptathlon — an event that didn’t even exist in the Olympics before 1984.
“I know that the generations before me didn’t have it the same way as I have,” Bender said in the Round Table podcast. “Just hearing from older coaches, older people in the sport, I know how lucky I am and blessed I am to be competing.
“When they were my age — early 20s, late teens, in college — the funding, the scholarships, just the opportunities to compete at a high level didn’t exist. To have those now and hopefully to continue to build on them is incredible.”
— Noozhawk sports columnist Mark Patton is a longtime local sports writer. Contact him at sports@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk Sports on Twitter: @NoozhawkSports. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook. The opinions expressed are his own.