Off a Bucks County road, in a rust-red barn that is not a barn anymore, a 12-year-old girl named Julianna Rush dribbled and shot a basketball. Her parents, Michael and Jen, purchased the barn in 2014 to transform it into a 6,000-square-foot warehouse for the family business, the sports-camp conglomerate that Julianna’s grandmother Cathy founded more than 50 years earlier.

During the renovation, Michael and Jen raised the barn’s ceiling to 20 feet so they could do what they did in 2016: build a full basketball court inside it, laying blue shock-absorbing tiles atop a rubber floor. That way, they and their three children — and anyone who liked basketball and knew the Rushes — could play whenever they wanted, without the risk of too much wear and tear on knees and ankles still growing thicker and stronger.

Inside, soccer balls, tennis rackets, weights, and mats were strewn across the floor and overflowed from tall, metallic shelves. A basketball shooting machine loomed like a statue in a corner near the court. Every slap of the ball against the tiles echoed throughout the cavernous facility. Julianna was practicing, Michael snapping passes to her. Her sunset-red hair, pulled into a ponytail, bobbed as she took one jumper after another from a spot near the foul line. Her form — right elbow cocked into an L and tight to her torso, every movement smooth and with bounce, as if she were a liquid robot — was impeccable. So were the results of her shots: swish, swish, swish.

Whenever Cathy visits on the weekends, she critiques Julianna’s performance and progress, gives her tips and advice, and sometimes records videos of her workouts. Julianna, who plays on a travel team and an AAU team, watches the videos to see how she can improve, how she might shave away any flaws in her stroke. One of the videos is five years old, a slow-motion sequence of Julianna shooting on an eight-foot-high hoop when she was 7. If there’s anything that Cathy Rush’s life in basketball demonstrates, it’s the power and possibility of grand change over time.

The word legacy is used so frequently when discussing sports that it has become banal, although there’s no consensus on what, in practical terms, it actually means. What is Jackie Robinson’s legacy? Easy enough. But what is Michael Jordan’s legacy? The six championships? The sneaker sales? Is John Madden’s legacy his brilliant coaching mind or his brilliant entrepreneurial mind? Will Barry Bonds’ alleged steroid use forever blot out his 762 home runs in our collective memory? Is an athlete’s or coach’s legacy merely the thing you think of first whenever you hear his or her name? And what if someone else thinks of something different? There’s rarely anything tangible that one can see and touch and say, There. There it is. There is my legacy.

Cathy Rush can. So let’s pause here, 50 years since the passage of Title IX, to understand this dynamic between grandmother and granddaughter and the symbolic significance of their relationship.

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Here is Cathy Rush, a basketball revolutionary who coached Immaculata College to three national championships in the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, at the time an all-distaff counterpart to the NCAA. Who wasn’t a product of Title IX but predated it — the first of those championships came in March 1972, three months before President Richard Nixon signed the bill into law. Who wasn’t yet 30 years old when, after guiding the Mighty Macs to those three titles and six consecutive AIAW Final Fours, after winning 149 games and losing just 15 at Immaculata, she retired from coaching in 1977 to raise her two sons and continue building her camp business into something close to an empire. Who was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2008 and whose groundbreaking Immaculata teams were inducted in 2014 and who got to see her story depicted Hollywood-style in the 2009 movie The Mighty Macs.

“As much as I look up to her, they look up to her. “They whisper, ‘That’s your grandma?’”

Here is Cathy Rush, who drives 105 miles north from her home in Ventnor to Doylestown every summer weekend to visit Michael’s family, and here with her is Julianna Rush: Cathy’s own flesh and blood, the walking, talking, dribbling, shooting manifestation of her life and life’s work. Julianna is just one girl, but she is also more than just one girl. She represents something bigger, a drop of water in a wave that Cathy helped start to swell. She is all the girls and women who have seized on the opportunities that Title IX was intended to guarantee them and that people like her grandmother made possible for them. She is all the women who starred at USC in the 1980s and Tennessee in the 1990s and Connecticut for a generation, the women who made it to the WNBA, the women who became coaches, and the women who became surgeons and CEOs and who never picked up a basketball again after high school. She is Dawn Staley and Kara Lawson and Diana Taurasi and who-knows-how-many fellow ballplayers with bobbing ponytails who haven’t been born yet.

Here is Cathy Rush. She is 75. How many coaches and players over the last half-century has she herself mentored or befriended, either at Immaculata or at one of her camps? How often has she been the moon to this tide? Here is Julianna Rush. She already is one of those players. She spends a week each June inside another gym in Bucks County, among a select group of peers and friends, maybe 20 in all, whom the Rushes gather together for a camp at a nearby private school. And she listens and nods and follows Cathy’s teaching points and instructions, and the other 12- and 13-year-old girls do the same, and they sidle up to Julianna and nudge her and lean in close.

“As much as I look up to her, they look up to her,” she said. “They whisper, ‘That’s your grandma?’”

Ever since she was small, Julianna has absorbed the broad legend of Cathy and her achievements, family lore handed down. But there was a difference between having a vague sense that her grandmother has accomplished something of note and appreciating how … historic … Cathy really was, how far back into the past her story stretched.

The beginning of that story is there for everyone to see, just two blocks from the Atlantic City boardwalk, blazing across a giant billboard that reads CHRIST DIED FOR OUR SINS atop one of the turrets of Chelsea Baptist Church. There, in the 1950s, when she wasn’t much older than Julianna is now, Rush and Carolyn Cade Rott vied for rover status — in women’s basketball then, the rover was the only player who could cross the midcourt line to play offense and defense — on the church’s youth group team. “I wanted the ball, and so did she,” said Rott, who went on to spend seven years as the head girls’ basketball coach at Rush’s alma mater, Oakcrest High School. “It was, ‘I’m going to be the rover.’ ‘No, Cathy, I’m going to be the rover.’ But she was the cream of the crop.”

Her father, John Cowan, ran a generating station for the Atlantic City Electric Co. and had a mind that made him the worst possible pinochle opponent, the kind who could deduce, better than anyone else at the table, who held what cards and when they would play them. Her mother, Alice, had captained the field hockey, basketball, and volleyball teams in high school. At her two-room elementary school — kindergarten through second grade in one room, third through fifth in the other — Rush was smart and studious enough to skip a grade. At home, she could dash two doors down to her cousins’ house, where her uncle had mounted a basketball hoop above the garage door.

“We’d meet there,” she said, “and everybody would shoot. Then they’d go do something else, and I just kept shooting and shooting and shooting.” Her eighth-grade team won the county championship, with Cathy averaging 28 points a game. Of course she scored so much. The girls played three-on-three, not five-on-five like the boys.

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She got in one year of basketball at Oakcrest before the school dropped all its girls’ interscholastic sports, so she joined an intramural gymnastics team. Trampoline was her specialty, and her love of sports was so consuming — and the societal presumption that a young woman had only so many career options so strong — that she decided to attend West Chester State and major in physical education. Already, she had mapped out her future: She would get a college degree. She would get a husband. She would get a teaching job that she would keep for three years before she started a family and never worked outside the home again. A ’60s woman, she likes to call herself now for the way she thought then. Her geometry teacher at Oakcrest told her, You’re wasting your brain.

It might have seemed that way at first. She played just two years of basketball at West Chester, and she met and married Ed Rush, and she taught and coached in the Great Valley and Springfield (Delaware County) school districts before Immaculata hired her in 1970 for a cool $450 a year. Nothing to lose there. Why not drive 15 miles west from Delaware County to the rolling farmland of Chester County, where the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary had purchased 198 acres in 1906 to build an all-women’s Catholic college? Why not take over a basketball program at a school of fewer than 800 students, a program that had been around since the 1940s but that didn’t give scholarships and no longer had a gym? An electrical fire had destroyed the college’s fieldhouse in 1967. The decorating committee for the next night’s Sophomore Cotillion had been inside, putting the finishing touches on the place, when the stage curtains went up in flames. The women made it out unharmed, and they joined their schoolmates pouring out of the dorms to watch in curiosity and terror as the gym burned to the ground. Immaculata wouldn’t open another until 1971; in the meantime, the team practiced in the basement of a campus convent, the one for novice nuns. Some plum coaching gig. Hey, it was going to be for just a couple of years, right?

“When she went to coach at Immaculata, she said, ‘We’re going there to play the men’s game’ ... Now all those teams play that way.”

She had her advantages and resources, though. The first tryouts she oversaw stunned her: women who could play, women from the Philadelphia Catholic League and the neighborhoods in and around the city, women who had grown up marinating in environments in which the importance of labor and striving, of thinking beyond yourself, was revealed every day. Theresa Shank Grentz was the oldest of five children. Her father was a receiver at a supermarket warehouse. Rene Muth Portland was one of four children. Her father owned a hardware store. Most of my players are from big families, Rush once thought. Maybe that’s the key. Like, if you want something, you have to reach for it.

Maybe it helped as much that her father wasn’t the only Cowan who knew how and when to play a trump card. Ed Rush was an NBA referee, and Cathy, who traveled with him to 30 games or so each season, mined him and his friends and colleagues around the league for basketball insights and wisdom. When Immaculata went 10-2 in her first season and only got better from there, when she soaked up all that knowledge from all those sources, retaining it and expanding on it, was she wasting her brain then? Once the Mighty Macs won their first national championship in 1972, she was nimble enough to scrap her plan to step away from coaching, and she was ambitious enough to buck the stereotypes that led one sportswriter to describe her as a “pretty, blonde, 24-year-old coach” and that had once limited her thinking about the choices she could make.

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The public and media saw and read about the nuns and the white-haired Knights of Columbus members sitting in folding chairs and banging buckets at games to show their support. About the players sticking to Immaculata’s strict dress and behavior codes — mandatory prayer services in the chapel for soldiers wounded in Vietnam, no skin showing between the hems of their skirts and the tops of their knee socks, always calling their coach “Mrs. Rush” even though she was just a couple of years older than they were — and selling toothbrushes and pencils to raise funds to travel to national tournaments. About Rush playing golf in the morning before bringing her son Eddie Jr. to the gym, setting him courtside in a portable crib while the Mighty Macs practiced, then wearing stylish pantsuits on the sideline during games. Yet below that layer of quaint, feel-good narratives was an exacting leader shepherding a talented team to the top of women’s college basketball.

Julianna can mostly set her own schedule to work on her game, but her grandmother’s players didn’t have that luxury. Rush ratcheted up the demands on them, from two-hour practices three days a week when she began to five days a week — and two practices each day during Christmas break — once winning became the baseline standard. Ninety percent of each practice was devoted to sprints and drill work. “When she went to coach at Immaculata,” Michael said, “she said, ‘We’re going there to play the men’s game. We’re going to share the ball, push the tempo.’ Now all those teams play that way.” Scrimmages generally were pointless, she reasoned, because a player would improve only so much by watching someone else dribble and shoot. At Immaculata, every player had a ball for every practice, so that when it came time for Rush to implement a 1-3-1 trap or teach the best strategy to beat it, every player knew what to do and how to do it.

Through that approach, for instance, Grentz, 6 feet tall, developed into a multidimensional force in the post, the funnel through whom Immaculata’s entire offense ran. On March 26, 1973, one day after the Mighty Macs had beaten Queens College 59-52 for their second straight national title, Grentz sat in Rush’s living room, the two of them tuning in to UCLA’s victory over Memphis in the championship of the NCAA men’s tournament. They witnessed a seminal performance by Bruins center Bill Walton, who, in helping UCLA win its seventh consecutive national title, made 21 of his 22 shots from the field and scored 44 points. It was fitting that Rush and Grentz had watched the game together. A writer for Sports Illustrated later noted that Rush had followed a similar formula to that of Bruins coach John Wooden, “surrounding a big, quick, pivot player with a meticulously drilled team.”

The comparison wasn’t outlandish or inappropriate. “Cathy was ahead of her time,” Grentz said, and the cute-and-cuddly image of Immaculata belied its teams’ dominance and the cutthroat competitiveness of its head coach. The Mighty Macs went 60-2 over their three national-championship seasons, and no team that good could be nothing but proper and perfect little ladies all the time.

Janet Ruch Boltz, a diminutive guard for the Mighty Macs, had been in the starting lineup for most of her senior season, 1971-72. But Rush kept her on the bench for the title game, caring less about bruising Boltz’s ego and more about counteracting West Chester State’s size advantage. The Macs won, 52-48. Before a 1973 game, several Ursinus players sneaked into the second floor of Immaculata’s rotunda and, from a bannister, hung a bedsheet that read: WE’RE GOING TO NAIL IMMACULATA TO THE CROSS. After their victory, Rush and the Mighty Macs tore the sheet to pieces.

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All the Immaculata players commuted to school and carpooled to games, and the following season, a carful of them, while driving along the backroads to campus, passed the Radnor Hunt Club and paused to stare at the riders, clad in black hats and red jackets, atop their horses. Finally, the players arrived at Immaculata, late for practice. Portland entered the gym first and tried to scoop Eddie Jr. out of his playpen. “Put him down!” Rush shouted at her, then told the group to run three miles as punishment for their tardiness. On Jan. 28, 1975, the Mighty Macs crushed Maryland, 80-48, at Cole Field House in the first nationally televised women’s basketball game in American history — an independent network named Mizlou telecast the game — and Rush came away from it questioning her own intelligence, wondering if she should have kept the game closer to keep viewers from turning it off at halftime. “I was too dumb to realize that probably would have been a good thing,” she said, but she couldn’t help herself.

Cathy and Ed eventually divorced, but not before she had long established her credibility and shed the perception, in certain people’s eyes, that she possessed only the veneer of expertise, that Ed had been the one pulling the coaching strings all along. Once, he and a family friend equipped her with a walkie-talkie for a big game so that he could call down information to her. She turned off the device after five minutes. “Painful,” she said. To the coaches who worked at her camps, she was just one of them, spending hundred-degree days on makeshift courts under a canopy of woods in the Pocono Mountains or on the asphalt skillet of a Valley Forge office-center parking lot, drinking beers and talking hoops until the wee hours of the morning, rising on four hours’ sleep to do it all again the next day. “We had more fun as a staff than the kids had,” Rush said.

For friends such as Geno Auriemma, Phil Martelli, and Herb Magee, for former Immaculata players such as Grentz, Portland, and Marianne Crawford Stanley, for dozens more, a week at Rush’s Future Stars camp became a rite of coaching passage. Did you coach high school or college? Boys or girls? Men or women? Didn’t matter. Those artificial walls of inequality crumbled. At one Poconos camp, Magee challenged Rush to a round of golf … when she was seven months pregnant. They played 18 holes through a driving rainstorm. “Needless to say, I got destroyed,” Magee said. “She would have beaten me from the men’s tees.” When they returned to camp, someone asked Magee who had won. “Rain delay,” he said. “We’ll have to pick it up later.”

Amid that camaraderie, in her unique setting, Rush didn’t necessarily think of herself as a crusader, as a barrier-breaker in the women’s movement. Grentz had a friend who played at Villanova. There, the friend told her, guys would saunter into the gym to play pickup or intramurals and complain that the women’s team was practicing. Rush didn’t have to fight for gym time. The gym belonged to her and her team. Other coaches had to push administrators to pour more money into their programs because the men had it all. At Immaculata, there weren’t any men, and there wasn’t much money. “We had nothing to compare ourselves to,” Rush said.

“I always say that I’m the only women’s basketball coach who was adversely affected by Title IX.”

The battles over whether football’s dominance or Title IX itself was causing athletic departments to cut men’s sports? Rush never had to fight them. The resentment and indignation over men’s having access to resources that women didn’t? Rush never felt it. She never had time for it. There were too many men who had respected and been respectful to her, who had been willing to help her. Did that make her journey easier or harder? Did that afford her a lighter burden to bear compared with those coaches who had to shout to be heard and claw for every inch of progress?

It’s not that she considered such questions irrelevant or unimportant. It’s that there was always another game to coach, another championship to chase, another camp to run. When her breast cancer was diagnosed in 1990, it wasn’t enough for her just to survive the disease; she became a spokesperson for the American Cancer Society.

Michael Rush said she taught him to solve problems and carry out projects with that single-mindedness of purpose. He was close one year to signing a major contract to hold a week’s worth of camps at a local university, only to have the school double the rental fees at the last minute. He erupted with anger and indignation. His mother just looked at him. The first advertising brochure she’d ever printed had featured an embarrassing typo: 5,000 copies of GIRLS BASETBALL CAMP. That mistake hadn’t stopped the camp’s attendance from swelling from 50 kids the first year to 400 the next to 800 to 2,000. Don’t piss and moan or scream and holler. Figure it out. Get to work. Fix it. Her bias toward action was as loud or louder than any lobbying she might have done.

Besides, she never wanted to coach college basketball forever, not really. Sure, there was interest from higher-profile schools: UCLA, Rutgers, Maryland, San Diego State. And she considered those offers, especially after sauntering into Immaculata’s administrative offices in September 1976 and telling the school’s leadership: Look, we need scholarships, and if we don’t start giving them, I’m going someplace that does. “I was an arrogant and obnoxious 20-something,” she said, and she couldn’t see what the Sisters could, couldn’t recognize how Title IX had changed and would change everything. More Catholic colleges and universities were starting to admit women as it was, and now the giants of Division I had to start allocating more resources to women’s athletics. Even if Immaculata did start handing out basketball scholarships, was it realistic to think the program could keep pace with Villanova and Penn State and Notre Dame?

So she resigned, figuring she would take a year off and get back into coaching. Except now she was a single mother of two young boys, and her business was flourishing, and the more she thought about it, the more she realized that she liked her life as it was and that she always would. That’s the irony of Cathy Rush’s legacy: The law that was supposed to benefit her and everyone like her caused her to take her first step toward ending her coaching career.

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“I always say,” she said, “that I’m the only women’s basketball coach who was adversely affected by Title IX.”

She doesn’t mind so much. She is reminded, whenever she makes that Friday drive north from Ventnor to Doylestown, what a rarity she is in that regard.

It is not lost on Michael Rush that his mother gave up coaching for her children. “This was a choice that she made — that we were a bigger priority than that was,” he said. “That’s pretty remarkable for anybody.” Michael is 48, born in 1974, and earlier this year, as part of the 50th anniversary of Cathy’s first national-championship team, he returned with her to Immaculata — to Camilla Hall, the Sisters’ retirement facility — to say hello to the few familiar faces left there. But he has no true, lasting memories of the place. He has heard the stories, just like Julianna has.

Her points of reference in the sport are fresher, as one would expect. While Julianna’s school was stuck in remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, her sign-on icon, the little picture that let her teachers know she was present and ready for class, was a UConn emblem.

“She knows everything,” Cathy said. “It’s amazing, and there are a million kids just like her.”

Her big brother, Tommy, who is two years older, teases her sometimes, as big brothers do, purposely mispronouncing the last name of her favorite player: the Huskies’ Paige Bueckers. “I always tell him, ‘It’s Beckers, not Beeyookers,’” she said. But when Tommy and his buddies are a player short for a full-court game in the barn, they don’t hesitate to ask Julianna. She has to play with the men’s ball, but she doesn’t care, because “you should be able to shoot with any ball, no matter its size or anything,” she said. “So it really doesn’t hurt me at all.” And the thought that she wouldn’t or couldn’t play with whomever she wanted, that anything so silly would stop her from achieving her goals, doesn’t even cross her mind.

“I would love to play Division I,” she said, “but I just want to play basketball for as long as I can.”

She tilted her head.

“Yeah, that’s pretty much it.”

And there are a million kids just like her. There. There it is. There’s the answer to the question whispered in a basketball gym from one 12-year-old girl to another. Yes, that’s Julianna Rush’s grandma. Yes, that’s Cathy Rush. And yes, there is her legacy.