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I'm Zoe Weinberg and this is next in foreign policy. The podcasts were the next generation of national security and foreign policy leaders. Talk about the issues of today and tomorrow.

Today we are joined by Lucy Montgomery. She's the founder of Women's College Players Association, which advocates for the health and safety safeguards and player empowerment in women's college sports.

She previously worked for athletes and limited and helped launch a women's soccer team in Los Angeles, Angel City FC.

Lucy, welcome to the show.

Hi, Natalia. Hi, Zoe. Thanks for having me.

We're so excited to have you. Something that we always love to ask is to hear a little bit more about how you first became interested in your field of work, so specifically sports.

And the intersection of sports and policy.

Yeah, well, let's see it. So I grew up in Iowa in the mid 90s and I just loved being outside with my brother in all the neighborhood kids.

I loved jumping on the trampoline. I loved playing hockey in the street. I loved playing backyard baseball. I just really loved sports.

And then when I was about eight in 1999, the US women's soccer team won the World Cup and that was hosted in the US.

And I remember just falling in love with Mia Hamm and the rest of the team.

And that was when I first started really following women's sports and played soccer, basketball, softball sports on teams.

And ultimately decided to stay with basketball and played through college.

And then after college, I moved to DC and that was obviously the perfect intersection of policy and sport and started attending a lot of events in DC that were at the intersection of policy and sport and just started to realize, wow, there's this whole world outside of balls and strikes or just the score.

And it was really fascinating to me to think that, wow, sport, if used right, can be an amazing vehicle for social change.

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