Sitting at a Denver bookstore in 2002, Kate Fagan did not choose to tell her mother she was gay, it was a necessity.

“I had engaged in a pattern of lying by omission that was really eating away at me,” Fagan said Tuesday in front of a full Sheldon Ballroom. “And while I didn’t actually solve it going forward, I did at least put a stake in the ground at that moment to lie a little bit less to my parents.”

Even after she came out to her family and teammates on the Colorado University women’s basketball team, Fagan did not come out publicly until 2011.

Following Fagan’s graduation in 2002 and a few years playing basketball professionally, she began writing as a journalist.

One of Fagan’s most widely recognized pieces came as a writer for ESPN and ESPNW. In 2015, she completed “Split Image,” an investigative story about suicide victim Megan Holleran, who, at the time, was a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania.

Since then, Fagan expanded her concept for “Split Image” into the book “What Made Maddy Run” and has consistently chosen to promote awareness of mental health and anxiety in sports.

“So many of the stories that I work on now, the sole pursuit is to try and redefine how we see weakness and vulnerability,” Fagan said. “It used to be when I was playing college sports that anybody who couldn’t finish a sprint or had to step out of practice, I just thought they were totally weak.”

The concept of self-care resonated especially well with junior Mabel Muñoz, a wellness and development major.

“A lot of athletes feel that they have a lot of pressure that [non-athletes] won’t understand,” Muñoz said. “And I completely, 100 percent agree with that because I will never understand what you as athletes go through. But at the same time, we’re here for you as well.”

Pressure was something Fagan keyed in on, not only in sports, but in her own life after becoming a journalist. Prior to coming out, Fagan worked her way up from a local paper in eastern Washington and eventually became the Philadelphia Inquirer’s beat writer for the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team. Despite her climb up the employment ladder, Fagan was not putting forth her best work, she said.

“I just distanced myself from everybody I worked with, and when I got down to the Philadelphia Inquirer, I would say that not being open about who I was, was a problem in terms of being able to be very good at my job,” Fagan said.

After she came out as gay, it broadened her scope of journalism and allowed her to write with empathy, an emotion her stories had previously been missing, Fagan said.

Since then, Fagan has repeatedly used her perspective to discuss the topic of women in the sports world, whether in ESPN the Magazine, online or on TV. This includes ESPN’s sports debate show “Around the Horn,” on which she consistently appears.

“Every time I was in the production room, I would fight to get women’s sports stories in the program,” Fagan said. “That was so hard. It was so hard because people started to notice that I would talk about female athletes or women’s sports if I won ‘Around the Horn’ and then all of a sudden, the feedback looped to me was, at every turn they were like, ‘Nobody cares about female athletes or women’s sports.’”

According to Fagan, one of the reasons women’s sports struggle is because they receive significantly less media coverage than men’s. If female athletes were featured in media more often, it would make fans more aware of events in women’s sports, making them more invested, Fagan said.

“Let’s reverse that for one week,” Fagan said. “All of a sudden, you’re flipping through your TV and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, is that the Minnesota Lynx? I know Maya Moore, she played for [the University of Connecticut], and I want to see how she’s playing against Diana Taurasi.’ These are things you’d say.”

The concept of women in sports is not new, but it has not reached a level of stability either.

“I just believe that there needs to be more representation of women across the board, sports being one of them,” Tracy Chamberlain Higginbotham said.

Higginbotham, an Oswego State graduate of the School of Business, has been an entrepreneur for more than 20 years. Her current goal is using her networking company, Women’s TIES, to promote women’s businesses at spring events, as well as to increase attendance from female fans at women’s sports.

“Something that I added to my company five years ago was a women’s athletic network because there are so many women that don’t support women’s sporting events,” Higginbotham said. “For example, the [Syracuse University] women’s basketball team that did so well a couple years ago.”

The group referenced by Higginbotham was the SU team from 2016, which advanced past the second round of the NCAA women’s tournament for the first time in school history and ended up being the national runner-up. Despite the success, the following season, the team averaged less than 1,500 fans through the first dozen home games, according to a February 2017 article by the Syracuse Post-Standard.

That directly relates to two of the key components that Fagan said inspire audiences to attend athletic events or watch them on TV: storyline and stakes. The storyline matters because it provides context on the event, while the stakes are about how much the outcome matters.

Despite the relevant storyline and major stake produced by the previous year’s success, not many fans were enticed into watching the team. This is a problem that permeates throughout women’s sports, even at the international level.

“Don’t tell me it’s because someone can jump really high,” Fagan said. “I think that’s fun every once in a while, but we see women’s sports during the Olympics. You know the storylines, you know the stakes, you don’t tune in.”

Photo: Dori Gronich | The Oswegonian