Talk with a big-league ballplayer about the influential people who set the right foundation for him and before long he’s almost always talking about his father.

ESPN commentator and former major league player and manager Bobby Valentine is no exception.

Valentine’s father did more than have a catch and toss him some batting practice. He wanted his son to see the very best ballplayers, wanted him to watch how they played the game so purely. He did that even if that meant driving from Stamford, Conn., to Stratford.

The names of the ballplayers Valentine’s father wanted his boy to see: Donna Lopiano and Joan Joyce of the Raybestos Brakettes softball team.

“That was a long trip for my dad to drive in those days,” Valentine said in an e-mail exchange. “Donna was one of my heroes growing up. My dad said Donna and Joan were as good as any of the guys around. I played with Donna’s cousin in high school and we would always talk about how good she was.”

It wasn’t just talk. A coach of the Mickey Lione Little League in Stamford used the first pick of the draft one year on Lopiano. It turned out it was wasted because someone dug out a league rule book and pointed out that girls were prohibited.

Athletics have benefited from that slight because it lit the flame of Lopiano, a dynamite stick of an advocate forever fighting for gender equity.

Lopiano, 63, is the president and founder of Sports Management Resources, a consulting firm used by high school and college athletic departments. Former women’s athletic director at Texas and past president of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, she will speak at 3 p.m. today in the Kansas Room of the Kansas Union.

Lopiano talks in a way that leaves no doubt she would trade all the honors and titles she has received through the years for the Little League uniform taken away from her.

“To go out for Little League, not only make a team, but be drafted No. 1, to get your first uniform, it was a pretty exciting time and it didn’t end up very well,” Lopiano said. “I couldn’t wish that upon any kid. I’m still very disappointed in USA Baseball and Little League. They still have not embraced girls playing baseball. They shuffle them off to softball as soon as they can.”

Lopiano’s softball accomplishments included winning six national championships, but she doesn’t hesitate to say she prefers baseball.

“I had to learn to throw underhanded,” she said.

Title IX, enacted June 23, 1972, has been around long enough that more and more mothers are taking on the role of instructing children, which excites Lopiano.

It’s always been my belief that Title IX has prevented many a teenage pregnancy. Girls don’t have to attach their egos to the athletic achievements of their boyfriends. They’re too busy scoring goals and buckets.

“I think that’s absolutely true,” Lopiano said of my theory. “The great value of sports is it takes kids out of this dangerous after-school period of time before their parents come home. It keeps them out of trouble.”

Lopiano called being on a team “a very positive gang for boys and girls.”

If you like speakers who don’t bite their tongues, give Lopiano a listen today.