My foray into the world of podcasting begins here. Who knows if it’s also the end?

Pip: You’re listening to I’ll Call It Like I See It — a blog that covers women’s basketball, Black history, Scottish seascapes, and country music queens, sometimes in the same week.

Mara: Sheila Morris has been busy. This episode moves through women’s sports and competition, Black history and civil rights, and women artists and cultural icons. Let’s start with the basketball courts and the bobsled track.

Women on the Court and the Ice

Pip: Women’s sports this season gave us two very different stages — a bobsled tube in the Milan Cortina Olympics and the SEC Tournament floor in Greenville, South Carolina — and both asked the same question: what does it take to stay the course when the odds are stacked against you?

Mara: The post on Elana Meyers Taylor sets that up directly. Here’s Meyers Taylor in her own words: “I really want a gold medal. I haven’t gotten it yet, so I feel like that is the one thing that I am missing from my resume, but besides that it is doing it for myself and doing it for my kids. To show them that I can chase my dreams and I can overcome obstacles and just continue to persevere through any obstacles that come my way and actually achieve my dreams.”

Pip: What that means in practice is that the gold medal is almost beside the point. Meyers Taylor, 41, the most decorated Black Winter Olympian, was racing for her deaf sons — one of whom also has Down syndrome — to show them that obstacles are something you move through, not stop at.

Mara: And she won. That’s the historic part — a gold in women’s monobob at 41, during Black History Month, with her sons Nico and Noah running to meet her at the finish.

Pip: Meanwhile, the SEC Women’s Basketball Tournament post is a warmer kind of dispatch — friends, family, Gamecock gear, a granddaughter named Molly wondering why Nana was smiling in her sleep. The Gamecocks lost the Tournament Final to Texas, but the tone is pure joy.

Mara: That joy carries into the Women’s Final Four post, which covers the Gamecocks making the Final Four for the sixth consecutive season. UCLA won it all under coach Cori Close — fifteen years of patience and persistence, as the post puts it — and three South Carolina players head to the WNBA Draft. The post also calls out UConn coach Geno Auriemma’s sideline behavior as a distraction that disrespected players, staff, and the game itself.

Pip: Persistence and respect for the game — two themes that connect a bobsled track in Italy to a basketball court in Phoenix. Speaking of legacies that don’t get their due billing, let’s talk about Black history.

Hidden Gems and Lasting Legacies

Mara: The post on Willie Flora opens with a personal frame: a friendship of forty-five years, a celebration of life in Simonton, Texas, and a question about whose name gets remembered. Willie Flora was not a public figure, but her niece Verna’s tribute says it plainly: “Aunt Ninnie was called many names, Skin, Cat Momma, Girlie, Aunt, Cousin, Sister, Road dog, Mother, but most of all she was called Mom. She was the type of person that, whatever you needed, no matter what it was, you had it.”

Pip: That’s the whole argument for why ordinary people belong in Black history. Not every legacy fits on a postage stamp — though, as the post on Harriet Powers shows, some do now.

Mara: Powers, born into slavery in Georgia, was recognized as a pioneer quilter and storyteller. The United States Postal Service issued a stamp in her honor in February 2026. And the post on Jesse Jackson traces six decades of civil rights activism, including his 1984 Democratic convention speech naming LGBTQ people explicitly inside his Rainbow Coalition — “The Rainbow includes lesbians and gays. No American citizen ought to be denied equal protection from the law.”

Pip: Three very different figures, one through line: people who refused to be defined by what the world expected of them. From civil rights to quilts to country music — that pivot is closer than it sounds.

Art, Love, and the Women Who Made It

Pip: Women’s History Month gets the artistic treatment here — from a Scottish painter who fell in love with the North Sea and a violinist, to the country queens who shaped a childhood in rural Texas.

Mara: The post on Joan Eardley draws from her own words about Catterline, the tiny coastal village where she did her most powerful work: “When I’m painting in the North East, I hardly ever move out of the village, I hardly ever move from one spot. I do feel the more you know something, the more you can get out of it.”

Pip: A lesbian artist who died at 42, whose love letters to violinist Audrey Walker weren’t published until fifty years after her death — that’s a story that needed the telling.

Mara: And the post on country music queens closes Women’s History Month on a different note entirely — Patsy Cline, Dolly Parton, Anne Murray, and a childhood memory of being told by an uncle that she sang as good as Patsy Cline. Anne Murray’s “A Little Good News” gets quoted in full, and the post connects its 1983 lyrics to the political mood of 2026 with very little stretching required.

Pip: Art as witness. That’s the thread from Eardley’s seascapes to a country song about wanting one day without catastrophe.

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Mara: Persistence, legacy, and the question of who gets remembered — those ideas run through everything here.

Pip: Women flying down a bobsled track, quilting a Bible story, painting the same cliff face until they understood it. More of that next time.