Because surfing wasn’t a sport at her public school, Rochelle Ballard, a 1989 graduate of Waimea High School on Kauai, didn’t feel that Title IX, the 1972 law prohibiting sex discrimination in educational activities receiving federal funds, applied to her.

While she experienced discrimination, “Title IX didn’t apply in the lineup with a bunch of men,” said the former national amateur champion, 17-year veteran of the women’s professional championship tour, 2012 world master’s champion and still the best female barrel rider of all time.

Although Ballard and Keala Kennelly, the big-wave champion, grew up surfing for fun with the boys, including legendary Andy and Bruce Irons, on Kauai, when it came to competing, “we were still trying to prove women’s surfing was a sport and not a sideline.”

Not only were they paid a fraction of what the guys won — if at all — but “whenever the waves got really small and boring and not contestable, the men said ‘we’re not surfing’ and the organizers would say ‘great, send the women out.’ ”

In 1998, to show the world the riveting, cutting-edge state of women’s surfing in real life, in real waves, her then-husband, filmmaker Bill Ballard, shot Ballard and her friends free surfing around the world for the 60-minute documentary “Blue Crush,” a top-seller that was adapted into the 2002 feature film of the same name.

In addition to the 50th anniversary of Title IX, this year marks the 20th anniversary of “Blue Crush.” The cult Hollywood film which featured Ballard, Kennelly, Megan Abubo, Serena Brooke, Kate Skarratt, Layne Beachley, Lisa Andersen and others alongside stars Kate Bosworth, Michelle Rodriguez, Kauai surfer Sanoe Lake and young North Shore native Coco Ho.

Originally inspired by “The Maui Surfer Girls,” an article by Susan Orlean in Outside Magazine, “Blue Crush” focused instead on Ballard’s struggle, starting in 1995, to succeed in the male-dominated, gladiatorial arena of Banzai Pipeline.

“Women are smaller, not as weighted in momentum and strong as guys are, but I knew it was possible, I just had to pay the dues and learn it,” said Ballard, who stands 5 feet 1. “It was scary, I got hurt, fell over the ledge, got cut off, wasn’t given the best waves, pulled into a lot of closeouts — but then I learned to drop in late from the boys and all of a sudden, I started getting better barrels and coming out of them.”

While she never won a world title and there was never a women’s championship event at Pipeline during her career, Ballard, who surfed there in her free time for the pure love and challenge of it, attained the highest level and “most amazing experience in surfing, the biggest reward.”

There were practical consequences, too. Ranked in the top 10 of the women’s world tour throughout the 1990s, Ballard scored two perfect 10 barrel rides at the 1997 Billabong Pro at Burleigh Heads in Australia. She went on to win the event over multiple-time world champions Beachley and Andersen and still holds the women’s world record for two perfect 10s in a single heat.

The event was a turning point in the perception of women’s surfing, she said. “I remember the guys for the first time stayed to watch the women and being cheered by Kelly Slater.”

Burleigh Heads “stepped it up for women,” Ballard said, noting women’s events were soon added at glamorous but deadly, tubing breaks such as Teahupoo, Tahiti and Tavarua, Fiji.

In 1998, with “Blue Crush,” she said, “we helped to spark the rise of the women’s surf industry and the mainstream appeal of being a surfer girl. It was a very small market before then.”

The market grew as veteran women surfers pushed for more media coverage, sponsorships and prize money.

In 2019, the World Surf League finally established equal prize purses for women and men, and in 2021 committed to holding events for both genders at the same venues, including, for the first time, Banzai Pipeline in 2022.

This year’s Billabong Pro Pipeline, won by North Shore local wildcard Moana Jones Wong, made “the dream of ‘Blue Crush’ into reality,” Ballard said.

I can’t help but think that Hawaii’s Patsy Mink, the first woman of color in Congress and the author of Title IX, now named for her, would be stoked.

In “Fierce and Fearless,” a new biography by Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Gwendolyn Mink, we learn the tireless advocate for peace, denuclearization and equality of race and gender faced electoral obstacles from the male-dominated lineup in the Hawaii Democratic Party.

But Mink worked in solidarity with female leaders, including Congresswomen Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug, to pass progressive laws, just as Ballard and other pioneers opened channels for generations to paddle through. Whether in school, work or play, we are all daughters of Title IX.