For the past three semesters, students led by Emmy-nominated filmmaker and Visiting Assistant Professor of the Practice Theodore Bogosian have been working on a documentary highlighting the athletes, coaches and storylines that have shaped the past fifty years of women’s sports at Brown.
Titled “Champions and Change: 50 years of Women’s Intercollegiate Athletics at Brown,” the film is scheduled to be released on College Hill this fall. Earlier this month, during a series of panel discussions about women’s athletics at Brown, members of the filmmaking class — ARTS 1013B: “Finalizing Your First Documentary Feature: Content Creation from Script to Screen” — presented a 35-minute teaser of the documentary.
“The documentary is intended to celebrate the 50 years of women’s intercollegiate varsity athletics in the Ivy League, but especially at Brown,” Bogosian said in an interview with The Herald. In the film, “we’re looking at the period between when Title IX was passed and began to influence women’s varsity sports here and the trajectory from those humble beginnings to now.”
Title IX, through its promotion of equality for women’s sports, plays a pivotal role in the documentary, which highlights Cohen v. Brown — a federal court case that restored University funding for women’s sports teams at Brown.
The case will be “a thread that’s woven throughout the whole film,” said Zoey Fisher ’25, a student in the course. “It’s the foundation of what spurred the following 50 years of women’s athletics at Brown.”
Apart from its focus on Cohen and Title IX in women’s sports, the documentary will highlight the “firsts, bests and superlatives” that have characterized women’s athletics at Brown, Bogosian said.
Fisher noted that for each sport featured in the documentary, the team picked “a standout story that really defines the sport’s place at Brown.”
Some of the athletes and coaches featured in the film include Olivia Pichardo ’26 — who became the first woman to play varsity baseball in Division I history when she joined the team in 2023 — and Heather Marini, the first female position coach in Division I football.
These achievements are “a wonderful arc of triumph over adversity,” Bogosian said.
Though Bogosian brings his experiences from producing documentaries, he emphasized that the students took charge of the production, while he was “serving in a more of a supervisory role,” he said.
“I’m giving them the opportunity to make as many mistakes as they can, as fast as they can and to learn from those mistakes,” he added. Bogosian also hopes the students “make as many friends as they can along the way and enjoy the process.”
Integrating all the different voices and student perspectives into one coherent documentary has taken a concerted effort, explained Jessie Golden ’26 — the 2024 volleyball Ivy League Defensive Player of the Year — who is also a student in the course. Though they tackled different sports in separate teams, many of the students picked “a word that defines their part of the film,” Golden said.
Her group, which highlights women’s volleyball and the accomplishments of Head Coach Taylor Virtue, chose the word “confidence.”
“I think sports, in general, just gives people confidence, especially younger girls,” Golden said. “I feel like confidence is the main thing I’ve learned from being here at Brown and being an athlete.”
Fisher added that despite the separation into groups, the production of the documentary is still a collaborative activity.
“Everything that everyone does is presented to the class and everyone gets to weigh in on it,” Fisher said. “Every single person has their hand and their perspective in every aspect of the film, which I think is what is helping to make it more cohesive.”
But beyond that, “we’re all on the same page about what the overall message is going to be and how we want all the different pieces to highlight that message,” Fisher added.
According to Fisher, one of the main goals of the documentary is to explain what made Brown uniquely suited to creating an atmosphere that enabled so many female athletes to flourish and move women’s sports forward.
Fisher attributed this environment to the Open Curriculum. “Here, we are encouraged to think outside the box, to make our own path, not to do exactly what’s in the book,” she said.
Even though students selected most of the storylines that will be featured in the documentary, the production process has incorporated input from alumni, as well. After the panel event, various former student athletes who didn’t see their sports represented in the documentary’s preview reached out to members of the class to share their stories.
“It’s been really cool to see how this film has inspired female athletes from Brown’s history to come forward and be excited to share their story,” she added. “That will definitely inspire female athletes and students at this school for generations to come.”
“Brown is a place where people are still a part of the community after they graduate, and they want to give back,” Golden shared. “All of the people at the event wanted to help us with the film, and they wanted to be a part of it in any way they could.”
“We’re learning as we go,” Bogosian said. “We had a wonderful reception the other night and I was so proud of my students and their work, and I know we’re going to have a great film.”
Lydell Dyer is a sports editor for The Herald. A junior hailing from Bonn, Germany, Lydell is studying nonfiction English and political science, and if he's not off "making words sound pretty," you can find him lifting heavy circles at the Nelson.
