Tit for Tat

I was on the track team in high school, so I watched it happen over and over. As my teammates became curvier, they took increasingly more desperate steps to keep their anatomies under control. Some layered two or three bras. Others used duct tape. Nothing really worked. Eventually the more well-endowed dropped out. We accepted it as fact: buxom women couldn’t do sports. Luckily for all of us, three University of Vermont students during my senior year weren’t buying it. Hinda Miller, Lisa Lindahl and Polly Smith put their heads together to build a bra that would control the painful bounce. They were getting nowhere until Lisa’s husband came in wearing two jock straps slung over his chest. He was teasing, but it got them thinking. "That's what we wanted: to pull everything close to the body," said Hinda. They bought two jock straps and sewed them together. And just like that, the sports bra was born.