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The impact of Title IX legislation is clearly visible on the La Conner High campus.

It’s seen on banners and in the trophy case at Landy James Gym and on a permanent sign placed near the school’s main entrance.

All herald the achievements of Lady Brave players and teams four decades after passage of the landmark act that literally leveled the playing field for female athletes.

For two La Conner High products, though, the story begins well before 1972.

That’s because Lauren McClung, a La Conner alum now playing volleyball at Pacific Lutheran University, and her younger sister, Kelley, a La Conner senior bound next fall for Central Washington University on an athletic scholarship, are direct descendants of one of North America’s leading women’s suffrage pioneers.

They are the great-great-granddaughters of Nellie McClung, 1873-1951, the revered Canadian social reformer, whose image has appeared on that country’s $50 bill, a national postage stamp, and various renderings and monuments north of the border, mostly in the prairie provinces.

Nellie’s memory is held in such esteem there that her family home in Winnipeg is a national historic site.

Nellie was one of “The Famous Five,” who raised awareness of and support for women’s rights in Canada shortly after the turn of the 20th Century. They were successful in overturning laws that had reduced women to second class citizens.

They gained much of their notoriety at the same time the 19th Amendment, giving American women the right to vote, was being proposed and ratified in the United States.

“There’s a lot of history in all this,” says Lauren’s and Kelley’s dad, Sean McClung, of La Conner, among those family members whose accounts help keep Nellie’s legacy alive.

They have plenty of help.

There is no shortage of authors and chroniclers fascinated with The Famous Five, all of whom were voted Canada’s first honorary senators in 2009.

They were so honored for their role in securing Canadian women the right to vote and run for office.

“It was pretty amazing,” Sean said during a recent trip to Port Townsend, where he watched Kelley play basketball for La Conner. “They were able to convince the courts to overturn laws that basically said women weren’t full citizens, that they couldn’t sit in the Senate.”

Nellie’s part can’t be overstated.

It was largely through her efforts that Manitoba in 1916 became the first Canadian province to extend the right to vote to women and grant them the opportunity to seek high political office.

Nellie didn’t waste her own opportunity. She was elected in the early 1920s to the Manitoba Legislative Assembly.

Nellie is credited with having had a keen political acumen. She deftly managed to keep the suffrage movement within the Canadian mainstream by resisting overtures from extremist groups.

The women’s suffrage movement in great measure — though not completely — defined her life’s mission.

Though a feminist, Nellie was also a devoted wife and mother, who embraced other social causes, temperance foremost among them.

“She was a teetotaler,” explains one of her admiring biographers, “who saw men drinking away their families’ pay.”

Ultimately settling in Victoria, Nellie would also champion medical and dental care for children, factory safety legislation, property rights for married women, and equitable divorce laws.

On the latter issue, she offered her most popular and widely quoted line.

“Why are pencils equipped with erasers,” Nellie reportedly said, “if not to correct mistakes.”

She often complained that society pressured women ill-suited for motherhood to bear children.

Nellie’s command of humor and satire made her much in demand as a public speaker, and as an author, she enjoyed a widespread and loyal readership.

Over the years, she has won her fair share of American fans, too. Many have been U.S. tourists to Calgary, Alberta, where a statue honoring The Famous Five is prominent in that city’s Olympic Plaza.

“Nellie,” noted Sean, “was definitely ahead of her time.”

And, because of that, his daughters and other female athletes in the U.S. and Canada can now enjoy the time of their lives.