Thirteen years after Stephen Curry helped put both Davidson, N.C, and Davidson College on the map, he, along with his wife, Ayesha, is doing it once again.
The couple are making themselves principally involved in the athletic department’s future success thanks to an undisclosed donation that will help further fully endow women’s sports at the small North Carolina college where Curry took the program to the Elite Eight in 2008.
Davidson sponsors nine women’s sports and has 26.13 scholarships devoted to women’s sports, half of which are allocated to the women’s basketball team. The college’s total number of women’s sports scholarships lags behind its other Atlantic-10 counterparts.
This one hits home…@ayeshacurry & I are excited to announce the Curry Family Women’s Athletics Initiative aimed at helping close the inequity gap in women’s sports starting with @DavidsonCollege. It's on all of us to help female scholar-athletes keep shining. Let’s goooo Cats! pic.twitter.com/9AcX5Nubi2
— Stephen Curry (@StephenCurry30) August 26, 2021
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“Davidson College is where it all started for me, and it no doubt prepared me for leadership and service. I’m forever grateful for the unwavering support from the entire Davidson community," Curry said. “The reason I am who I am today is also because of strong, powerful women that have poured into my life all these years. Now as the father of two girls, I want them to grow up without any boundaries on their futures.”
Curry also penned a letter in the Players' Tribune several years ago wherein he voiced his support and advocated for trying to close the gender equity and equality gap in both sports and society at large.
“I want our girls to grow up knowing that there are no boundaries that can be placed on their futures, period. I want them to grow up in a world where their gender does not feel like a rulebook for what they should think, or be, or do,” Curry wrote in the letter.
The scholarship, officially titled the Curry Family Women’s Athletic Initiative, will affect nearly 200 student-athletes at Davidson and is intended to have an immediate impact.
“The Currys' gift and vision provide an unprecedented push forward for Davidson Athletics and our exceptional scholar-athletes,” Davidson athletic director Chris Clunie said in a statement to ESPN. “… Beyond Davidson, the Currys are sending an important message about addressing the broad inequity in women’s athletics and the importance of unlocking opportunities today and into the future.”
This recent donation is far from the only philanthropy the two-time NBA MVP Curry has developed a penchant for, both in and outside the world of sports, going so far as to help start and fully endow another program in a sport for which he’s not a profressional, and at a school which he didn’t attend.
In the summer of 2019, Curry, also an avid golfer, helped start a golf program at Howard and fully funded it for the first six years of its existence, the first of which was this past season.