From a very early age, Sally K. Ride has had her head in the clouds and stars in her eyes.

Ride will be recognized for her considerable professional accomplishments as well as her contributions to intercollegiate athletics and higher education as the 38th recipient of the Theodore Roosevelt Award during the NCAA Honors Dinner January 9 in Dallas.

Growing up, Ride wanted to be a scientist and was fascinated with space. "I sort of dreamed of being in space. But when I was 11 or 12 years old, that was sort of a poor career choice for a girl so that's not what I aimed my career toward at all. If you'd asked me when I was 10 if I wanted to be an astronaut, I would have said yes in a second," she said.

Instead, Ride envisoned herself going as far as she could in the field of science.

"In high school I pictured myself majoring in some area of science and then going on to graduate school. I wasn't sure I quite knew what a Ph.D was in high school, but I definitely had the image of pursuing science and becoming a scientist," she said.

Ride credits a couple of her high-school science teachers for helping her nurture and maintain her interest in science.

"They spent time with me and helped me with my self-confidence and self-esteem. They said 'if you're good in science in high school, you'll be good in science in college. You're good enough to move on with it.' That's what I needed when I was in high school," she said.

Ride did move on. She attended Stanford University, where she played No. 1 in singles as a member of the Cardinal women's tennis team from 1969 to 1973. It was an effort that predated Title IX, so she received no scholarship assistance. The experience was a valuable one.

"Through sport, and particularly college sports, I learned the value of teamwork and collaboration and how important it is to understand how to win and how to lose and how to be part of a team. It turned out that that's important in everything," she said.

They were skills Ride would soon put to good use, but in a very different context. Ride recalls sitting in the student cafeteria one morning, just a couple months from graduating with her Ph.D in astrophysics, reading the student paper when she spied an ad that would change the trajectory of her career.

"There was an ad NASA had put in the Stanford Daily saying they were looking for applications for astronauts. The instant I saw that, I knew that's what I wanted to do," she said.

Best known as the first American woman in space, Ride was part of the Space Shuttle Challenger crew during NASA missions in 1983 and 1984. She was in training for a third space flight at the time of the Challenger accident in 1986.

Not surprisingly, Ride views her first space flight as one of her most special accomplishments (along with earning her Ph.D). The achievement, she believes, also marked a critical moment in time for women in the sciences.

"You want girls to be able to turn on the television or open the newspaper and see examples of people who look like them. That gives them a sense that that's something they can do. I think it was really important for that reason," Ride said.

These days Ride has turned her attention to encouraging girls and young women to enter the sciences. Having spent a good amount of time over the past 10 or 15 years speaking to groups of young girls and women about the field, Ride said she and some friends were talking one day about what sort of programs they thought they could design to help encourage those girls and women to pursue science.

In 2000, Ride created Imaginary Lines, Inc., an education media company devoted to creating communities and providing services and developing products and programming for girls and young women interested in mathematics, science and technology.

"Generally, for societal reasons, more girls than boys start to drift away from science in middle school. We decided to create a company that would have the philosophy that we don't need to convert any of these girls to science, we just need to keep the enthusiasm they've got."

Imaginary Lines targets middle-school-aged girls, offering programs and activities the age group will find fun and that they can engage in with their friends. It also permits them to meet a wide range of women who have gone on in the different areas of science, love what they do and, Ride notes, are normal people.

It is too early to tell just what kind of impact the endeavor is having, but Ride and her colleages at Imaginary Lines are attracting attention.

"We get 1,000 girls out to our events," she said. "We're getting a great response from them and from their parents and from corporate sponsors."

In fact, Ride sees many similarities between girls and women in science now and girls and women in sport.

"We actually think the issues of women in science are in some ways just about where women in sport were 30 years ago," Ride said. "With the sciences, the girls are out there, they're starting to see the female role models, they've got the interest and it's still some of the lingering stereotypes that are causing a lot of them to move away from it."

Ride is committed to doing what she can to smash the last barriers for those girls and women coming along behind her.

"I'm really concentrating on developing Imaginary Lines and the programs it runs for girls in math and science," she said. "I actually don't have plans beyond that right now because I think there's a lot of work to be done in that field. I think we're just at the beginning of being able to make a difference."

Ride spent one year at Swarthmore College, where she was a three-sport student-athlete in tennis, field hockey and basketball, before transferring to Stanford.

In addition to serving as a mission specialist aboard two Space Shuttle Challenger missions, Ride completed tenures as NASA's first director of the office of exploration and as the agency's first director of strategic planning. She has been the Ingrid and Joseph Hibben Professor of Space Science (an endowed chair) at the University of California, San Diego, since 1996 as well as a professor of physics at the school since 1989. Ride is the only person to serve on accident boards assembled to investigate both the Space Shuttle Challenger catastrophe and the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia tragedy.

The author of five science books for children, Ride has initiated and currently directs a large Internet-based NASA education project that enables middle-school students to take digital pictures of Earth from a camera aboard the International Space Station.

A former member of the board of directors for the now-defunct NCAA Foundation, Ride was an NCAA Silver Anniversary Award winner in 1998.

Ride earned a bachelor of science in physics and bachelor of arts in English at Stanford in 1973. She also earned a master of science in physics and a Ph.D in astrophysics from Stanford in 1975 and 1978, respectively.