When it comes to beginning a speech, this opening is hard to beat.

"I was in a concentration camp."

High school students, said Marie Sugiyama, tend to sit bolt upright in their seats.

"Their jaws drop, their eyes get big and they stare straight ahead," said Sugiyama, 73.

This is not one of those boring "when I was your age" speeches in which kids begin to nod off by the second sentence. No, the kids never see this one coming. Then again, if you don't pay attention, you never see Marie Sugiyama coming either. She's 5 feet tall, polite, observant, soft-spoken and, given the bombast that can drip all over sports these days, Sugiyama is not a stomper or a screamer.

"Subtle" is what she says, underselling herself. Sugiyama is easy to overlook. But do so at your own peril. No one who has lived her life should ever be underappreciated or overlooked.

How many people do you know who have been evicted from their homes without warning, victims of fear and bigotry, had everything taken away from them including their self-respect, only to years later emerge as a tireless and successful advocate for girls in sports?

Said Sugiyama: "I fight injustice, discrimination, for people who are treated like second-class citizens, who are made to feel separate, different, who are singled out, who are told unfairly they can't do something."

Who is Sugiyama talking about: the Japanese-Americans interred in relocation camps during World War II or girls in Sonoma County gaining acceptance and opportunity in athletics? "Both," she said.

In the remarkable timeline that is her life, Sugiyama easily connects that first epic moment to the second, admitting she wouldn't have been as motivated to champion girls' right in the '60s if she hadn't so suffered from the indignity of being removed from her Sebastopol home by the FBI in 1942 and sent on a train with her family to live in a dustbowl corner of Colorado.

"Yes, that experience had an effect," said Sugiyama, who has been co-commissioner of the North Bay League since 1974.

Yes, that experience, like the words are a crab claw stuck in her throat.

She was 6 at the time, one of eight kids born to Shokichi and Satsu, apple farmers in Sebastopol. It was 1942, America was scared, scared ridiculous one might say, and so the Sugiyamas were told they could take a suitcase or a blanket-as-a-bag and stuff either one. First to Merced by train, then to Colorado by train - to Greeley, hard by the Kansas border.

"If you were one-16th Japanese, you qualified," Sugiyama said. "I was 100 percent."

She said that sarcastically.

"They didn't tell us where we were going or how long we'd be there," she said. "The curtains were drawn the entire way. They said that was to protect us in case the train stopped. They also said the soldiers with the rifles were there to protect us at the camps. But if they were there to protect us, why were the gun turrets pointed toward us, not away from us?"

The Sugiyamas were among 120,000 Japanese-Americans dispersed to 10 relocation camps throughout the western United States from August 27, 1942, to Oct. 15, 1945.

"They were concentration camps," Sugiyama said. "They just said 'relocation' to soften the blow."

Sugiyama has little hard memory of the camp that came to be known as Amache. But Marie had no trouble being provided the details by her brothers and sisters and parents. Bare, wooden rooms slapped together with tarpaper, they froze in winter and boiled in summer.

Their camp was better than most, as it had a fire department and a hospital. An internee who would later draw cartoons for Walt Disney drew some for the camp-produced newspaper. But Amache wasn't Club Med, more like Club Dread, and years later when Sugiyama began to compile a film history of living Amache internees, she learned how devastating the time was.

"Some people just couldn't talk about it," she said. "In many cases the children of internees didn't know their mother or father had been in the camps until after their parents had passed away."

The Sugiyama daughters had never taken communal showers and would not start then. "We went into the showers in the middle of the night for our privacy," Sugiyama said.

The war ended, but the experience did not. "Ashamed," that's how Sugiyama described the most prominent, residual emotion.

Ashamed is not how she remained. She graduated from Analy at 16, then SRJC at 18, eventually earned a bachelor's degree in physical education from Chico State and a master's from San Francisco State in the same subject.

As her education advanced, so did her self-confidence.

Sugiyama grew more confident and more determined at crusading against injustice. First, of course, as an internee, then as a female athlete.

"In 1952, teachers would take girls out of high school class," she said, "and it would be to SRJC for one sports day. Later we also were allowed to go to UC Berkeley for one day a year. One day a year to play sports!"

Of course, Sugiyama didn't mind her manners. She became involved in club field hockey and was an accomplished all-around athlete. She was Montgomery's athletic director from 1974 to 1997, also coaching girls' basketball, volleyball, softball, gymnastics and, for 23 years, badminton. Obsessed, you might say, in her zeal to lift her gender out of second-class status.

Along the way, she was traveling a parallel path. While a tireless advocate for girls' sports, Sugiyama also became a speaker for the Sonoma County Japanese American Citizens League. Last year she spoke about her war experiences at six high schools. Ironically, or oddly if you prefer, Sugiyama has yet to speak at her high school, Analy.

No matter. She has never trafficked in hate, resentment and bitterness.

"If you resent something," she said, "you get angry. If you get angry, you get negative. If you get negative, you can't live a good life."

And a good life, well, Marie Sugiyama has made sure no one was going to prevent her from achieving that. Obstacles, you don't have to put them in front of you or for that matter stay behind them. Walk out. Into the sunlight. The view, Marie Sugiyama will tell you, is absolutely gorgeous.