“Later, we looked through them, and I thought to myself, ‘not too shabby for a 57-year old retired academic!’” Cash recalls.

The photos were good enough to convince Cash to submit an application on the final day – January 1, 2023 – for the Sports Illustrated rookie model campaign. A couple of years earlier, Cash had read about Kathy Jacobs, a 161.5cm (5 ft 3”) woman from Calabasas, California who had made the magazine’s swimsuit issue at the age of 56.

Cash was one of seven women to be chosen – although she was at least 23 years older than everyone else in the group. They were flown to Porto, Portugal to be photographed, and will appear in the May 2024 issue, which will also celebrate the magazine’s 60th anniversary.

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“It’s been magical,” Cash said of the experience. “There are very few things, at the age of 57, that make you feel like a five-year-old the night before Christmas. But this was exactly like that.”

It’s also been a change of pace for the veteran educator, who earned her bachelor’s degree 20 years after high school, and her master’s a further decade later. She didn’t get her doctoral degree until she was 55 and by the time she retired in 2022, she was an associate dean at a university.

The Sports Illustrated win has given the mother of three grown daughters – ages 28 to 31 – an encore career as a model. There’s also a sense for her of returning to something that eluded her years ago; when she was a high school student in Long Beach, she was scouted as a model, but her conservative parents forbade her from taking part in that career until she was older. Her father was a Filipino World War 2 veteran who emigrated to the US in the 1940s; her mother was part Filipina-Japanese, part German-Native American.

Once she left high school, she was signed to a modelling agency, but said that back then, “my ethnically ambiguous look wasn’t in”. She got married, had kids, and by 2010 was modelling part-time. In recent years, as diversity in ad campaigns became more sought after, so was Cash’s look. Combined with the boost provided by the Sports Illustrated win, she said that her encore career is picking up speed.

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“I’ve been doing beauty campaigns, cruises and commercials,” she said. She also did a campaign for Peloton, which happened to be her exercise equipment of choice.

“I also think that if I did anything special before a shoot, somehow it would be like the emperor’s new clothes,” she added. “That you’re seeing something that’s not really real.”

Fitness has always been a part of her life; as a student, she played tennis, loved dancing and took ice skating lessons. Now, she works out on her Peloton every day, walks on her treadmill, and does some work with weights. She starts her day with oatmeal or shredded wheat and loves snacking on vegetables. But if she craves a little dessert, she won’t deprive herself.

“Everything in moderation seems to be working for me,” she said.

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“I’m really encouraged by what I’m seeing in the fashion industry, where there is much more of an embracing of everyone’s individuality,” she said. “Just because somebody has one view of beauty doesn’t mean that another perspective should be downplayed. Beauty blossoms with age. When you’ve lived your life, and you know better, you do better – and that’s beautiful to me.”

She’s also become adept at sidestepping her own insecurities, and helping women overcome theirs.