By Katie Culver

I was so excited about my son’s first soccer season, that I volunteered my husband and I to share responsibilities as the team’s coaches. The complicating matter: I was 40 weeks pregnant.

My third child was born two weeks later, which meant that – along with rainouts – much of the season was a bust for me. Yes, I cheered from the sidelines, but it was frankly tough to watch my husband coach. As a former coach in high school and college, I was dying to get in there!

Being forced to watch from the sideline, however, reminded me what a powerful role coaches play – and made clear that we need more moms stepping up. Sure, I had to sit out the season, but the sidelines provided an alarming view.  It occurred to me that our children’s recreational sports reinforce gender inequity. Why?

1) The boys (plus sisters and parents watching) missed out on the valuable example of a woman coach—a competent woman at that—demonstrating leadership and skill in an area typically dominated by DADS.

2) I—completely willing and more than able—missed the opportunity to be involved in my son’s sport because I was fulfilling the stereotypical role of care-taker to the children on the sidelines. Now I know this makes sense—I had just given birth and was nursing my very fussy baby most of the time. However, with every single team we played being coached by a Dad (many of whom never played soccer!) it was clear that I had entered territory where women were not welcome. I was determined to change this.

The next spring, I again volunteered my husband and I as “co-head coaches.” I would bring a blanket and snacks for my three-year-old and strap baby TJ onto my chest in a baby carrier (yes, to coach in the sweltering heat!).

As a woman, particularly one wearing a baby and toting a toddler, I was an anomaly on the field. But my presence sent an important message to boys on the team, to my daughter, and to the spectators: Moms belong here!

It may stretch your comfort zone, but consider this a formal Mother’s Day invitation to get involved in sports with your kids — not on the sidelines, but on the field:

·         Don’t just bring snacks, volunteer to coach! NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY! Why are Dads more inclined to coach a sport they never played? Does being a sports fan qualify them to be a coach? Well, yes, they believe so. Own that attitude. Plus just consider that coaching a team is pretty basic compared with the juggling and on-the-run problem-solving and strategizing that is part of your life. And coaching is FUN!!

·         Practice with your kids! Take them to a field to play soccer or lacrosse or to just run around. They will learn so much from you and respect you for making the effort to play sports (or just be silly!) with them. Both boys and girls need to see their moms engage in athletics to challenge the norms we associate with sports.

·         Get other moms involved. Take a leadership role in the local recreation league so you can help recruit moms to coach. Whether it’s setting league policy, organizing try-outs for placement, or planning community-building events, local sports boards need more moms to serve as leaders and organizers. How can we encourage older girls to, say, train to become referees if local leagues look like boys-only clubs?

By Lindsay Rico

Why did I decide to play tackle football in the 6^th grade? Ever see the movie “Little Giants”? It’s about a ragtag football team with a coach who is just as much of a reject as his players. The one girl (they call her “Icebox”) is one of the best on the team. The team (of course) wins the championship against the very team these  players had been rejected from at the beginning of the season.

Movies are movies for a reason. They aren’t realistic—you don’t say, “Hey, I could do that. I could make that happen.” But that’s exactly what I did.

After convincing my dad to sign me up, I realized that football isn’t actually as glamorous as the movies make it seem. To sum our practices and training up in one phrase: Football is running. Everywhere I went—I ran. If it was a break, the team would run to the water. If we were being punished, we ran up and down a hill at the end of the field for what seemed like an eternity. If we actually did something impressive, we still ran, but it was a shorter distance.

Then again, football is also hitting. My coach would always say if the play has nothing to do with you—if it’s going the opposite way as you or if you fudge your assignment in some way—put a “hurt” on someone. Hit someone. Anyone. It’s the least you can do to help your team. We did tons of drills that involved tackling someone and getting tackled at different angles and in various situations.

So I guess football is running and hitting.

There was one particular moment, however, that I value the most out of all the crazy events that occurred during my two seasons playing for the Indians. It was a moment when I compiled the most important lessons my coach had taught and used them to my advantage: I was playing cornerback on a particular play and the ball was being run on the other side of the field. I was jogging over to see if I could help out at the breakdown when I saw him. A lineman was charging at me from the opposite direction. I knew what he was going to do: he was trying to get the angle on me so that he could lay me out.

My coaches had warned us that this might happen. “Keep your head on a swivel!” they barked at us. Football is not a sport immune to cheap shots. Like many sports, if the ref doesn’t see—then it’s perfectly legal. But one of my coaches made an extra effort to warn me in particular and at that instant I realized why. Many of my teammates were nearby with heads turned, jogging slowly to where the play was occurring, completely oblivious. Yet yet this player had chosen to target me. I had made a great effort during the season to be like any other male player on the team but this kid who got a peek at my ponytail decided that this girl who had the audacity to play against him needed her clock cleaned.

As he came nearer, one thought occurred to me: Maybe I should just let this kid hit me. I mean, that is what a lot of young women are taught right? That boys don’t know any better and that there are some things that they will never understand. That we should let boys be boys—men be men? I was convinced that the only thing that kept this boy from “being a boy” was me. I was also aware of how great of a hit it would be and how hard I would hit the ground and how long it would take me to recover from his cheap shot. I would have to be sacrificed for the sake of his pride and the running standard that girls should not play football.

But then I heard coach’s voice in my head yelling “Thattaway, Rico. You kept your head on a swivel and he sees you but he doesn’t see you seeing him. So why don’t you knock this kid into next week?” And I did. I moved at the very last second  and checked him right in the chest. He went down right on his back. Hard. It was there, too, on the reel the next week as we reviewed the game’s film.

On or off the field, there is always someone looking to knock you down.  Football gave me tools I didn’t have before. Remember: Keep your head on a swivel.

It bugs me. I drive by the fields in my town – and I only see men coaching the soccer teams.  Don’t get me wrong. It’s wonderful when dads share quality time with their daughters and sons. But where are the moms?

Even in the backyard, it’s dad shooting hoops and playing catch. How can we get moms outside to play?

Our daughters now have the opportunity to play a variety of sports, but we still have too few female role models to guide them.  Showing girls that they can be strong, active, and capable women starts at home, with mothers.

Dolly Ryan (photo), did play basketball in high school and college and now coordinates the 7th and 8th grade youth basketball program in her community. She’s working to creating a co-coaching model that includes at least one female and one male coach for each team. Ryan says she “hopes that through youth basketball more mothers will see they can contribute through youth sports.” Most coaches are dads, she says.

Having moms in coaching positions, says Ryan, brings a valuable balance to a program, helping to “reflect what town sports should be about, i.e. community, having fun, living a healthy lifestyle, challenging yourself, being respectful of refs and coaches – and representing the town in a positive light both on and off the court.”

Contrary to popular belief, you can coach even if you haven’t played the sport. And – truly – your participation matters.  Just in case you need the nudge, here are six reasons why it’s beneficial for your daughters to see you coach:

1.    Doing something together other than shopping at the mall is a fun and alternative way to bond.
2.    She will see you as a whole new person (not just the one upset by the messy room) including as a skilled sportsperson, something we value in our society.
3.    You will feel important and proud of yourself – particularly if it’s a new sport for you.  (Note: When you feel good, your daughter will notice!)
4.    You can share firsthand in your daughter’s accomplishments as an athlete, plus she’ll develop her own self-confidence by wanting to show off her skills!
5.    Learning about your daughter’s sport allows you to be an educated fan and cheerleader.  Dads need not have a monopoly on sports knowledge and when you can talk about the passing game or staying goal-side when defending, she’ll notice.  It will take you from mom role to mentor role.
6.    Mothers can make great mentors, especially when daughters pursue sports.  And the benefits can go both ways. Getting involved in your daughter’s sport may inspire you to ramp up your own activity level. It can be an opportunity to get back to something you love or to redefine yourself!

Emilie Liebhoff is a former co-captain of Dartmouth College women’s ice hockey, mother of two daughters, and founder of Moms as Mentors and the Director of Strategic Initiatives at the National Coalition of Girls’ Schools.

By Laura Pappano

In a sports culture in which OBP, ERA, PR, SOG, QB Ratings (among others) rule the landscape, Linda Jean Carpenter and R. Vivian Acosta track stats you won’t catch among box scores, but that have served a generation: Women’s access to play and power in college athletics.

“There isn’t a Congressional hearing or scholarly work on the issue of women in coaching and administration that doesn’t cite their research,” Donna Lopiano, former CEO of the Women’s Sports Foundation, shared in an e-mail.

Beginning in 1977 using pencil and paper (the second year they switched to IBM punch cards and now use  actual modern computers), Acosta and Carpenter have made a career of surveying Division I, II, and III colleges to record women’s participation on the field and in coaching and administrative suites. They have tallied numbers and types of women’s teams, percentages of female head coaches plus paid and unpaid assistant coaches, and athletic directors. In 1994 (in a nod to an increasingly complex college sports structure) they added percentages of females in sports information director and athletic trainer roles.

In other words, these two women whose own sports experiences – as players, coaches, researchers, administrators, professors (Acosta has a PhD and Carpenter a PhD and law degree) – could shape a compelling narrative of the rise of women’s athletics, have through their data done something even more valuable: Made concrete the wins and losses for the women’s sports movement since the Title IX era began in earnest.

Their longitudinal data, said Lopiano, has provided “critical factual evidence of the absence of progress in opening the highest status and highest paying coaching position to females in college sports.” She says “there is no comparable work like it in the field” and is why “the advocates of Title IX continue to use and depend on this data.”

The project began — as many important things do — by chance.

Shortly after the passage of Title IX,  Acosta was waiting to speak at a conference organized by the AIAW, the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (it governed women’s college sports until the NCAA took over in the 1980s).

“I was eavesdropping and I heard someone say, ‘Have you noticed how many men are coaching women’s teams?’ and someone else said, ‘Yeah. Has a study been done on this?’ – and a little light bulb went off,” Acosta recalled last month during an interview at the lakeside home she shares with Carpenter.  “I went to Linda and said, ‘We can do this. All we have to do is count!’”

Counting, of course, was (and is) a mammoth task that takes months. Even today, while they use computers to sort and tally data, all the surveys are sent out on paper because, says Acosta, “people expect it and it takes them 10 minutes.” The next round of surveys will be mailed in a few weeks (see photo above of Carpenter and Acosta in Carpenter’s office with surveys). They collect two year’s worth of data each time and make their reports available for free online. Click here for the most recent.

In it, Acosta and Carpenter note that 2008 marked the “highest ever participation by female athletes” with 9010 women’s teams, or an average of 8.65 per school (most popular women’s team offered by colleges, in order: Basketball, volleyball, soccer, cross country, softball).

At the same time, however, the representation of females as coaches of women’s teams “remains low.” When Title IX was passed in 1972, over 90 percent of head coaches of women’s teams were women. Today, it’s 42.8 percent. A few other results of note:

–  21.3 percent of athletic directors are women, up from 18.6 in 2006
–  Only 27.3 percent of head athletic trainers are females
–  Only 11.3 percent of head sports information directors are female
–  Only 2-3 percent of head coaches of male teams are female (while 57.2 percent of women’s teams have a male head coach)

Check out Acosta & Carpenter’s article in Academe (journal of the American Association of University Professors), looking back on 37 years since the passage of Title IX.

Coming Tomorrow:  Q & A with Acosta and Carpenter

If women play sports, they will get hurt. This is a seemingly innocuous statement, but it’s one that draws strong reactions because it derives many connotations and reactions, especially given the number of high profile articles and books published recently regarding the injury rates of females in sport. The subject has become a new favorite for writers intent on stirring up controversy over the obvious.

I have just completed one of the most provocative books on this topic, Michael Sokolove’s Warrior Girls. Mr. Sokolove kept me interested for the first hundred and fifty or so pages, looking at the injury rates of elite female athletes in comparison with their male counterparts.

He considered Title IX, and how the unintended consequences of the law have ceded control of women’s athletics to men, and created a male-centric sports culture and training environment in women’s sports. Good point. The subject is especially relevant to me because I’ve played squash for 10 years and suffered a season ending injury this year.

This last fall, after playing in three competitions for Wellesley College, I was diagnosed with a herniated disc in the thoracic section of my back. This diagnosis came after seeing six specialists, (five of whom were male), underwent a year of tests, experienced excruciating pain, and – probably worst of all — that pervasive feeling that maybe it wasn’t my body that was letting me down, but my psyche.

Did I just have a low pain tolerance? No one, I mean nobody could actually find anything wrong with me, so maybe I was just a weak female? So I sucked it up and did what I think a lot of female athletes do: I kept my mouth shut, because I wanted to play.

Then, my right leg went numb on me twice in one week. My coach (by the way, the only female coach I’ve had), was firm:

“You have to get an MRI,” she said, “and you have to figure this out.” With the help of a spine specialist who didn’t lose interest when she saw that the problem was not operable and a physical therapist, we got to the bottom of the problem. And not a moment too soon either; if I had continued to play with the herniated disc I may have ended up with permanent nerve damage, or loss of control over my lower extremities.

When I picked up Sokolove’s book, I couldn’t put it down. OK, I even cried when the athletes he covered were told that their careers were over. I could feel their pain. Sokolove’s theories on male coaches taking over female athletes seemed to fit with my own experience—I had worked and trained with men in my ten years in squash, and at Wellesley was working with a woman for the first time.

I agreed that the culture of women’s athletics needed to change: as young women we needed to be benched when we were in pain, not encouraged or rather heralded for playing through life altering injuries. Given that most majority of us will not become professional athletes, is it really worth it to have permanent leg, back or hip problems? I agreed with Sokolove (and so does my coach).

But here’s my problem: Sokolve concluded — at the end, after he had worked so hard to research and consider the history of women’s sports — that it was the parents of elite female athletes that had to change. He stated, in the end, that  as parents it was their responsibility to take a more active role and prevent their children from playing through injuries.

I was stunned and angered. How 1950s of him to say that we needed some sort of authority figure to tell us females what to do. I wondered if he also was going to recommend that I get married right after college because it’s easier to bear children when you are in your early twenties.

As a young woman who has suffered a serious injury, I can tell you that it is not the parents that need to change. I’ve watched parents cringe and blink with every step their daughters take on the field. But what I’ve also witnessed, and even been told by coaches, is to “play through it.”

It is this attitude, one driven by a male- centric athletic environment that values the image of the wounded warrior, that needs to end. And it can. The first person to ever tell me not to play through it was my college squash coach.

As female athletes we need to give the reins back to female athletes and create a female-centric athletic culture that values competition, hard work — and the courage it takes  to say, “you know what coach? This injury isn’t worth it, and I’m going to sit this one out.” As an athlete who had to do that this year, I can tell you that takes more courage than going out there and playing through it.

Sarah Odell is a junior at Wellesley College who will represent the U.S. this July in Squash at the Maccabi Games in Israel.