It’s February and Lindsey Vonn is in the news. Again.

Unlike last year, when we debated whether or not she was exploited by an SI swimsuit spread, this year she has just won the silver medal in the downhill world championships in Garmisch-Paertenkirchen, Germany – while skiing in a self-described “fog” after being officially cleared to race after suffering a concussion.

Another form of exploitation?

Vonn’s experience – detailed by NY Times writer Alan Schwarz who has made a crusade of reporting on concussions – should be a call to get serious. We know that concussions don’t just happen in football.

In his piece, Schwarz writes that during the race Vonn actually felt that, “My head just isn’t thinking fast enough. I can’t process the information fast enough, and that gets me behind on the course. My body is one gate ahead of where my mind is and that’s not a good way to ski.”

The “tests” that cleared her to compete were clearly inadequate. For Vonn – as for athletes at all levels of play – we have to create more rigorous tests and more stringent guidelines. And stick to them.

After long dismissing concussions as “dings” and the natural by product of play, the NFL this season got even more serious. Key players sat out (including Aaron Rodgers who went on to become the Super Bowl MVP).

Sure, the NFL was pressured to do this because of growing public discomfort with news stories of retired NFL players struggling with memory loss, depression, basic mental functioning – even some committing suicide. The NFL is too big to hide.

But will anyone care about Lindsey Vonn’s mental state when she’s 50? What about college and high school athletes?

This is not a gender issue. It is not about weakness or toughness. It is about the nature of the sports that we play – and the speed and intensity with which they are played. A study published in the Jan. 29, 2011 issue of the American Journal of Sports Medicine tracked concussions in high school athletes for 11 years. Results show an increase over time (though is this just better reporting?) AND that in sports played by girls and boys that girls suffer concussions at the same or higher rates. All-male sports of football and lacrosse accounted for 75% of all concussions.

The NFL acted because the league knows that as much as fans love the game’s hard-hitting violence they are jarred by the long-term effects.

The NFL may be protecting its product by protecting its players.

But without $30-plus billion dollars at stake, who will look out for all the other athletes?

By Laura Pappano

Obviously, it sounds like negotiation hoopla.

Members of the NFL Players Association charged with forging a deal with the league (NFL owners last year voted to opt out of the present collective bargaining agreement) insist they are not just thinking about themselves.

Baltimore Ravens cornerback Domonique Foxworth, one of the youngest  guys ever voted onto the NFL Player’s Association executive committee, said in this week’s New York Times that a lockout – if it comes to that – will not just be a bummer for “billionaire owners” and “some players who might not get a chance for a life-changing payday” but will hurt thousands of “regular people” like parking attendants, concessionaires and souvenir vendors.

Noted Foxworth , “I just want to introduce that there is a third party that doesn’t have a voice.” NFLPA President Kevin Mawae has put out the same message.

The only folks who buy this may be the ten-year-olds in fantasy leagues who are already fretting about no 2010 season (trust me, it’s a topic).

But here’s a suggestion for the NFLPA: If you really want to use your clout, don’t stop with the concessionaires!

Hyatt Hotels – at least three in Boston – are outsourcing their housekeeping staff, laying off 100 who have worked cleaning rooms and making beds in some cases for more than two decades.  Adding to the insult: the housekeepers who were earning in some cases $15 per hour trained their $8-an-hour replacements (they were told trainees would cover vacations, according to The Boston Globe).

Hotels – and those who clean the rooms – are essential to the sports industry. Heck, the Hyatt in Cambridge boasts that, “when Boston’s national sports teams win home games-the hotel exterior lights will change colors.”

The San Francisco Hyatt at Fisherman’s Wharf features fan information on its site and one fan noted that the Grand Hyatt in New York is a popular place for baseball, hockey, basketball, and football teams to stay, “making it a good place for autograph hunting and gawking at multimillion-dollar ballplayers.”

The matter is that housekeeping is a woman’s job. It is also an immigrant woman’s job. Who knows where 21-year-veteran housekeeper Drupatie Jungra – who is 55 years old – will find work now?

President of the Massachusetts Lodging Association, Paul Sacco, pointed out that hotel guests would not be affected. “If you stayed at the Hyatt last night and you bumped into the housekeeper, would you notice a difference?”

Unions can be pig-headed and a barrier to reform. But in the same week that that textile worker and union organizer Crystal Lee Sutton – the real life “Norma Rae” –  died of brain cancer, it’s worth remembering they can also protect women who don’t have the attention of NFL players, who don’t have a voice – or, it seems, even a memorable face.

By the time Kim Clijsters charged toward the net to hit a final, overhead smash against Caroline Wozniacki and claim the 2009 US Open championship (7-5, 6-3), I was wondering if I really should be thinking so much about her uterus.

Sure, as a mother of three who plays tennis, I grinned with satisfaction to see a fellow mom triumph over a perky and fashionable 19-year-old and become as, The New York Times pointed out yesterday, “the first mother to win a Grand Slam title since Evonne Goolagong Cawley won Wimbledon in 1980.”

But amid the celebratory chatter (and the frequent camera glimpses of her adorable curly-haired, binky-mouthed daughter Jada), I couldn’t help but wonder: Why is this such a big deal?

Was I missing something about the experience of childbirth? Or, more accurately, was I missing something, some critical something that left me when I gave birth? Did childbirth transform me physically, handicapping me in some way that I hadn’t considered – and no one dared share?

The prospect – and problem – of women playing competitive sports, historically speaking, has been rooted in the alleged physical strains that are part of being female and bearing children. Fortunately, we now understand that blood doesn’t really rush from the uterus to the brain making females barren if they do anything more challenging than needlepoint (a Victorian belief). And all those pamphlets from Kotex and Modess warning girls they’d better sit out gym class now seem quaint.  In other words, having your period is now O.K., athletically-speaking.

Giving birth, however, remains a suspect activity. But why is this?

Holly Powell Kennedy, the Helen Varney Professor of Midwifery at the Yale School of Nursing whose work has pinpointed a prevailing “fear” of childbirth as a natural process, says, women are just as strong, powerful, and physically capable once they become mothers as they were before giving birth.

In fact, she says in an e-mail, “the physical work of motherhood is considerable and they can develop additional strengths as a result.” She notes one problem identified in a recent study of childbirth advice books is a prevailing concern that having a baby forever damages a woman’s body. That implication spills over to athletics.

“Perhaps the amazement which the sporting world and Clijsters expressed at her victory will become passé in the future with her stunning example of maternal athleticism, where her body was perhaps even stronger after becoming a mother!” says Kennedy.

It is true: athlete-moms remind us that giving birth is a physical experience in a way that, say, lawyer-moms don’t.  One has only to recall that conventional wisdom once held that women’s smaller average head size meant they weren’t as smart as guys (nothing to do with being barred from college, of course…) to realize that barriers to women’s participation are often camouflaged as physical limitations.

In other words, it may be time to re-frame pregnancy and childbirth not as a career-ender for female athletes, but as just another type of cross training.

It is the quiet story behind the high-profile victories of women’s athletics:  After thirty years of Title IX, after the superstardom of Mia Hamm, Michelle Wie, and Venus Williams, even after the advocacy of groups like the Women’s Sports Foundation, girls – especially in urban communities – are playing sports in lower numbers than boys.

There are many reasons for this and we heard about some in the Sunday New York Times and, more poignantly, in a short video on the NYT website.

As an athlete and a recent Yale School of Public Health graduate who just completed a research project in which I focused on this very issue, I can tell you it’s frustrating and disappointing. Why do so many sit on the sidelines – or in public health terms, why do so many girls express feelings of low self-efficacy towards sports?  The problem is particularly prevalent in urban and African American communities where residents have below average health, are low-income, and come from less educated households.

What do girls in just about every research study say? “I am self-conscious about my looks when I exercise” or “I am not motivated to be active.” Such feelings reflect a youth sports culture in which girls join later, play less, and quit sooner than their male counterparts.

So what has been done about it?

For years there has been a focus on trying to get girls to change the way they perceive their place in relation to sports. (In my world of lacrosse, sticks, gloves and goggles aimed at girls are ubiquitously pink). Some populations of girls have responded (When Title IX was enacted in 1972, 1 in 27 girls in high school played sports, now it’s one in three!). But other groups remain obstinately unchanged. This is, to some extent, unsurprising in a market saturated with images and messages aimed at bolstering female sexuality. (See FGN post)

Rather than try — and fail — to change girls’ attitudes, some of the newest interventions side-step the low self-efficacy issue all together. Instead, new strategies promote non-sports physical activity to prevent these children from becoming disinterested in or unable to participate in exercise all together.

The first of its kind, the Stanford Dance for Health intervention, for example, substituted dance classes for traditional physical activity classes three times a week in a mostly low-income middle school population.   In a randomized control trial, girls who had been assigned to the dance intervention significantly improved their fitness and reduced their BMI gain compared to girls in the control group.

Hip Hop to Health Jr. is a 5-year randomized intervention conducted in 24 Head Start programs where each site is randomized to either a 14-week dietary/physical activity intervention or a general health intervention. These approaches capture the attention (and it seems, enthusiasm) of an audience that will seem (at the moment, at least) unlikely to be captured by classic youth sports such as gym class dodgeball or Saturday morning soccer.

The big question remains, though: Do these programs miss the point that girls need to participate in sports? How you answer may depend on what you think sports do for a child (there is much more, many might suggest, than fitness to be gained).

On the other hand, might dance-based interventions give these girls safe time and space that might otherwise be lacking?  And if young girl gets that body confidence first in dance, whose to say it can’t be guided onto the field, court – or into the pool?

Lauren Taylor, assistant coach of Women’s Lacrosse at Yale, graduated from the Yale School of Public Health earlier this month, and is now working for the Yale Global Health Initiative.

story for a long time — I’ve been playing club-level Ultimate for some years now — and the growth and

professionalization of the sport in the last ten years has been phenomenal. This is due in no small

part to women’s participation, and the power and grace with which the U.S. women’s teams have been

dominating the sport at the elite level demands special attention.

Click here to read Bonnie’s story on Ultimate Frisbee in yesterday’s New York Times.