Girls And Women in Sports

The Super Bowl is Sunday. 

It's the Kansas City Chiefs against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The game is in Tampa, which makes the Bucs the first team ever to play the Super Bowl on their home field.

TigerBlog's prediction for the game: Kansas City 35, Tampa Bay 17. 

His other prediction: None of the commercials will be great.

He'll see Sunday if he's right about either one of those guesses and will get back to you Monday.

And that's enough Super Bowl talk for today. There are more important things to discuss anyway.

For starter, this week featured National Girls and Women In Sports Day. It was the 35th anniversary of the day, which celebrates achievement and participation in sports for girls and women. 

More than that, it encourages that participation. And there are few things better for girls and women than to participate in athletics.

Princeton's usual celebration of National Girls and Women In Sports Day has featured what TB has always found to be an extraordinary sight in the back of Jadwin Gym, with Princeton's women varsity teams surrounded by an army of little kids during what is essentially a clinic. This is followed by a women's basketball game.

Each year that TB has watched it, he's been amazed - and unable not to smile - at the sheer joy that the little kids (mostly girls, but with some boys mixed in) have at being that close to college athletes and being able to participate in the sports that they play.

Actually, it's always been a question for him about who is smiling more - the kids or the athletes.

Either way, there are lots of smiles. And it's just a truly wonderful scene.

This year, of course, has also marked the 50th anniversary of women's athletics at Princeton. TigerBlog, as he has mentioned, it writing a book on those first 50 years.

When women's athletics started at Princeton, Title IX was still just about two years away from being passed into law. There was nothing at all that required equality of opportunity other than a sense of fair play, and that was something that wasn't always associated with girls sports back then.

As TB has spoken with the women who competed for Princeton in the 1970s, he's been happy to hear that most of them have spoken positively about the assistance (or at least lack of resistance) they got from their male counterparts.

Those weren't easy times to be a female athlete though. It took a lot of fortitude to build these programs and create these future opportunities.

One thing that has really resonated with TB is the way that so many of those early women athletes and coaches realized that their success helped the overall process of coeducation tremendously. Without their success, and the high profile that went along with it, women at Princeton would have probably faced a tougher road. 

Those early athletes, and the subsequent passage of Title IX, really set the foundation for the decades of Princeton women athletes who have followed.

TB has sort of pointed to the early 1980s as the birth of the modern era for women's athletics at Princeton. Certainly by the 1990s it was really starting to roll along.

What's most important, though, is the way that opportunities for girls to play sports have increased. When TB talks to most of the early women athletes, their athletic careers either began because they happened to live in a place that afforded them the opportunity (especially suburban Philadelphia) or were delayed because there simply were no teams for them to play with.

Even moving a few decades down the road, there are still a few stories that started with "my older brother and his friends were playing and they let me play because they needed more kids" or something like that.

Today girls sports opportunities are plentiful. In fact, there are travel teams and club teams and strength coaches and everything else that makes up the youth sports culture.

And maybe it's too much too soon, like it is on the boys side as well. But it's still a chance to play.

From that comes so many positives.  

TB has seen it with his own daughter, one of those little kids who used to love to go to the clinic in Jadwin each year and who now is a Princeton varsity athlete herself. 

Her own story is one of how participating in sports helped grow her as entire person. It gave her confidence. It helped build work ethic. It taught her the value of working as a team. 

It gave her self-confidence. 

These are lessons that have served her so well as a Princeton engineering student, and not just as an athlete.

Now multiply that experience out to all of the girls out there who got to play and who continue to pull from those experiences.

The ones who opened those doors all those years ago deserve a huge thank you.