On “voice” in girls’ sports
“We’re going to lose,” my daughter said, slumped and grumpy in the front seat of the car on the way to school one recent morning.
“Why do you say that?” I replied. “You can’t know that.”
“We lost to them last time,” she countered. “By a lot. It wasn’t even close.”
I reminded her that her team had been practicing hard and had won several games in the interim, that they were a different team – a better team – than they were when they first played this opponent last month. She rolled her tweenage eyes and pulled her backpack onto her lap in preparation to exit the car.
I eased my foot off the gas, let us coast down the road, piled a few more valuable seconds into the bank account of time with my daughter and fired my last best shot at helping her write a different story in advance of that afternoon’s middle school lacrosse game.
“Focus on the smaller things,” I suggested. “Focus on the things you can control: work hard, play smart, be a good teammate.” And I left it at that.
***
I’m a mother, but I’m also a coach. Before that, I was an athlete. When I was in high school and college, still developing as a competitor in every sense, the voices I heard most frequently belonged to my coaches. Their words were the drumbeat that animated our team’s performance and their encouragement was the wellspring from which I drew my confidence.
Now as a coach, I’m acutely aware of the words I speak to my team, the order in which I say them, the tone with which I deliver them. I try to be cognizant of helping my student-athletes develop their own healthy internal voices, and ensuring that every voice within earshot – whether teammate, spectator or referee – is constructive.
Sports are a haven for teenage girls; but they’re also a classroom, where student-athletes learn how to compete, communicate and succeed. Girls who play high school sports are 41% more likely to graduate from high school; they’re more likely to be engaged in their community; and they’re more likely to have a positive self-image than their non-athletic counterparts. In short: the field of play is where girls learn how to talk to one another; but more importantly, it’s where learn how to talk to themselves.
The ground rules on our team are clear: we don’t yell at each other. I don’t demean. We don’t discuss weaknesses and losses; rather, we talk a lot about players’ strengths and growing edges, about wins and smaller victories. Don’t get me wrong: this is not a come-one-come-all, everyone-gets-a-participation-trophy scenario. The girls on my varsity high school lacrosse team are athletes. They’re competitors. They’re gritty and ferocious. They’re also whip-smart and observant.
So when, in a recent pre-game “captains and coaches” meeting with an all-male referee crew, one of the officials said to the assembled group of two female coaches and four female student-athletes, Let’s watch the cross-checking, ladies. We don’t want anyone getting a broken nose and messing up those prom pictures, one of my captains' heads jerked in surprise and she shot a glance my way. It said, “Really? Again? What’s with these guys?”
The week prior we’d had a referee jokingly refer to one of our players as a “naughty little girl” at a mandatory pre-game stick check. He’d made the “shame” gesture, repeatedly sliding one index finger over the other while wearing a mock look of disapproval. He thought it was funny. I was appalled by how cavalierly he could make an athlete feel small at the precise competitive moment when she should be allowed to feel most capable and powerful.
That same ref had said to the captains at the coin toss that he “really just want[ed] to see the girls perform.” The comment didn’t sit right with anyone, and after the game, my team’s other captain observed: “The one place where I most want to be seen as something other than an object is on the sports field.” This young woman is a two-sport varsity athlete, co-captain of her soccer and lacrosse teams, and is heading to Bowdoin to study biochemistry. The other captain, the one who registered her pre-game discontent with a well-disguised look, is going to Barnard. “I decided that there are some spaces where listening to women’s voices without having to compete with men’s voices was appealing,” she explained of her decision to matriculate at an all-women’s college.
I’m not saying there’s no place for men – and their voices – in women’s sports. One of the longest-serving coaches in our competitive Dual County League is a man and he has built a phenomenal girls lacrosse program at Acton Boxborough High School. Instead, I’m arguing for upping the ante on the responsibility of all those in positions of authority — coaches, officials, administrators — to use our voices to deliver messages that contribute to female athletes’ ever-expanding sense of their ability, strength and power. Given the alarming rise of feelings of sadness and hopelessness among teen girls over the past decade, girls need that message today more than ever.
For a long time, the sport of women’s lacrosse didn’t have boundaries: no painted lines distinguished “in” from “out.” But a series of rule changes in the early aughts culminated in the drawing of hard boundaries on our fields of play. Maybe now, twenty years later, it’s time to address the sport’s less overt boundaries, if not the boundaries of women’s sports writ large.
So for all of us operating at the intersection of sport and education: as we embark on the second half-century of Title IX, let’s agree on a few ground rules:
Let’s speak up: Last week we had to stop a game because a boy who had been playing soccer on an adjacent field overshot his goal and decided to saunter across our field, mid-game, to retrieve his ball. The ref whistled our game to a stop: twenty-four girls ceased play while he unhurriedly picked up his ball and began to retrace his steps. “Go around!” I shouted. But he was too far away to hear. One of my players was closer to him, though, and she ran straight at him, shouting, “Get. Off. Our. Field!” Her voice was loud and clear and the message was unmistakable. When the boundaries of women’s sports are transgressed, let’s speak with clarity, confidence and volume.
Let’s keep up: No one says that officials need to be as quick as the trained athletes on the field, but if you’re pronouncing yourself "too old, fat and slow” to keep up with the game, as one of our refs did this season, then maybe you should find a way to contribute to the sport other than officiating. More importantly, if you’re too old, fat and slow in body, might you be a few steps behind the cultural moment, too? The onus is on the adults to meet today’s student-athletes where they are, not where they were or where you want them to be. Invoking prom pictures as an incentive for girls to play a clean game is inappropriate. So is using diminutive language and gestures with respect to female athletes. Let’s check ourselves: if we wouldn’t say it to a bunch of boys about to step onto the field of competition, don’t say it to a bunch of girls.
Let’s quiet down: The most powerful gift a coach can give an athlete is an understanding of the power of her own voice. Young athletes are magpies: they’ll pick up snippets of the songs of coaches and parents and peers and they’ll weave them into their inner ballads. So let’s talk to today’s athletes the way we want them to talk to themselves long after they outgrow this season’s cleats. And let’s be mindful of those moments when our silence sets the stage for their song to emerge. The sooner they start relying on their own voice, stringing together fragments of positive self-talk, narrating their own experience, the more confident and resilient they’ll become, on the field and off of it.
***
That game my daughter played that afternoon? The one she was sure they’d lose? It was the last game of her seventh-grade lacrosse season. They won. In overtime. And she scored the winning goal. I think it’s the first sentence of a powerful story she’ll tell herself for years to come.
***
by Amory Rowe Salem
for all the girls of CRLS, the DCL and the MIAA
June 2023