from Woman’s Day
September 19, 1995

Score One for the Girls
When a soccer game becomes a metaphor for life.

By Robin Marantz Henig

Last fall, when the coaches running our town's soccer program first suggested forming an all-girls division, the girls thought it was a terrible idea. Our daughter Samantha, who is 10, had been playing on the co-ed league for three years, and that's where she wanted to stay.

I was leery of the change as well. It certainly ran counter to my ideas of equal opportunity, fought for by the brave young women who breach the sex barriers of Little League baseball and public military academies. Was this new division an admission that girls just can't cut it when they try to play with the Big Boys? Would the best players in an all-girls league inevitably feel that, no matter how good they are, they are somehow and forever second-string?

It's not as though we were nurturing a World Cup contender at our house. Throughout her six soccer seasons, Samantha usually spent more than half of each game on the sidelines. When she did play, she stuck to her position on the defensive line, and seemed fearful and tentative when the action came her way. She grumbled whenever she was pulled back onto the bench -- but she also seemed relieved. Some of those other players were simply too rough.

Sam was usually one of about four or five girls on a team of twelve or fifteen, and she was not the only girl who played this cautiously -- or who sat out most of the game. Season after season, I would stand by dutifully on chilly Saturday mornings and worry about what self-image the girls were developing about their competence as athletes. It couldn't have made them feel good about their own abilities to see the boys so dominate every play.

There was no doubt that, in mixed-sex soccer, the girls and the boys played two different games. The females cooperated; the males aggressed. The girls played their positions, waiting for the ball to come into their territory before passing it to a teammate. The boys, meanwhile, catapulted toward the ball in a mass of legs and torsos, no matter where it was, and fought even their own teammates for the right to kick it as hard and as far as they could.

The girls, in short, played by the rules and acted as members of a team, while the boys charged ahead ferociously. It seemed a metaphor for the way the male of the species solves most problems, physical or intellectual: by using speed and strength rather than strategy or intuition.

On reflection, then, I had to concede that the all-girls league was worth a try. Maybe it was time, after all, to give the girls their own playing field.

Sam still objected to playing in the new division; she thought it was sexist to separate the girls from the boys. But the first game showed my husband and me how right we had been to insist that she try it, sexist or not.

With no boys to steal their thunder, the girls were suddenly terrific. The soccer they played was fast and aggressive, even better than the boys' because they still remembered to play their positions and pass. It was a revelation.

Now finally a fully equal member of the team, Sam's personal strengths became athletic advantages. "Must be some stubbornness in her personality," said my friend Jane, whose daughter was also on the team and also having her best season ever. And Sam certainly looked stubborn out there as fullback. Whenever the ball approached, she stood her ground, no matter how many girls from the opposing team were in her way. A gaggle of girls didn't scare her the way a bunch of boys had, even though the girls were every bit as tall and ornery.

We mothers became our girls' biggest boosters. Each good play had a political subtext; it made us all, the mothers and the daughters, feel the power of sisterhood. We mothers even found ourselves cheering when the girls on the other team did well.

When Sam's team finished the season undefeated (five wins, four ties), they actually challenged an all-boys team to an exhibition game. (They weren't total fools, though; the team they chose to play had an average age about a year younger than theirs.) "How will those boys feel if they end up getting beaten by girls?" Jane's husband asked her before the game. Her answer: "Get used to it."

And beaten they were. Our girls prevailed, with a score of one to nothing. Okay, maybe their extra height turned out to be an unfair advantage, but I like to think what really swung the game was the extra confidence that had been blossoming all season long.

As I watched that glorious soccer season unfold, I found myself making the mental leap from the soccer field to the classroom. If girls did so well athletically once they switched from co-ed soccer, would the same thing happen academically if they switched from co-ed schools? Are boys as likely to dominate and reshape what goes on in an academic discussion as they are to distort what goes on in a soccer play?

Sam and her buddies at age 10 are brave, confident feminists. They see sex stereotyping everywhere, and their favorite phrase is, "That's not fair." But many experts tell us that, as adolescence approaches, these powerful, egalitarian young women will turn coy and insecure, downplaying their strength and power to get along in a male-dominated society.

In my heart, I worry that the experts might be right. I believe I've seen evidence of their theory during this triumphant soccer season. When the girls were on their own, I saw their transformation with my own eyes -- a transformation that might just as easily occur in a single-sex classroom. The girls were more confident, more competent, more free than they had ever been when they were playing in the shadows of the boys.