JACKSON TWP — Heather Lewis makes sure to clarify that she doesn't look at specific genders when building the athletic program at Seneca Valley High School.

Lessons learned from participating in athletics certainly aren't gender specific.

“Sports provides opportunities to learn life lessons, develop confidence and develop leadership goals,” said Lewis, athletic director for the Seneca Valley School District. “It's not about succeeding all the time.”

But after filling out a state-mandated Title IX report, Lewis saw an opportunity to get more girls involved.

She thought the district could do more to increase the number of girls playing sports.

Female athletes make up 48 percent of Seneca Valley's school population, and they are 44 percent of the district's student-athletes.

Seneca Valley offers 33 sports for boys and 28 for girls in middle and high schools.

Lewis decided to target the seventh and eighth graders in middle school as a place to grow those numbers for female athletes.

Starting in the fall, the district will add more teams for eighth graders. Seneca Valley hopes to offer more teams in basketball, volleyball, soccer and softball.

“The more girls you can get in sports, the more likely they can stay with it,” Lewis said. “To boost numbers at the senior high level, we want to get them introduced to sports at a younger age.”

Lewis said the district looked at which sports had a high number of girls getting cut from teams.

In the district's three middle schools, 244 girls play sports. Seneca Valley offers basketball, soccer, lacrosse and volleyball teams to those girls.

“We're going to increase the numbers and opportunities at the middle school level,” Lewis said. “We're hoping it will have a macro, or global effect.”

Lewis' plan, which is to take five years, also will call for administrators to evaluate the hiring of new girls coaches as well as possibly raising the salaries to attract candidates to the district.

Seneca Valley also built a new girls softball dugout last summer.

Raiders girls basketball coach Rob Lombardo pointed to a report by a newspaper saying the numbers in girls basketball have been steadily declining in Western Pennsylvania.

Seneca Valley's numbers for girl basketball players are up in the elementary programs, but the district only has 24 spots available in middle school for girls basketball.

Lombardo said, “Rather than have us pick 12 girls for seventh grade and another 12 for eightth grade, having another team will allow us to keep more girls in the program and be concentrating on basketball.”

Seneca Valley has the 14th largest high school female enrollment in the state with 1,041 girls and the most female enrollment in the 133-team Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic league.

Lombardo hopes adding more teams will prevent some of the better athletes from slipping through the cracks.

Some girls who play multiple sports in middle school could get discouraged if they get cut from one sport and choose to focus on one specifically.

“You don't know what a girl you cut in seventh grade may turn into,” Lombardo said. “She could hit a growth spurt and say I want to focus on one sport. Forcing kids to go choose another sport and individualize themselves too early in their career isn't a good thing.”

Lewis sees the opportunity to continue to find ways for the district's sports programs to do well. And the girls teams have found a lot of success this year.

Seneca Valley won WPIAL titles in cross country and soccer in the fall and the girls basketball team nearly upset top-seed Penn-Trafford in the WPIAL playoffs.

The game against the Warriors provided one of the lessons that Lewis thinks sports can teach.

“You can do everything right, but maybe the job doesn't fall into your lap,” Lewis said. “You have to teach kids, regardless of gender, how to handle that at a young age.

“(The Penn-Trafford game) was a classic example of that. They did everything right, but Penn-Trafford made one more play.”