You Go Girl!
SLIPPERY ROCK — Using all of her strength to hold the stick upward, 7-year-old Taylor Balint reared back and let loose with a shot.
The ball sailed through an opening in the net.
"Woooo! Great shot! Lacrosse player in the making!," her mentors said.
The mentors belong to the Slippery Rock University women's lacrosse team, participating in the National Girls and Women in Sports Day celebration Feb. 13 at SRU's Morrow Field House.
As part of the event, girls ages 5 to 12 were introduced to sports like lacrosse, field hockey, volleyball, softball, soccer and basketball by coaches and their team members.
That is the present.
Gie Parsons, women's basketball coach at Clarion University, remembers a different time.
After the day's classes were done at Gateway High School, Parsons went back into the gymnasium, pulled out the basketball she hid during gym class and began shooting around.
After teachers or school officials heard the ball bounce off the floor a few times, they would enter the gym and chase Parsons out.That was the past — the 1960s, to be exact."That was the only time I could play basketball," Parsons recalled. "Girls and sports? We had<I> nothing.</I>"She has plenty now.A 1971 SRU graduate, Parsons is in her 29th year at Clarion. She's accumulated more than 400 victories.One of her teammates on the SRU women's team was C. Vivian Stringer, the longtime women's basketball coach at Rutgers University. Stringer has won more than 800 games and was inducted last summer into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.The journey of women in sports from 50 years ago until now has been progressive, yet painstaking."My mother played in the era when girls were only allowed to play half-court," Union High School boys basketball coach Karen Davis said. "They had to play in skirts. She hated it."Parsons said it wasn't until studies were done on "our baby-carrying capabilities that it was determined the female body could handle the stress and duress of playing physical sports."Of course, girls playing organized sports has become commonplace. An estimated one in three high school girls belongs to an athletic team. In 1971, that ratio was one in 25."I've always been involved in sports," said Brianne Dishong, captain of the SRU women's lacrosse team. "I love the competition. I can't imagine my life without it.
"I would not have liked to have grown up 50 years ago. It's hard to imagine being denied the opportunity to compete, participate and have fun."SRU women's basketball coach Laurel Heilman played sports as a child — with the boys."There was no organized sports activity for girls," Heilman said. "If you wanted to play, you played baseball and football with the boys."Once I got older ... The boys got bigger and I didn't. That's when the organized girls sports like softball and basketball became attractive."When I was growing up, the neighborhood kids played their own games, things like Kick the Can, to stay active. You don't see that stuff anymore, not even pickup games. If it's not an organized league, kids aren't doing it — especially girls," Heilman added.During her high school days, Parsons wanted to play organized girls basketball so badly that she formed her own team during her senior year.When she was a sophomore in 1965, a group of senior girls approached the athletic director about starting a girls team at Gateway."I was 6 feet tall as a sophomore, so they asked me to play with them," Parsons recalled. "I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. I loved every second of it."But when the other girls graduated a year later, the program was disbanded.Being denied a chance to play girls basketball her junior year, Parsons refused to be denied her senior season."When the athletic director wouldn't put a team together my senior year, I decided to do it myself," Parsons said. "I organized a team, was player-coach, set up a schedule. ... There was a gym in the basement of a club in Penn Hills, and that's where we practiced," she added.Few female sports camps existed when Heilman played. Now there are numerous team camps for every sport, along with AAU programs during the offseason.
"AAU teams were hard to find when I was a kid," Heilman said. "Now if you don't play AAU, you're in the minority."High school athletes have become so specialized. Volleyball, softball, basketball, etc., they go year-round anymore."The fact so many sports are out there for women today is why SRU lacrosse coach Emily Hopkins brought National Girls and Women in Sports Day (NGWSD) to Morrow Field House three years ago.The idea is to pique girls' interest in athletics at a young age."Most of the girls here have no idea what lacrosse or field hockey even is," Dishong said.SRU field hockey coach Stacey Hart agreed."My sport doesn't even exist around here," she said. "It's big on the eastern side of the state, though."Players on SRU's field hockey roster are from Eastern Pennsylvania, California, Maryland, New York, Virginia — even Holland."Little girls here grow up on soccer. Little girls over there grow up on soccer and field hockey," Hart said. "We're an Olympic sport and I wish it was going on now so we could show these young girls a game and then talk about it."The sooner girls are exposed to a new sport, the better chance there will be a movement to form a team later."Hopkins said as many as 40 girls have taken advantage of SRU's NGWSD program in the past."All of our female student-athletes take part in this program," Hopkins said. "It's inspiring, seeing the way they give back. They know what sports have done for them."Vonda Kuhn of Volant, an employee at the university, signed up her 6-year-old twin daughters, Britney and Bailey, for the program. Kuhn competed in track and field when she was in school."Friendships you make on a team can last a lifetime," Kuhn said. "You get the feeling of being part of something, and sports teaches you to be goal-oriented."The pure exercise is the most important thing. There's an obesity problem among kids in this country. We need to keep our young women in better health."The NGWSD organization recently reported that one in three American children born in 2000 will contract type II diabetes and that one in six girls today is obese or overweight.
Penny Balint of Slippery Rock, mother of 7-year-old Taylor, said, "I just want you keep my daughter busy and make sure she's aware that all of these things are out there for her."SRU volleyball player Anna Bixler played four sports when she was in high school. She is the Rock volleyball team captain."When young girls get involved in sports, it opens up their whole personality," Bixler said. "That's what they did for me. I learned about leadership and working with others."SRU president Robert Smith said youngsters learn teamwork, self-discipline and other life skills through athletics."Because women are such a vital part of the workforce, too, we all need to learn how to work effectively with others," he said. "That might be the most important skill we get from sports."Beach volleyball player Misty May and women's basketball players Sue Bird and Lisa Leslie were among female athletic role models mentioned by current SRU athletes."Who do you want to be like? Who do you want to play like?," Heilman pondered."We have women role models in sports now. It's not just Michael Jordan and Larry Bird anymore. It's (WNBA star) Lisa Leslie and (Tennessee women's basketball coach) Pat Summitt."Davis recalled a standout girls basketball player at Venango Catholic — Mary Kay Lynch — when Davis played at Union."She was so good. Our role models back then were more localized," Davis said. "There was no one else."Women's sports are still evolving. Girls basketball is much more up-tempo these days. Almost every team plays man-to-man defense. When I played, outside shooters were gold because everyone played zone."The cycle's not complete yet. Women's sports still have a ways to go, but it's much better than it was," Davis added.Parsons summed it up best from her coach's office at Clarion, when told of the NGWSD program at Slippery Rock."I would have killed for something like that," she said.
• <B>1971</B> — One in 27 girls in high school participated in athletics.• <B>1971</B> — Tennis player Billie Jean King became first female athlete to earn more than $100,000 in any sports season.• <B>1972 </B>— President Richard Nixon signed into law Title IX of the Education Amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, preventing discrimination of women wishing to participate in athletics at federally funded programs.• <B>1972</B> — The average number of women's sports offered at American colleges and universities was 2.1. The average is 8.5 today.• <B>1972</B> — More than 90 percent of women's team coaches were women.• <B>1972</B> — 294,015 girls participated in high school athletics.• <B>1984</B> — Victoria Roche of Belgium was the first girl to play in the Little League World Series.• <B>1984</B> — Female athletes participated in 13 of the 24 events at the Olympics.• <B>2000</B> — C'mon Mom!, the first national sports education program designed exclusively for mothers, was launched on Mother's Day.• <B>2000</B> — Slippery Rock University graduate C. Vivian Stringer became the first coach to lead three different NCAA women's basketball programs to the Final Four.• <B>2007</B> — More than 3 million girls participated in high school athletics.• <B>2008</B> — Female athletes competed in 28 of 32 Olympic events.• <B>2009</B> — Kate Reyes, 13, became the first girl to deliver a game-winning hit in a Little League World Series game.• <B>2009</B> — Butler graduate Meghan Schnur was a member of Sky Blue, the first Women's Professional Soccer League champion.• <B>2009</B> — Only 17.9 percent of women's athletic programs in colleges were headed by a woman.• <B>2009 </B>— One in three girls in high school participated in athletics.
