Encouraging Girls to Play, Building Equality

by Dylan Barnett

I remember the gymnasium in my junior high school as the place where we had our dances. In fact, if someone asked me to describe it, all I would be able to say is that it looked like a poorly lit gymnasium. Were there bleachers? I would assume so. Were there decorations on the walls, like flags or posters? I have no idea. Were there basketball nets? Probably. Was there sports equipment? If there was, I never used it.

While I do not remember much about the gymnasium in my junior high school in Brooklyn, New York, I do remember standing with a group of my friends in an outdoor courtyard once a day. This long, rectangular, pink and grey cement courtyard, which was fenced in by a 20-foot tall, black, metal fence, was where we went for physical education.

More than 300 sixth through eighth graders were herded like cattle into this space. At the beginning of the class period, the teachers who were responsible for chaperoning us handed out basketballs and then left us to our own devices for the next 40 minutes. However, unless a basketball bounced away from a group of boys who were playing on one of the eight courts in the yard and they asked me to throw it back to them, I never even got to touch one of the balls.

Every day, during the entire “class,” the boys played basketball and the girls stood in circles, gossiping and fixing each other’s hair. The teachers accepted this as normal.

But it isn’t normal. In fact, I was always a very active and outgoing child, who loved sports and games (even though I was never very good at them). Throughout elementary and junior high school, I played both soccer and softball after school. During high school, I was on the varsity volleyball team and loved to play games like speedball, volleyball, badminton, and Ultimate Frisbee that our phys ed teachers organized. However, despite my love for these sports and games, I was held back from doing what I truly wanted to do: play sports during physical education class. Because I was a 12-year-old girl who desperately wanted to fit in, because the school and teachers did not create an environment that enabled me to challenge these gender norms and stereotypes, and because they did not encourage me and tell me it was okay to play, I followed the “norm.” 

In a two-part New York Times series focusing on girls’ participation in sports since the passage of Title IX in 1972, writer Katie Thomas highlights the gender gap in sports caused by gender norms. She discusses movements to close this gap by rethinking traditional activities and looking for new ways to encourage girls to play, such as organizing all girl games, playing with friends, and involving teachers they like or trust. Thomas’ article shows that creating an opportunity is not enough; schools must put in the effort to create a comfortable environment for girls and make it a priority to encourage girls to play.

At my school, all it would have taken was one teacher to organize it, to encourage it, and to tell me it was okay to play sports and games with the boys and I would have, happily. Watching the boys play basketball while I gossiped with my friends didn’t have to be the norm. It didn’t have to be my only choice.

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Dylan Barnett, a former Girls Inc. intern, is a senior at Smith College.