Hugo Schwyzer

Back on May 8, I wrote about The Uneven Playing Field, a long article by Michael Sokolove that appeared in the New York Times magazine. The piece was excerpted from his then-forthcoming book, Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women’s Sports. The book has been published; my copy came last week and I finished it this morning, just moments ago.

I was anxious to read the book, particularly because I was more than a bit troubled by the title. Historically, when a man talks about the need to “protect our daughters”, you know trouble’s coming. “We’ve got to protect our daughters from the lesbian menace, boys!” “We’ve got to protect our daughters from abortion-promoting, Wicca practicing, bra-less, unshaven, radical feminists!” Though I know some paternalistic language creeps into my own writing, I do make a conscious effort to avoid obvious tropes like the need to “protect daughters”, recognizing that very phrase has been associated with everything from homophobia to the lynching of young black men. One wishes Sokolove had chosen a different subtitle for what ends up being a terrific, pro-feminist book. (I suspect, but have no evidence, that it was his publishing house who came up with the “protecting our daughters” line as a marketing ploy. Nothing sells like anxiety, after all.)

I love women’s sports. I’m married to a former high school soccer star who, like many of the women profiled in Sokolove’s book, suffered a career-ending knee injury. In my wife’s case, that knee injury cost her what had been the promise of a division-one scholarship. I’m particularly passionate about soccer — for its purity, its deceptive simplicity, its abhorrence of timeouts, and its endless capacity to surprise. Sokolove’s book is mainly about soccer, the sport that more American girls play than any other, and about the epidemic of knee injuries that has brought so much pain and devastation.

In my May 8 post and the Times excerpt, you can read about some of the research that explores both why young women suffer more frequent catastrophic knee injuries than men, as well as about the many proposed solutions to the problem. I’m happy to say, after reading the book cover-to-cover, that Sokolove repudiates the idea that girls are less interested in or less able to play sports than boys. The troglodytes seeking to repeal Title IX will find no comfort within the pages of “Warrior Girls.” Sokolove, whose previous books have all been about male athletes, including a much-admired sociological study of baseball and young black men, writes as someone passionately committed to athletic competition — but even more passionately committed to the well-being of the athletes themselves.

One of the problems with women’s sports comes with the coaches, Sokolove points out. Too often, coaches (especially, but not exclusively, men) simply “downsize” the men’s game. They train the girls as if they were boys, often with the well-intentioned assumption that to train girls differently would be to mark the women’s game as inferior. But Sokolove, who interviewed dozens of coaches and trainers and doctors for the book, notes that girls’ bodies are different in some key ways. Put very simply, boys frequently suffer injuries (particularly knee injuries) due to lack of flexibility; conversely, knee-injuries in girls are often due to over-flexibility. In men’s sports, pre-game activities include a huge amount of stretching to improve flexibility — and many coaches, coming out of men’s sports, simply replicate that training regimen with teen girls. But what teen girls generally need, Sokolove writes, is less emphasis on flexibility and more emphasis on form and strength. (Trust me, it gets very technical, stuff about the role of estrogen in maintaining joints and so forth.) So even now, 35 years after Title IX, we still have a generation of coaches who impose a male paradigm on young female athletes.

Those of us who are feminists are instinctively wary of those who trumpet differences between girls and boys. We’re suspicious with good reason: most of the time when folks start waxing about how boys are “naturally” one way and girls another, an argument will soon come for excluding women from a traditionally male preserve. Those who emphasize difference, in other words, tend to be those who advocate a reactionary approach to gender roles. Almost invariably, when the subject is sport, the voices that speak about physiological differences argue for excluding women from competition, or for scaling back opportunities for women to play. Thus it’s understandable that an initial, knee-jerk (sorry) response to Sokolove’s thesis about young women athletes’ particular vulnerabilities is a wary one!

The solution, as Sokolove sees it, is better training that takes into account the particular strengths and weaknesses of adolescent women. Rather than continue to use exercise and flexibility regimens that are borrowed from men’s sports, coaches and medical staff need to do a better job of incorporating girl-centered research to design better injury-prevention programs. Parents of skilled athletes need to do a better job of resisting the pressure to have their daughters focus single-mindedly on just one sport. And the cultural imperative to “people-please”, an imperative we direct largely towards women alone, needs challenging. Girls will play through pain that perhaps their brothers will not, often out of a terrible fear of disappointing parents or coaches.

Sokolove, in his concluding chapter, quotes Mariah Burton Nelson:

We teach girls how to display their own bodies, for male approval or attraction. In a sporting context, we teach them how to accomplish tasks and achieve with their bodies. But a huge missing part is that we don’t teach them how to pay attention to the day-to-day biofeedback they are getting — to recognize when they’re tired or hungry, when they’re sore, when they need to strengthen or rest. The only thing they hear is that they are supposed to ignore pain, and when the body is breaking down, that’s the message that gets us into trouble.

Yup.

Michael Sokolove’s book celebrates Title IX and the “women’s sports revolution.” This is not a book to comfort those who insist, against all evidence, that women are naturally less competitive and athletically inclined than men. Indeed, Sokolove’s book is a call-to-arms to push the women’s sports revolution further, and to begin to demand more specialized, girl-and-woman-centered training for athletes of all ages. And his text is a reminder that we need to do so much more, as Mariah Burton Nelson says, to empower young women to listen to the needs and desires of their bodies.