This fall, our daughter, Lisa, and our granddaughter, Katelyn, are teammates participating in a women’s recreational volleyball league in Rockford. Katelyn sums up the relationship, “Lisa’s the oldest by about a decade and I’m the youngest by about a decade, but we are the two best players.” Her statement reminds me of the 1960s TV series, “The Guns of Will Sonnet,” and Walter Brennan’s catch phrase, “No brag–just fact.”
Girls’ competitive sports in high schools began more than fifty years ago when Title IX became federal law in 1972. The change was just in time to include Lisa, who loves athletics.
When Katelyn was a member of Durand High School girls’ volleyball team during the early 2000s, Aunt Lisa watched from the bleachers and was a boisterous booster.
Some of the girls of earlier generations enjoyed the rough and tumble of sports but society placed more limits on young ladies’ behavior. My mother, who was a member of the class of 1930, the first to complete four years in the new Durand High School built on the north side of West South Street. In her Physical Education classes, they played girls’ rules basketball, which is much more restrictive than the fellows’ version. There were six players on each team, three on each side of the court and neither trio was allowed to cross the center line. A player could only bounce the ball twice in succession so there was no dribbling. Mom and some of her friends played the rowdier, boys’ rules basketball in the gymnasium during their lunch hour.
When I attended DHS in the 1950s, we still played the same girls’ rules basketball in P.E., as my mother’s era. About twenty of us belonged to the Girls Athletic Association, which met after school once a week to engage in various sports among themselves.
High school athletic programs have been studied for more than a century. According to the experts, three of the most important participation takeaway that students continue to practice after graduation are: 1) a stronger sense of self-confidence in building relationships with others and having an expanded capacity for empathy, (2) developing better understanding of self and in so doing understanding how their actions affect others and (3) building foundations for lifelong fitness habits.
Have you ever played competitive sports?