Sports’ Role in Women’s Learning

Killer instinct.

Taken out of context it might sound like an accusation, but athletes know the moniker to be one of the highest compliments in many coaches’ lexicons.

One of the hardest and most rewarding parts of being an athlete at any level is learning to harness this instinct: to unleash it in the midst of competition and reign it in when sportsmanship and calmness are required.

The best athletes control their emotions, not the other way around.

And that mastery over the mind, that killer instinct, ultimately proves to be a necessity regardless of what one does in life.

And the more I see in the world, the more I am grateful for the experiences I’ve had in sports at all levels, from my participation in kickball and CYO basketball to my current membership on the Radcliffe Heavyweight rowing team.

Earlier this fall, one of my teammates found an article titled “Female Jocks Rule the World.” The author, Danielle Friedman, cites studies that have shown very strong correlations between female participation in youth sports and success later in life, both in education and in employment.

None of this surprises me.

Sports are some of the best resources girls have in middle school and high school.

While magazines and TV shows worry about girls’ appearances, female athletes’ coaches and teammates focus on what they can do.

But more than anything else I’ve seen, sports teach girls how to be aggressive and compete for the things they want. While middle school social life seems to be teaching girls to gossip, sports teach these same girls the importance of directness, sincerity, and commitment.

When I entered high school, I began to appreciate the importance of the standards I had been held to as a young athlete.

In my junior year of high school, I enrolled in honors precalculus, a famously hard class at my school. I hadn’t been the most talented math student in my first two years, so I was a little nervous about my prospects in the class. But I found that the challenging nature suited my personality well. One day I told my teacher that I enjoyed her class because it had “thrill factor.” What I meant was that I felt like an athlete again.

But sports teach more than aggression. They also provide girls with a ready group of female role models. In her article, Friedman notes that “women who played (or passionately follow, for that matter) sports gain unique access to ‘boys’ networks that they’d otherwise be excluded from, experts say.”

While this access is valuable, I’d argue that the entrance into all female networks is even more so. In school and in most other activities, females compete against both boys and girls or, depending on their age, men and women. But in sports, women usually only compete against members of their own gender (though there are exceptions).

And when a woman competes against other females, you can’t help but notice how talented and dedicated your peers are. My teammates here are some of the strongest people I’ve ever met.

Rowing with them has both shown me the ways in which I can improve myself and made me realize that this improvement is possible. I no longer worry about being “good for a girl” because I don’t believe that girls or women fall into a second-class category that would merit that kind of qualification.

I would be wrong to argue that athletes are a special breed of people. While I am constantly in awe of my teammates, I am often just as amazed by the accomplishments of women whose campus involvements are concentrated in areas outside of athletics. What I do believe is that involvement in sports gives its participants strengths that they can use after they hang up their cleats, ice skates, or Nikes.

As I grow older, sports and life become less and less different. Suddenly, my success in all areas of life is predicated on the same things I learned long ago in youth lacrosse: work with your teammates, fight through the fatigue, take risks, and always compete as hard as you can.

We’re always told that sports are a metaphor for life. Perhaps that’s just because sports offers us the first chance we get to see life as it is.

—Staff writer Christina C. McClintock can be reached at ccmcclin@fas.harvard.edu.