Teamwork

The benefits to girls participating in sports have been widely publicized over the past several years. These benefits are impressive:

• Building bone mass and decreasing the likelihood of osteoporosis through weight-bearing activities
• Gaining greater confidence and self-esteem, while decreasing the occurrence of depression
• Helping develop positive body image
• Reducing the risk of breast cancer
• Reducing the likelihood of unwanted pregnancy
• Teaching teamwork, goal-setting, and pursuit of excellence (In fact, 80 percent of the female executives at Fortune 500 companies claim to have been involved in sports.)

These are some of the great advantages we have today—in contrast to our mothers and grandmothers, who were discouraged from participation in sports. But there is another benefit I have discovered, and that’s the relationships that occur between women engaged in a team sport.

I grew up with two brothers who were both younger than me. They were only fifteen months apart in age, and were thick as thieves, so I basically ignored them. Sure, I would occasionally ride bikes with them or sometimes play in the sandbox, but I quickly got bored with these activities because I just didn’t share their level of boyish play. The only girls I knew were the friends I made in school, and I thought these friendships were how all girl relationships worked. We tried not to offend each other, we were non-confrontational, and we didn’t tease each other the way boys did. If someone was disliked, she was cut from the herd. Though we needed each other, we operated as individuals in a group. There was no real solidarity amongst us because we had no “common goal.” We didn’t understand how to unite and become more powerful.

Growing up, I didn’t participate in team sports. My sports were individual and so I never experienced the close relationships that are formed between groups of girls striving toward a common goal. As an adult, I now recognize these close feminine relationships as an additional benefit of sports for women—especially for those who have never experienced the kind of relationship that only a sister can provide.

Women involved in a team sport spend a lot of time together, and so they can’t help but eventually learn intimate details about each other. For example, among the women on my cycling team, I know who is allergic to what, I know food preferences—I know who likes the triple cream brie but wishes she didn’t. I know some of the vivid details about upset stomachs: “We were sitting on a wooden bench and I’m telling you, my guts were rumbling so violently that Sharon felt the reverberation on the bench and reached for her phone which was on “vibrate,” thinking she had an incoming call.”

I have been given descriptions of saddle sores that only a doctor should hear—additionally, my vocabulary on the “hoo-hoo” has increased tenfold.