Play like a girl

Growing up, I wasn’t the most active of children. I much preferred reading inside the lunch room to playing kickball on the playground at recess. However, I did have friends who were much more active  on the field than I was and I enjoyed other activities outside of the grounds of my schools athletic arena. I loved things like swimming, kneeboarding, innertubing, skiing on both water and snow, and rock climbing.  Lots of things that I thought were fun, that I could do at my own pace, but weren’t necessarily the best for demonstrating athleticism inside of the boundaries of schools PE class.  I didn’t see the point of running around a quarter-mile track for times just to prove that I could, so whenever we had to do the fitness test, I wasn’t necessarily the best at it. As a result to most of my classmates, and to my PE teacher, everything that I did it in that gymnasium I did ‘like a girl’.

 Like a girl is the phrase that I never really thought about  until I was older. Growing up it just kind of meant that I could do the best I wanted to in sports, but my brother would probably be better at it than me. To me it didn’t seem like something bad. It just meant that I didn’t like team sports, my brother did, and that was OK because I was a girl and it didn’t matter if I was good at sports.  It was only after I got into high school and my brother put together a band, that I realized what those words really meant. I was always more musical, my brother was always more athletic. When he seemed to infringe on to my space, it seems logical that I should try to take  some of his. So I tried out for the basketball team, and failed miserably. 

 It wasn’t my failure that bothered me though, it was the reaction I got from my family. They could’ve said that I could try again next year, or that they would work with me to help me build up the endurance I needed to be on the team. Instead, they told me it was fine That I didn’t make the team and I play like a girl anyway so it didn’t really matter. For the first time that I can remember those words hurt me. Not even because I really wanted to be on the basketball team, but because even the thought that I would want to even try seemed ludicrous to the closest members of my family.

 My tryout for the basketball team was my last attempt to get into team sports, but it affected me more than that. I was already growing out of swimming at our community pool, but I also stopped diving into the lake whenever we wend down to visit my Grandma. I let my membership to the local rock climbing arena expire. The next time summer came round I never once told you the kneeboard out of the shed,  and the winter after that, when my parents asked if I wanted to go skiing I made excuses. For the first time in my life I let those words affect me.

 My parents weren’t being malicious, my brother was never trying to impose his manliness on me by being better at me and sports. Looking back on it now it seems slightly ridiculous that I let four words affect my entire life. However I feel about it now though, then those words were everything. They told me it didn’t matter if I tried because I wouldn’t be good at it, so why try at all? Play like a girl is a phrase that needs to change, and thankfully today it is. People around the world are asking themselves just what message play like a girl gives the next generation. The world is changing, one ball at a time.