Before Girls Were Told They Could Be Competitive: A History of Girls in Competitive Sports
Updated: 9 hours ago
Long before girls’ athletic ambition was widely encouraged, girls and women were already finding ways to test their ability, challenge expectations, and play to win.
Written by Linda Herron
Women Sports USA®
A girl wants the ball when the game is close. She runs hard through the finish line, asks for another try, and remembers the play she wants back. She enjoys her teammates, but she also cares about the score. She wants to find out how good she can become.
What has changed is how the people around her respond. Her determination may be encouraged, questioned, or treated as something she needs to soften. The drive that sends her back to practice can become the very thing she feels expected to explain.
The history of girls in competitive sports reveals deep-rooted determination. For generations, girls found ways to compete even when others questioned how much ambition they should show.
When Girls in Competitive Sports Faced Restrictive Expectations
Not every girl or community had the same experience. Some families cheered on athletic daughters, and some schools built proud traditions of women’s competition. Others held girls back or questioned whether vigorous sport was suitable for them.
Early women’s basketball shows us both the progress and the limits. When Senda Berenson introduced the game at Smith College in 1892, she created a new opportunity for women to compete, but she also adapted the rules because of concerns about overexertion. Players stayed in assigned sections of the court and had only limited movement with the ball.
Even those restrictions could not dim the players’ enthusiasm. When Smith’s first-year and sophomore students faced each other on March 22, 1893, classmates lined the sidelines with banners and class colors, and the first-years won, 5–4. Smith College’s historical account captures their excitement while also documenting outside warnings that team athletics could harm women’s health and their suitability for marriage and motherhood.
That tension between opportunity and restriction appears throughout the Women Sports USA® History Hub, which traces the milestones, movements, and women who carried this history forward across generations.
The Complicated History of Making Room for Girls
Even people working to create more opportunities for women did not agree on the extent to which girls and women should be allowed to compete.
In the 1920s, women physical educators promoted “play days,” bringing girls together for broad participation and cooperative play rather than sustained competition between established teams. Historical research on the play-day movement shows how educators offered these events as another model for women’s sport.
There is real value in broad participation. Girls should have room to move, learn, and enjoy sports, whether they want a recreational league or the strongest opponents they can find. The trouble begins when adults decide that serious competition is not for girls.
Opening the gym door was an achievement. Giving the athletes inside freedom to test their ability was another.
Alice Coachman and the Talent Already There
Alice Coachman’s story shows us just how strong athletic ambition can be, even in the face of barriers involving both race and gender.
Growing up in segregated Georgia, Coachman was discouraged from participating in sports and excluded from facilities available to white children. Still, she ran barefoot on roads and practiced high jumping with improvised equipment. Her fifth-grade teacher and her aunt saw her talent and encouraged the athletic interests others tried to limit.
In 1948, Coachman won the Olympic high jump in London, becoming the first Black woman from any country to win an Olympic gold medal. The National Women’s History Museum’s biography of Alice Coachman documents her journey and the barriers she faced.
Her accomplishment deserves its place among the great milestones of sports history. But her story also asks us to consider how many talented girls never received the encouragement, facilities, or opportunity to keep going.
The record books can show us who succeeded, but not how much ability and ambition went unseen because opportunity never arrived.
Title IX Changed the Ground Beneath the Game
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 made sex discrimination illegal in education programs and activities that receive federal funding. That protection includes athletics, as the U.S. Department of Education explains in its overview of Title IX and athletics.
For girls’ sports, that protection opened an essential door. Athletic opportunity in schools now stood on a civil rights foundation, giving girls and women firmer ground to challenge exclusion and unequal treatment.
But 1972 should never be treated as the beginning of female competitiveness. Women had already trained, organized teams, pursued championships, and challenged restrictions for generations.
The athletes who came before Title IX belong in that history, alongside the advocates who turned its protections into real opportunities. Together, they remind us that progress takes more than a new rule.
A place on a team matters, but it is only the beginning. Athletes also need coaching, resources, and steady encouragement to help them grow.
Wanting to Win Is Something Girls Can Learn to Use Well
That history shapes how we respond to young athletes. When a girl cares deeply about competing, adults can help her turn that ambition into preparation, resilience, and respect for the game.
Wanting to win gives coaches something meaningful to teach. An athlete can learn to respond to mistakes, respect an opponent, and handle disappointment. She can learn that earning a role takes work, that helping the team may mean doing something other than scoring, and that caring about the outcome does not make her worth depend on it.
That takes guidance. Humiliating a teammate, cheating, or ignoring someone’s safety should be addressed clearly. But a girl who asks how to earn more responsibility deserves a useful answer. A player disappointed by a loss needs room to process it, while a player proud of her improvement should be able to enjoy what she earned.
That balance matters when an athlete wants a larger role. She can support her teammates while continuing to pursue her own goals, a lesson explored in Athlete Playing Time in Sports: What the Bench Can Teach You. Ambition and being a good teammate can grow together.
Coaches can give that ambition direction through clear expectations and useful feedback. Even a difficult conversation about playing time can become a conversation about growth, as we explore in Playing Time Is Personal: How Coaches Handle One of the Hardest Conversations in Sports.
Competition does not look the same in every child. A quiet player may carry intense determination, while an outgoing teammate may draw energy from sharing the experience. Adults can pay attention to effort, choices, and conduct without expecting every athlete to show ambition in the same way.
Remembering the Women Beyond the Famous Firsts
The most recognizable names help us mark progress, but a fuller history also depends on local stories.
A school photograph can help you identify athletes and coaches. An old uniform can start a conversation about where the team practiced and what it was like to play. A newspaper clipping can bring back names and accomplishments that have slipped from public memory.
Ask the women in your family and community: What sports could you play? Who encouraged you? What opportunities did you wish you had? What did being part of a team mean to you?
Their answers may hold pride, frustration, friendship, or unfinished ambition. Preserving them helps younger athletes understand the opportunities they inherited—and the women who made them possible.
Women’s sports history reaches far beyond the podium. It lives in the people who played, coached, organized, and kept showing up—and in the opportunities the next girl receives because they did.
Giving the Next Girl Room to Compete
When a girl steps onto a field today, she should have room to find out what she can do. That includes trying something difficult, making mistakes in public, earning trust, and discovering the satisfaction of improvement.
She may become a champion or play for a few seasons, carrying what she learned into another part of her life. Either way, her effort and ambition deserve to be taken seriously.
She steps into a history shaped by women who pursued athletic ambition with fewer resources and far less encouragement than they deserved. The opportunities she has today carry their effort forward.
Before girls were widely told they could be competitive, they were already competing. We do not have to create their determination. Our job is to give them the opportunity, guidance, and room to see where it can take them.
Every generation of girls deserves to know the women who made room for them to compete. Women Sports USA® helps keep those stories visible.
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Linda Herron is the Founder and CEO of Women Sports USA®, a former Division I field hockey athlete, coach, author, and business finance executive with over 40 years of experience. She uses storytelling to honor athletes, coaches, officials, and pioneers, preserving the history of women’s sports and inspiring future generations.
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