Half of Girls Who Want to Play Sports Never Get the Chance

For decades, women’s sports were asked to prove themselves. Would people watch? Would fans fill the stands? Would brands invest?

Today, we know the answer. Professional women’s sports leagues like the WNBA and the NWSL are booming.

But as we celebrate what is happening at the highest levels of women’s sports, we should be asking how many girls will never discover what they are capable of because they never got the chance to play.

The sports access gap

According to the Women’s Sports Foundation’s inaugural WSF Sport Report, more than half (54%) of girls ages eight to 18 who have never played organized sports say they want to.

Somewhere among those girls is a child who could discover the sport she loves. A future captain. A coach. An Olympian. Maybe even a champion. Most will never become professional athletes, nor should that determine whether their opportunity mattered. Sports can shape health outcomes, confidence, leadership, and a sense of belonging that lasts well after competition ends.

But none of us can know what sports might unlock in a girl until she gets the opportunity to find out.

As a Women’s Sports Foundation Trustee, I care deeply about what happens long before an athlete reaches the world’s biggest stages. That is why the foundation’s new research feels so important at this moment. Our findings show us where women’s sports are thriving, where barriers remain, and where we need to focus next.

One of the biggest takeaways is the disconnect between girls’ interest and their opportunity to play. Girls want to participate, but too many still are not getting into the game. And the WSF’s report reveals that when they do, families are spending more on their sports than they are on boys’. The question is not whether girls are interested. It is whether we are creating enough opportunities for that interest to become participation.

And getting girls into sports is only the beginning. We have to give them reasons to stay.

The report also points to a belonging gap that is evident among teens. Among the youngest children, 80% of both girls and boys say sports are “for someone like me.” Among teens, girls are less likely than boys to say the same.

Girls do not need to be convinced that sports are for them when they are eight. We need to make sure that, as pressures mount during the teen years, the sports environment does not give them reasons to question whether they still belong.

What opportunity can unlock

I know personally what can happen when a girl gets that first opportunity.

I started running track around 12 years old. There was no grand plan that I would become a professional athlete or an Olympic champion. I was a kid who got the chance to try something, discovered what I was capable of, and had people around me who gave that interest room to grow.

That opportunity ultimately took me to Harvard, where I competed and studied neurobiology and global health, and eventually to the Olympic podium. Along the way, sports helped shape not only the athlete I became, but the person I became and the possibilities I saw for my life beyond the track.

Every girl deserves the opportunity to find out where hers might lead.

No athlete makes that journey alone. Behind every woman competing inside the world’s biggest arenas are years of access, coaching, resources, and people who reinforced that she belonged.

And that path matters at every level. Industry leaders surveyed for the WSF Sport Report overwhelmingly see progress at the professional level. But the picture changes at college, the only part of the pipeline where more say progress has declined than improved.

That contrast should get our attention.

Protecting the path forward

College sports are a critical bridge to professional and Olympic competition. As college athletics undergo historic changes to athlete compensation, revenue sharing, and name, image, and likeness opportunities, decisions being made now will help determine who benefits from this new era.

We cannot celebrate the destination while allowing the road to it to narrow.

And at a moment of such significant change, the WSF Sport Report points to a troubling disconnect around one of the protections that helped make today’s opportunities possible. More than five decades after Title IX helped transform sports for girls and women, 79% of girls surveyed have never heard of it. More than half of their parents haven’t either.

Opportunity can be inherited, but the knowledge of how it was won cannot be assumed. Without that knowledge, how can the next generation protect the rights they may not even know they have?

That lack of awareness is especially striking when nearly half of the industry leaders surveyed for the report identify Title IX rollbacks or weakened enforcement as the greatest threat to continued progress for girls and women in sports.

Our responsibility is not simply to benefit from the doors that have been opened. It is to make sure they remain open, and to open more for the girls coming behind us.