When I attended college in Vermont in 1988, I remember all the kids at the school who grew up in New York City. They had the starring roles in the plays, performed in dance recitals, played some type of instrument, or majored in art history. I never saw any student who was raised in New York City participate in sports.
What I’ve been observing in the city today contradicts my pre-conceived notion. For example, my 9-year-old daughter, who is growing up in Queens, takes weekly swimming and skating classes, plays tennis once a month, and in the winter, goes skiing for at least a week.
I am not the only parent with a child active in sports. Her friends at school participate in soccer, basketball, baseball, swimming, karate, ice skating, and tennis. It’s like this new generation of athletes coming out of one of the most unlikeliest of places.
Another interesting trend I’m seeing in the city is the participation of more girls in sports. One of my daughter’s classmates, who is also a 9-year-old girl, has a brown-belt in karate. Her mother told me that the next step for her daughter would be to get her black belt, but she must be 18 years old to obtain it, so she most likely will be getting a junior black belt next year. Then, at my daughter’s school last year, I met a 10-year-old girl who told me she plays ice hockey. I was astonished to hear these girls playing sports long-considered to be male-only activities.
Who would have imagined such things could have happened since 1972, when the federal government enacted Title IX? In defining Title IX, the Women’s Sports Foundation states, “Title IX gives women athletes the right to equal opportunity in sports in educational institutions that receive federal funds, from elementary schools to colleges and universities.”
The major sports events of last year are inspiration enough for me — the United States’ women’s soccer team won the 2015 World Cup, Serena Williams won three major grand slam events in tennis, and American swimmer Katie Ledecky broke her own world record in the 1,500-meter freestyle at the 2015 World Championships.
Soccer, swimming, and tennis were the sports I played as a child, so these are the statistics that stand out in my mind. My love of playing and watching sports comes from my father, who got into a bit of mischief when he was in school growing up in Connecticut. Because of it, the school told his parents that my father should divert his extra energy into sports, which his parents encouraged him to do. By my father’s senior year of high school, he was playing varsity football, hockey, and baseball.
Growing up in suburban New Jersey in the 1980s, I had a lot of opportunities to play sports. My classmates and I were the first generation of kids whose parents both had to work full-time, so after-school activities became a necessity for many of us. Instead of walking back from school to an empty home until our parents returned from work, we could now walk over to an after-school practice of any seasonal sport or to an indoor gym in town that had gymnastics equipment, a swimming pool, and a volleyball court.
Between my brother and myself, we each played at least one season of field hockey, lacrosse, soccer, hockey, basketball, swimming, tennis, and softball by the time we were ready to go to college. Not that I played all of those sports very well, but I at least had the opportunity to participate in some of them. My father even coached my town’s first all-girls soccer team in 1982, on which I played.
Sports, to my father, wasn’t just about the importance of learning a physical skill. For my father, the game was about learning to work with others as a team, practicing hard until you achieved your own goals, and never giving up.
Nowadays, my father plays golf five days a week and constantly reminds me that as science has discovered, physical exercise releases “endorphins,” according to www.webmd.com, that “trigger a positive feeling in the body … which can be accompanied by a positive and energizing outlook on life.” In other words, when we exercise, we are taking care of both our bodies and our minds.
Allison Plitt lives in Queens and is the mother to a 9-year-old daughter.
