How about the good news first? Track and field continues to rank as the most popular sport for high school girls in the United States. According to the National Federation of State High School Associations, nearly a half million girls participate each year, more than any other sport in the country. While that statistic seems promising, it doesn’t reveal the whole story. By age 14, girls drop out of sports at twice the rate of boys, according to research by the Women’s Sports Foundation, and according to the 2023 Project Play report, 56 percent of youth drop out of track and field after one year—one of the highest turnover rates among all sports.
The numbers are not all good or all bad, however. We already know a lot about what keeps girls engaged and interested in organized physical activity—and, perhaps more importantly, what goes wrong for them. Despite this growing body of knowledge, sports leagues and leaders have been slow to implement some simple strategies that can change the game for female athletes, whether due to lack of resources or lack of knowledge.
While working on our book, The Price She Pays: Confronting the Hidden Mental Health Crisis in Women’s Sports—from the Schoolyard to the Stadium, my co-authors and I not only dove into the most current research, but we also asked tween and teen girls themselves about the factors that lead them to quit sports. The patterns emerge quickly for this demographic. As their bodies change during puberty, they feel increasingly uncomfortable with movement, self-conscious in many of the required uniforms, and defeated as their performance temporarily plateaus. Those who receive the information they need and the open communication they require from coaches and other trusted adults navigate this tumultuous time and remain committed to their teams as they grow. The girls who have less support, unsurprisingly, end up leaving.
Addressing what girls are experiencing in the teen years can prove difficult (and uncomfortable) in many ways for the adults leading track and field programs, which is why it so often goes ignored. Experts suggest that those coaches who don’t feel qualified to talk about how puberty and periods may influence training and performance should ask for help from athletic trainers, school nurses, or local healthcare professionals to start the dialogue with the team. Older athletes can also help, serving as sources of support or starting conversations among the team that normalize these issues and reinforce the notion that menstruating is a sign of strength and health.
Coaches, of course, hold most of the influence over the athlete experience. Research by the Women’s Sports Foundation shows that younger girls have persisted in programs led by coaches who allow them to try new skills without facing repercussions for failure. They thrive in team environments that reward improvement over winning, but, make no mistake, they also want to compete (competition is a big part of what keeps it fun, girls reported). The research also reveals that younger female athletes are “more likely to believe a female coach’s advice because they lived it.” In the survey of more than 1,100 girls, those who said they “really” liked their coach were more likely to have a female coach (82 percent). As role models and mentors, female coaches have a greater impact on girls and more success in retaining them in sports—they counter gender-based stereotypes and increase girls’ sense of belonging.
The bottom line? Diversifying the coaching pool is one critical way that we can keep girls in sports like track and field. We know that women comprise just 26 percent of adults coaching kids fourteen and under, according to Project Play. Men are twice as likely to coach girls in youth sports as women are likely to coach boys. Evening out these ratios would go a long way toward improving the experiences for all.
In our research and reporting for The Price She Pays we heard over and over again how during the adolescent years, girls believed they would benefit from the empathy and reassurance of their coaches. They wanted coaches to understand why requiring white shorts, for example, might be problematic for girls just starting their periods—how having no choice in uniforms and apparel could, on some days, take their focus off their performance because they were more concerned about how they looked or what was showing than how they competed. They also wished they had been told earlier that the absence of menstruation might signal that they weren’t getting enough fuel to keep up with the physical demands of sports.
“In high school the coaches said, ‘It’s fine. You’re a distance runner. It’s okay you’re not getting your period,’” one athlete told us in the book. “But in college they tell us to go to our athletic trainer and a doctor and make sure we’re eating enough. For a lot of us, it’s the first time anybody said anything like that to us.”
Giving coaches the basic tools and training they need to support the specific needs of female athletes at a precarious point in their athletic careers might be one of the most effective ways of keeping girls active. When girls are greeted with relevant information from trusted adults and their changing bodies aren't treated like a taboo topic, they feel stronger, more confident, and empowered to keep moving through every stage of life.