Journalists worldwide rely on the expertise of Women’s Sports Foundation spokespeople and research, seeking our insight daily. As the leading resource on female athletes and physical activity, the Women’s Sports Foundation is at the forefront of educating the public about equal play.
Foundation, Beantown Jumpers featured on Austin, Texas "News 8" broadcast
Published: Tuesday, November 10, 2009
The Women’s Sports Foundation, GoGirlGo! Boston’s Director Whitney Post and GoGirlGo! Boston grantees, The Beantown Jumpers, were recently featured on an Austin, Texas, News 8 broadcast, in a segment titled “Girls who play sports are likely headed for bright futures.”
In the online article and accompanying video, Foundation research regarding athletic participation statistics of high school girls is cited, making the News 8 broadcast evermore credible in its suggestion that girls who play sports have higher levels of confidence and self-esteem and lower levels of depression, a message the Foundation tirelessly works to spread.
In the video segment seen during News 8’s nightly broadcast, GoGirlGo! grantees The Beantown Jumpers are featured. The Jumpers are a competitive Double Dutch team from Boston, Quincy and Pembroke, Mass., with team members who include girls and boys, Grade 2 to Grade 5. Their mission is to share the sport of Double Dutch with others while encouraging physical activity, teamwork and fun.
”It makes me feel like I am very special,” Jumper Juliette Silva said of her involvement with the group.
The video also focuses on the disparity between high school athletic opportunities for boys and those for girls. Again citing Foundation research, News 8 Austin states that there are one-third fewer participation opportunities for girls than for boys at the high school level.
“We need to reach out to girls to provide opportunities for them,” said GoGirlGo! Boston Director Whitney Post.
Watch the video here.
More on GoGirlGo! Boston.
More on Beantown Jumpers.
Jackson honored at NY Liberty's Inspiring Women Night
Published: Tuesday, July 28, 2009
On Thursday, July 23, 2009, the Foundation’s Yolanda Jackson was honored by the New York Liberty at their Inspiring Women Night, when the Liberty took on the Sacramento Monarchs. Jackson, who serves as the Foundation’s Senior Director of Athlete Marketing, was recognized alongside 12 other women who are pioneers of local New York City non-profit organizations that empower the lives of women and young girls. Before the game, the Liberty hosted a reception and networking event in the Club Bar & Grill at Madison Square Garden that featured the evening's honorees and special guest speakers Liberty president and general manager Carol Blazejowski and WNBA president Donna Orender.
Foundation President featured in CaptainU Internet radio interview
Published: Thursday, July 09, 2009
Jessica Mendoza, Women's Sports Foundation President, was recently featured on "Role Models." In a wide-ranging interview, Mendoza talked about winning Olympic gold, her work with the Women's Sports Foundation and her recent visit to the troops in Afghanistan. "Role Models" is an Internet radio show produced by CaptainU, a college softball recruiting software company.
Listen to the full interview here!
Foundation research highlighted in New York Times
Published: Monday, June 15, 2009
Research commissioned by the Foundation is used in a poignant New York Times article emphasizing the lack of opportunity for girls in urban neighborhoods to take part in sports. On Saturday, June 13, Katie Thomas of the Times describes how the youth sports movement has been highly influential in suburban communities, while girls living in cities from Los Angeles to New York are being left behind.
Disparity in girls’ sports is revealed through a look at urban teams
Foundation’s Director of Research, Don Sabo, is quoted
By Katie Thomas
New York Times Staff Writer
Saturday, June 13, 2009
The Cougars of Middle School 61 had a basketball game in the Bronx, but a half-hour before tipoff, six girls and Coach Bryan Mariner were still inching through traffic in Brooklyn.
A cell phone rang. It belonged to forward Tiffany Fields-Binning, who passed the phone to Mr. Mariner. “You don’t want her to go?” he said. He peered up at a street sign. “We’re on Atlantic and Flatbush.” He paused. “O.K. O.K. We’ll wait here.” Mr. Mariner turned off the ignition. “Tiff-a-ny.” He said her name slowly, like a sigh. “You didn’t set this straight with your pop?” Tiffany stared out a window. Mr. Mariner turned and assessed the situation: “We’ve got five.” Five players. No substitutes.
With this team, it’s always something. In the suburbs, girls’ participation in sports is so commonplace that in many communities, the conversation has shifted from concerns over equal access to worries that some girls are playing too much. But the revolution in girls’ sports has largely bypassed the nation’s cities, where public school districts short on money often view sports as a luxury rather than an entitlement.
Coaches and organizers of youth sports in cities say that while many immigrant and lower-income parents see the benefit of sports for sons, they often lean on daughters to fill needs in their own hectic lives, like tending to siblings or cleaning the house.
Others, like Tiffany’s father, Gavin Binning, are worried for their daughter’s safety, another roadblock to playing.
“Tiffany’s my baby,” he said. “They weren’t going around the corner, they were going to the Bronx. And for me not knowing that, it drove me crazy.”
Since the passage of the federal gender-equity law known as Title IX in 1972, girls’ participation in sports has soared. In the 1971-72 school year, girls accounted for 7 percent of all participants in high school sports. By the 2006-7 school year, their share had grown to 41 percent, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations.
In the suburbs, girls play sports at rates roughly equal to boys. A 2007 survey by Harris Interactive of more than 2,000 schoolchildren nationwide showed that 54 percent of boys and 50 percent of girls in the suburbs described themselves as “moderately involved” athletes.
Urban areas revealed a much greater discrepancy. Only 36 percent of city girls in the survey described themselves as moderately involved athletes, compared with 56 percent of city boys. Girls in cities from Los Angeles to New York “are the left-behinds of the youth sport movement in the United States,” said Don Sabo, a professor of health policy at D’Youville College in Buffalo, who conducted the study, which was commissioned by the Women’s Sports Foundation, a private advocacy group.
The Cougars have few of the basics that suburban public school girls have come to expect, including free transportation, uniforms and full seasons of regularly scheduled games. At M.S. 61 in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, each road game is a logistical puzzle for Mr. Mariner, 46, who is dean of students and coach of the school’s girls’ and boys’ basketball teams. Even when the Cougars arrive ready to play, games are sometimes canceled because the opponents — facing the same obstacles — cannot field a team. Parents rarely show up to watch.
Foundation featured in Washington Post article
Published: Thursday, May 21, 2009
Benita Fitzgerald Mosley, Former president of the Women’s Sports Foundation Board of Trustees, has been chosen as USA Track and Field's first chief of sports performance. In an article published on Thursday, May 21, Amy Shipley of the Washington Post desribes the challenges Fitzgerald Mosley will face in fixing a troubled U.S. Olympic track and field program.
U.S. Track Program Gets a Fix
Fitzgerald Mosley Will Be First Chief of Performance
By Amy Shipley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Benita Fitzgerald Mosley, a 1984 Olympic gold medalist, will be charged with fixing a troubled U.S. Olympic track and field program today when she is announced as USA Track and Field's first chief of sport performance, according to two sources with knowledge of the move.
Fitzgerald Mosley, 47, who resides in Haymarket and attended Gar-Field High in Woodbridge, helped put together a blisteringly critical report of the U.S. track and field team's performance after the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing as a member of an independent panel that included famed sprinter Carl Lewis.
Among more than a dozen recommendations in the report, which blamed the U.S. team's debacle-filled Olympic performance on disorganized coaching and a lack of professionalism by athletes, was the appointment of a general manager of sports performance to take charge of an area the report deemed to be in "chaos."
Fitzgerald Mosley was considered an ideal choice for the post because, despite her close connection to track and field, she had remained apart from USATF politics and policies since she retired as an athlete in 1988, giving her a desirable distance and independence, according to one of the sources. She also was considered among the most clear-thinking, incisive and diplomatic members of the nine-person panel that authored the report, the source said.
The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly in advance of the announcement.
USATF chief executive Doug Logan made the decision with input from President Stephanie Hightower and other USATF constituents, according to a source, and began informing them of the move yesterday. About a half-dozen candidates were interviewed, the source said, and Fitzgerald Mosley was considered the first choice.
"She's got nonprofit experience, she's got leadership experience, she's got athlete experience, she's got athletic managerial experience as well," one of the sources said. "She's someone everybody knows, but she's not someone who owes favors to anybody either."
The independent panel was assembled by Logan on the heels of an Olympic Games in which the U.S. team led the overall medal count but underperformed in many areas, most notably the relays. In a stunning embarrassment, both the U.S. men's and women's 4x100 relay teams dropped batons in back-to-back races near the end of the track and field competition.
As star U.S. athletes struggled, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt and others from his nation dominated the headlines.
Fitzgerald Mosley's first priority will be ensuring that post-collegiate athletes have access to the best possible training opportunities, one of the sources said.
After graduating from Gar-Field in 1979, Fitzgerald Mosley attended the University of Tennessee on a track scholarship and earned a degree in industrial engineering. She won a gold medal at the 1983 Pan American Games before becoming the first African American woman to win an Olympic gold in the 100-meter hurdles.
She has spent eight years as chief executive of Women in Cable Telecommunications in Chantilly and will remain in the region for the immediate future, a source said. USA Track and Field, the governing body for the sport in the United States, is based in Indianapolis.
Fitzgerald Mosley was president of the Women's Sports Foundation Board of Trustees in 1997-98, and remains a member of the board. She also has overseen the direction of the U.S. Olympic Committee's training centers, considered a valuable trait as the USATF seeks to improve its training opportunities for athletes.
In addition to appointing a director of sport performance, the 69-page report recommended an overhaul of USA Track and Field's high-performance program, improvements to its anti-doping policies and the termination of its million-dollar relay developmental program. The report deemed that program "a waste of money and a failure."
The relay program has been dissolved.