The Times had a crappy article on girls and sports this week. The cover of the magazine has a picture of girl with her head wrapped in gauze getting bonked on the head with the ball. Ouch.

I skimmed through five pages of stories of how girls are getting terribly injuring playing sports. I was looking for the point somewhere. Way back towards the end of the article after it jumped to the page before the crossword puzzle, it said something about how coaches need to train girls differently than boys and then things will be fine. 

How many people read that article to the end to find that point? How many people saw the cover, read the first couple pages, and walked away saying "girls shouldn’t play sports"?

The first paragraph of that article should have been a quote from one of the injured girls talking about how important sports were to her life and how she willingly put up with torn ligaments and stress fractures, because she loved winning games.

My knees are destroyed from running nearly fifty miles a week all through high school and into college. My back was so fucked up in my senior year that I could barely walk at the end of the cross country season. What did I gain from all that pain? A whole lot of self confidence. A work ethic. Leadership skills. It sure beat waving pom-poms around.

I have a box of medals up in my attic and two scrapbooks of press clippings. Each scrapbook has been carefully marked to note which races I won and which ones I earned a personal best. Twenty years later, I still remember my time for the mile, two mile, and cross country.

Warrior-girls rule, even if they limp a little.