Sports are a must-have for many girls who grow up to be leaders

Sports teaches us how to lose.

It’s a vital lesson Danette Leighton got from them. It didn’t really come from holding a number of high-level jobs within the industry, from Stanford's executive director for the NCAA women’s basketball Final Four, to WNBA and NBA vice president to Pac-12 chief marketing officer.

It came from her experiences as a girl playing softball in Southern California.

“When you learn how to lose, you bounce right back up,” Leighton, now the CEO of the Women’s Sports Foundation, tells USA TODAY Sports.

“You have to. You have to get to the next game. You have to make sure you understand the power of learning from your own mistakes.”

A self-described middle school dropout, Leighton stopped playing sports in high school. But she realizes now the skills she had already acquired from them – teamwork, handling pressure, pushing physical boundaries and, yes, losing – were crucial elements of her future success.

“When you know how to fail,” Leighton says, “you know how to win.”

That message is at the heart of "Play to Lead," a new study from the Women's Sports Foundation that ties girls’ youth sports participation with them growing into future leaders.

Through YouGov, the WSF surveyed adults from ages 20 to 80 and aimed for a nationally representative sample of ethnic and economic backgrounds.

Forty-nine percent of the respondents credited the skills acquired through sports for their development as leaders in such areas as their neighborhoods, schools and workplaces, including Leighton’s C-Suite sector.

The results reflect the premise on which the WSF has stood for 50 years. It was founded by Billie Jean King in 1974 at a time when women were denied access to mortgages and credit cards and needed advocacy and community impact following the passage of Title IX.

The organization persists, backed by the reach and influence of that enduring piece of legislation, at a time high school girls sport participation is only at the level boys reached in 1972.

But playing sports as kids has empowered them long before that.

“Youth experiences help women and gender-diverse adults become leaders prepared to shape the direction of our country and our democracy in times of prosperity as well as crises,” the WSF writes in the study.

Before “Play to Lead,” the Women’s Sports Foundation focused its research in this area on skills developed from collegiate and elite levels of play.

Here’s what it found about how playing youth sports, across a wide variety of levels of play, can turn girls into leaders:

Sports are a 'must have' for girls. You don't have to be a star to reap their benefits.

The survey's 2,886 respondents (98.6 percent of whom identified as women in their adult lives) participated in sports between the ages of 5 to 26. The WSF collected information about their sporting backgrounds; the skills, traits, and experiences it engendered; and the leadership roles they have taken on in adulthood.

According to the research, 67 percent of women believe they have carried their skills and lessons from sports into adulthood.

More than half of the respondents (52.6%), like Leighton, cited “learning from mistakes” as a key lesson from sports that prepared them to lead. Other results were also what the WSF's CEO and her associates expected.

“We've been doing this for 50 years to prove the model: sports is not a nice-to-have for girls; it's a must have,” she says. “And you don't have to be superstar.”

Leighton's father, Bill Macri, put a softball in her hand when she was very young. Macri coached high school baseball and football in Simi Valley, California. He played baseball at UCLA, and his younger daughter played his position (second base) in softball.

Then she quit.

“I wish I could tell you what my ninth grade brain was telling me,” she says.

Bill never questioned her decision. Lorchid Macri, her mother, supported it, too.

 “I feel very blessed to have parents that always gave me my platform, always told my sister and I we could do everything we wanted to do, always pushed us to follow our passions,” she says.

She followed them to the University of Arizona, where she fell in love with intramural girls flag football.

Leighton still regrets the decision to stop playing softball, though. When they had a daughter, Olivia, she and her husband, Chris, made sure she was always involved in a sport. She played sports through high school.

“We placed our daughter in every sport that we could think of so she could find her love,” she says. “Now I have a genetic studies major in college who has found her own passion in STEM and science. She was not an elite athlete. She will tell me all the time that she was not really an athlete. But I know the lessons she learned in sports.”

COACH STEVE: Youth sports report show girls participation growing, boys declining

Sports helps us learn teamwork, which is critical when you become a leader

Leighton didn’t play softball long enough to figure out if she could play at the next level.

Today, like the women in the WSF study, she has the advantage of time and perspective. Yes, for example, she learned how to catch a popup, but also that most of the time it took a couple of people to get an out.

When she was up with the bases loaded, she remembers feeling better in knowing she had teammates to lift her up, whether she struck out or not.

Her jobs, starting with working in the ticket office at Arizona, have worked in a similar way.

According to “Play to Lead,” 73% of women indicated that learning “teamwork” was their greatest takeaway for youth sports participation.

“(Any) leader will tell you that that is one of the most critical attributes that you need to have in order to be successful in any organization," she says.

Leighton moved to the athletics department at Arizona, where Rocky LaRose, who had played softball at the school, worked at a high-ranking position.

"I saw a woman in a role that I didn't even realize could exist," she says. "And that's kind of where my career took off."

When she became a vice president for the first time with the Sacramento Kings in 2001, she remembers walking into her first NBA league meetings and counting the number of women she saw in roles like hers on her hands.

Over time, as the margin became closer to 50-50, she realized the importance of having allies who were male and female. It’s a lesson that can be applied to youth sports.

“It is incredibly important for both girls and boys to grow up with women playing sports,” she says. “And I think that's the beauty of what you're now seeing.”

She points to the moment when WNBA star Sabrina Ionescu took on Stephen Curry in a 3-point shooting competition during the 2024 NBA All-Star game.

Ionescu made her first seven shots, and nine of her first 10, scoring 26 points in all. Curry had to make nine of his last 10 to reach 29 and edge her out.

 “I think a night like tonight shows a lot of young girls and young boys that if you can shoot, you can shoot,” Ionenscu said afterward.

COACH STEVE: Ionescu, A'ja Wilson shows young girls why everyone can use a mentor

Sports helps us find resolve for life's tough moments

In 1973, King defeated Bobby Riggs in the “Battle of the Sexes” tennis exhibition at Houston's Astrodome. King has told Leighton that, as she fought for women’s equality, she had no choice: She had to win. Talk about pressure.

Pressure is a complicated topic when it comes to youth sports. When we put too much of it on our kids, it can be damaging to their health.

However, kids can benefit from pressure when we allow them to face those situations with support and encouragement. As a girl, Leighton hated being up with two outs and a full count in the last inning but now realizes the value of it.

“Just having those simple life lessons when you're a child, you just overcome them, because you realize losing doesn't matter,” she says. "You just build back from that."

More than half (50.9 percent) of women reported “handling pressure” and 46.2 percent cited “pushing physical boundaries” as key lessons from youth sports.

“Athletics is about pushing physical boundaries, but it's also about pushing mental boundaries, and it's about being able to understand that when you can push boundaries, you become very innovative,” Leighton says. “You think very entrepreneurial, you think very creatively. And all of that is applicable in life and in business.”

Forty-eight percent of the women surveyed in “Play to Lead,” all of whom played sports during their formative years, have had a formal leadership role in the workplace. Nearly 71 percent held titles like manager, director, president, or C-Suite executive.

“The skills that I learned of being incredibly competitive, resilient and understanding the power of teamwork − those were the skills that got me to the next level,” Leighton says. “In every type of job that I had, there was the ability for me to grow and learn the actual trade or the product or the very specific task of that given role, but the intangibles are always the others. I believe strongly I would never have gotten to a vice president or a C-Suite level without those intangibles.”

Sports can ensure 'history never repeats itself' for girls and women

The longer girls play sports, the WSF research for the study found, the more likely they are to hold formal leadership roles.

The way Leighton sees it, playing longer means spending more time learning how to overcome losing, navigating more complex issues within games or just gaining confidence.

The Women's Sports Foundation is still fighting to give girls those opportunities and to play as long as they want.

Title IX banned sex-based discrimination in schools. Fifty-two years since it became law, girls have more than 1 million fewer opportunities to play high school sports than boys, according to WSF research.

"It's always being threatened, and there's always elements of it not being complied with," Leighton says.

Girls quit sports because of a lack of physical education in some schools and limited opportunities in other communities; inadequate facilities; or because of the pay-to-play model that also drives boys away from sports.

You can help them, Leighton says, by buying a jersey or a ticket to their games, or coaching them. When you do so, she says, you’re helping to establish a pipeline that fuels the economy for the next generation of leaders.

“We really want to make sure people understand you need to protect opportunities that weren't there for girls, much like we weren't able to get a mortgage or a credit card," she says. "I can't even fathom that. My daughter wouldn't be able to fathom that. So we just want to make sure history never repeats itself.”

Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for two high schoolers. His column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.

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