CHICAS HACIENDO DEPORTE.

KATIE THOMAS. NY TIMES.

RESUMEN: En Boston están reclutando mujeres para actividades deportivas en las escuelas. La mayoría de las mujeres no participaban de estas actividades debido a que eran en la tarde, había mal transporte público para llevarlas a su casa y porque no se sentían motivadas a participar. Este esfuerzo por involucrarlas en actividades deportivas está vinculado a dar igualdad de oportunidades a hombres y mujeres.

BOSTON — Recruiters for the recreational program MetroLacrosse wander school halls each winter, looking for children willing to learn a sport that is rarely played in this city’s poorest neighborhoods.
Signing up boys takes little more than hanging a picture of a lacrosse player in the gym, said Tracey Britton, the group’s director of youth and rookie programs. But persuading girls takes weeks of wooing: encouraging them to sign up with friends, holding girls-only clinics, and winning over teachers they trust.

“It is much more time intensive and staff intensive,” Britton said.

MetroLacrosse, which serves 600 children, is one of several Boston sports groups that are aggressively trying to increase girls’ participation. The city is at the vanguard of a movement to close the gender gap in urban areas by rethinking traditional activities and looking for new ways to encourage girls to play.

Organizers of youth sports programs regularly share notes on recruiting and retaining girls, and many groups have enhanced their offerings of traditional team sports with activities that appeal to a wider range of girls, including dance and yoga. But progress is slow, and significant obstacles remain.

A study published by the Harvard School of Public Health in 2002 reported that girls accounted for 49 percent of Boston’s young people but made up only 33 percent of participants in after-school sports programs. The results surprised the leaders of the youth sports community, and led to the creation of the Boston Girls’ Sports and Physical Activity Project, financed by a local foundation, to evaluate opportunities for girls in the city’s sports programs.

The gender imbalance was largely a question of resources, said Don Sabo, the project’s evaluation director. Community sports programs were struggling to maintain their usual offerings, which have traditionally favored boys. “Girls were left without their support,” he said.

Through Sabo’s project, youth sports leaders began sharing ideas about how to work together. A lack of safe transportation is a major obstacle to persuading parents to let their daughters play, so some groups shared vans. Others started referring girls to colleagues when their own programs were not a good fit.

The effort has reached as far as the elementary school playground. Employees at Sports4Kids, a nonprofit group that oversees recess at public schools, have been devising ways to shake up gender roles and increase options for girls. Tes Siarnacki, a recess coordinator at a school in East Boston, regularly encourages older girls to referee boy-dominated soccer games, and assigns older boys to monitor double Dutch jump rope, which is played mostly by girls.

One day this spring, Siarnacki zeroed in on a group of girls huddled in a corner, their heads bent in conversation. Siarnacki jogged over, spoke to them quietly for a few minutes and before long the girls hopped to their feet and began doing sit-ups and jumping jacks.

“They wanted to play ‘teacher,’ so I told them to play ‘gym teacher,’ ” she said. “It was a pretty easy sell.”

Several other groups around the country are increasingly singling out urban girls. In 2000, the Women’s Sports Foundation, an advocacy group that had traditionally focused on policy issues and college athletics, created an initiative that provides grants to groups serving girls and offers a free, girl-centered curriculum to community organizations. The program, GoGirlGo!, has regional offices in Boston, Atlanta, Chicago and San Antonio.

The Boys & Girls Clubs of America is also rethinking the way it serves girls, who make up 43 percent of its 1.7 million members. The percentage of girls who participate is lower still in sports-specific programs like basketball and baseball.

The national organization, which added “girls” to its name in 1990, has set a goal of increasing female participation by 5 percent a year, said Kharimasud Olufemi, the group’s director of sports, fitness and recreation. Forty percent of the children who attend Boys & Girls Clubs live in cities.

The group recently started a fitness program called Triple Play, which teaches nutrition, encourages social interaction and promotes sports. Although it is offered to everyone, it has particular appeal to girls, Olufemi said.

“It’s not just about team sports, but about encouraging individuals to be active to their own beat, so to speak,” he said.

Girls tend to stick with activities that offer strong social connections.

“You can’t just say, let’s come play sports,” said Cicley Gay, the senior program officer for GoGirlGo!. “You have to really create the environment.”

At some Boys & Girls Clubs, Olufemi said, organizers set up girls-only play times and papered over the windows in the gym door to keep boys from looking in. In New York City, education officials have widened the options available to girls. In the elementary and middle schools, the Office of Fitness and Health Education has begun to offer girl-friendly activities like fitness clubs and yoga classes. High schools have added varsity girls teams in activities like golf, lacrosse and double Dutch.

But despite the heightened level of awareness and the extra effort, girls’ participation lags behind boys’. A 2007 survey by the Centers for Disease Control found that in New York City, 35 percent of girls played sports, compared with 51 percent of boys. And in 2006, New York City’s public advocate criticized the Public Schools Athletic League, which coordinates high school sports, for not doing more to increase participation for girls, whose teams made up 44 percent of the city’s squads.

Boston has also struggled. According to the same survey, 42 percent of girls in Boston participated in sports. Both cities were well below the national average for girls, 50 percent of whom participated in at least one sport.

The challenges are clear to the people who run G-ROW Boston, a community rowing program that serves 200 girls a year. Since G-ROW started in 1998, organizers have strived to overcome barriers to participation by offering free transportation, tutoring and college advice. The results are impressive: at least 75 percent of girls return each year, and nearly every alumna attends college.

“We try to be whatever each girl needs,” Regan Bernhard, the program director, said.

She considered setting up a child care program so that girls who have to baby-sit for younger siblings can participate, but it proved too costly.

Ultimately, Bernhard realized that she could not eliminate every roadblock, saying, “I think the most disappointing losses for me are the kids who are in our target population who leave for things we can’t help them with.”

FOTO:Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
FUENTE: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/15/sports/15girls.html?_r=1&ref=education