Title IX is felt in little leagues, soccer fields across the country
This past spring, the soccer fields of Anoka, Minn. -- a suburb just north of Minneapolis -- were heavily sprinkled with blond ponytails. That's because of the Anoka Junior Soccer Association's 24 teams, two-thirds are all female. The organization's president, Nancy Giancola, herself the soccer mom of a fifth-grade girl, said she has witnessed a rapid expansion in the opportunities for girls to play youth sports in the past several years and since she was a young girl."When I was my daughter's age, we didn't have girls' sports at all," Giancola explained. Giancola grew up in the pre-Title IX era, during which only one in 27 girls played high school sports, and a second-grade girl playing in a youth soccer league was the exception to the rule. But growing up 30 years after the passage of the watershed legislation, her daughter has witnessed such female athletic triumphs as the U.S.
