Girls suck at sports. I always thought I was different, but in reality, I was just a sexist kid toward my own gender. It took me being grouped in with all the other girls to realize how bad it feels to be undermined just because you’re a girl.

You would think that out of all people, I would be the biggest supporter of girls’ athletics. I am now, or at least trying to be, but only recently.

In grade school, I always played football at recess with the boys. I was always a second-round pick, if not a first. It was never weird. We made sure never to let the girls play (minus me, of course), because they would ruin the flow of the game. Instead, we would quickly laugh at their gossip circles and continue. I’m saying this like I was “one of the boys,” but I was just an exception and only for a short amount of years. 

Playing basketball in my driveway at the age of 12, my cousin told me I could probably make it to the WNBA because the league is so bad. I laughed. Later, we quickly skipped through a professional girls’ basketball game on the TV to watch a rerun of a college football game from the 90s. 

I never grew up watching women’s sports; in fact, I probably made fun of it. It was so normal not to be a fan of women’s sports because everywhere I looked, it was always a boy’s name on the back of a jersey or a male holding up a trophy on the TV. Men were always my idols. I dressed in the stereotypical boy’s outfit all the way until 5th grade. I wore a baseball cap every day until I switched to a private school and could only wear them on the weekends. I owned at least ten jerseys, all males from the state of Ohio. In 2nd grade, for Halloween, my little sister was an Ohio State cheerleader, and I was an Ohio State football player, with shoulder pads, helmet, and everything else they would wear.

These were the athletes I adored, men. I spent my whole childhood with a burning passion and drive to one day be like them. Except, it was never going to happen. Not because I wasn’t good enough, but because I wasn’t a boy. 

It’s so frustrating to think women’s sports don’t even have the support of little girls, and I was one of them. The injustice in female athletics is so apparent that us girls are programmed to push ourselves down. 

Now, I find myself unconfident in my abilities and my achievements. I am a D1 athlete, yet I have been told so many times by boys that if they were girls, they would be D1 too, so in a way, I feel stripped of that accomplishment. I have been excluded from so many physical activities because having a girl participate would make it “uncomfortable.” I understand why girls don’t pursue sports because you are told by the world that you will never be good enough. I was fortunate enough to be grouped in with the boys growing up, so I built up enough boyish confidence to excel at my sport at a young age. But as soon as I entered high school, a little bit of that confidence got taken away with every negative comment towards women’s sports.

Confidence is such a big part of sports, and besides autonomy, I think it is the biggest difference between boys’ and girls’ sports. Confidence comes from knowing that it is possible to succeed, and without female athletes getting more recognition, girls will never gain this confidence.