Takedown Report

More girls playing high school sports in NC than ever before : ‘We’ve come a long way, baby’

After an alarming decline during the COVID-19 pandemic, more girls are participating in high school sports in North Carolina than ever before.
Que Tucker played high school basketball as a student at Stoneville High School in Reidsville in the late 1960s. At the time, it was the only sport girls could play, but it wasn’t the only sport Tucker was interested in. “I look back and I think about what I could have participated in because I wanted to. I mean, I high jumped when I was in high school, but it wasn’t on an organized track team, it was just in a sawdust pit at a field day with four or five schools in Rockingham County,” Tucker said.
Title IX of the Civil Rights Act was not signed into law until 1972, so opportunities for girls in sports were limited. “You know that old saying that we used to see a lot – ‘we’ve come a long way, baby.’ I look back and I think about that now, and we truly have come a long way,” said Tucker. “I think we see that in so many different areas.”
Now the first female commissioner of the N.C. High School Athletic Association, Tucker is seeing the results firsthand. According to data released by the NCHSAA, there have never been more girls playing high school sports in North Carolina than there are today.
During the 2023-2024 school year, the number of girls playing high school sports in the state surpassed 90,000 for the first time ever. Every single sanctioned girls sport saw participation rise, bringing the total number of female participants to 91,111, representing an increase of 6.6% from the prior school year.
The previous all-time high was 89,826 set during the 2016-2017 school year. …

The pandemic effect
After the COVID-19 pandemic, girls sports participation dropped 12.5% in North Carolina to 76,612 athletes. It was the lowest participation rate among girls in two decades. But in just two years, the NCHSAA has seen a full recovery and is now setting participation records.
While it was not shocking participation dropped during and immediately after the pandemic, the drop in female participation was alarming, and significantly higher than the 6.4% decline seen in boys sports. “I just think that perhaps coming out of COVID … perhaps our girls were a little slower to get back into the mix of playing multiple sports, maybe even just playing one sport” said Tucker.
Boys participation returned to pre-pandemic levels during the 2022-2023 school year and grew another 4.5% this past school year to 117,611.
Girls participation has never matched or surpassed boys participation in North Carolina high school sports, but the impact of the pandemic was seen more widely on the girls side. Multiple surveys of athletic directors conducted by HighSchoolOT in 2020 and 2021 showed a high level of concern about girls sports participation.
But now the pandemic may be creating new opportunities.
This past fall, a new record was set for the number of schools offering girls golf and the number of girls participating in the sport statewide. …

New opportunities for girls in sports
This past winter, the NCHSAA officially sanctioned girls wrestling for the first time. A total of 1,432 girls wrestlers from 248 different schools participated in the sport, which culminated in an individual wrestling state championship tournament. It was the product of several years worth of work, which included a non-sanctioned girls wrestling invitational. “We’ve known for a number of years that it has grown, and I think after it was well known and well publicized that the 2023 school year would be the last year of an invitational, and that then the next year it would be standalone, I think we’ve just had a lot more girls participating in that sport in and of itself,” Tucker said.
In fact, the number of girls participating in wrestling grew by 74.4% from 2023 to 2024.

First NCHSAA girls wrestling champions crowned; Lumberton wins team title

“I think it’s very important, if for no other reason, we want to be an inclusive organization. We believe that every student-athlete who goes through the front door of a school should have the opportunity to participate in sports,” said Tucker. “It’s part of our mission. It’s part of what we want to do and what we want to be about, for us to provide those opportunities for females, for anybody who participates or who goes into the front door of our member schools.”
The NCHSAA Board of Directors approved the sanctioning of girls wrestling during the 50th anniversary of Title IX in 2022. “It took us a long time to get to where we were able to sanction wrestling, and our wrestling coaches, to their credit, they worked hard to try to maintain, to try to sustain the interest so that their numbers would be there,” said Tucker.
The hard work of wrestling coaches has not gone unnoticed at the school level either. East said the Millbrook wrestling coaches have done a good job of bringing out new female athletes. “I think our coaches do a good job of working the hallways and trying to find those kids that need some form of connection to the school in some way. I know I can say that a lot about our wrestlers because there are kids that basically don’t do anything else and they’re out there wrestling, which I thought was pretty cool,” he said. … more at … https://www.highschoolot.com/story/we-ve-come-a-long-way-baby-more-girls-playing-high-school-sports-in-nc-than-ever-before/21536255/

July 26, 2024 - Posted by The TakeDown Report | Uncategorized