Most Girls Play Sports for Fun, Not to Win

If your daughter loves her team but dreads the scoreboard, she is telling you something researchers have now measured. For 83% of girls ages 5 to 13, having fun playing a sport matters more than trying to win. That comes from a nationwide study by Girl Scouts of the USA, conducted with Wakefield Research, that looked at how girls and their mothers experience youth sports and after-school activities. When you ask a young girl why she plays, she will tell you about her friends, the running around, the feeling of getting a little better at something. Winning is somewhere further down the list.

Girls Want Connection While the Adults Want Wins

Girls want connection, joy and friendship, Girl Scouts of the USA found; the adults around them are more focused on winning, and on treating sport as an investment that should pay off. The study did not put a number on the grown-up side of that gap. You can feel it anyway, in the postgame breakdown in the car and the quiet math about whether the travel team is worth it.

What a girl gets from the game is not a trophy, but a place to belong, a body she trusts a little more, and the habit of trying things that might not work out. Those are the reasons girls play sports in the first place, and they are the reasons she will want to come back next season.

By 14, Girls Leave Sports Faster Than Boys

By age 14, girls are dropping out of sports at higher rates than boys, according to the Women's Sports Foundation, which links burnout and dropout to whether girls get decent facilities, good coaches and a safe experience. It is not only girls who leave: by widely reported figures, about 70% of kids drop out of organized sports by age 13, with the professionalization of youth sports cited as a significant factor.

Somewhere along the way, a lot of rec leagues turned into feeder systems, and that pressure now arrives well before middle school. As one pediatric expert put it to USA Today, for a lot of kids sports “become less fun and more about the concept of what success is from more of an adult's eyes than a child's eyes.”

Families Are Getting Priced Out

Cost is the other reason girls leave. Girl Scouts of the USA points to reduced public funding and the increased privatization of youth sports, which drive up the price of playing. When a season costs what a vacation costs, it stops feeling like play. Families start treating a sport as a financial investment rather than something a girl does for fun, and once money is on the line, so is the expectation of a return. That expectation lands on a nine-year-old who just wanted to be with her friends.

This does not mean pulling her out, or hiding that you care how the team does; it means keeping the pressure you feel about the cost off her shoulders.

Girls Keep Going When the Adults Ease Off

What keeps a girl in the game is the least expensive thing on offer: a grown-up who is glad to watch her try. Bonnie Barczykowski, CEO of Girl Scouts of the USA, put it this way: “Girls thrive when they have the freedom to try, learn and grow without feeling that success is measured only by winning.” Supportive peers and trusted adults, she added, are what give a girl the confidence to keep going and to discover what she can do.

She can hear the difference between being asked whether she won and being asked whether she had fun, and she watches your face before she checks the scoreboard. What she sees there, more than the result, is what brings her back next season.

More on the research is at girlscouts.org.