Studies: Women Who Play Sports Fare Better

(CBS)  The top-ranked UConn Lady Huskies crushed Syracuse today in the Big East tournament to tie their own record for most consecutive wins in women's college basketball. The Lady Huskies are a strong team, but it turns out playing any team sports helps girls do better in life as CBS News correspondent Michelle Miller reports.

In the world of college basketball, there is nothing else like them. No other team, male or female, can boast a 70 game winning streak, each win by double digits.

"He always says the star of our team is our team," said player Tina Charles.

"He" is Geno Auriemma, the no-nonsense, hard-driving coach of the University of Connecticut Lady Huskies for the last 25 seasons.

"Come on, I'm not nice?" Auriemma joked.

"Nice" doesn't win 33 Big East titles and six national championships, he said - teamwork does.

"I don't think people appreciate how hard it is to be on a team, where you're so dependent on other people for your own success," Auriemma said.

Off the court, the Lady Huskies are just as impressive: a team with a perfect 100 percent graduation rate in the 2008-2009 season. Compare that with only 33 percent of the men's program at UConn. And consider star forward Maya Moore, voted ESPN academic all-American of the year, with a 3.75 grade point average.

Such feats may not have been possible for the Lady Huskies if not for the passage of Title IX nearly four decades ago. The federal mandate forced schools and colleges to even the playing field for girls by providing them with the same sports opportunities as boys.

And it's paid big dividends. When the bill passed in 1972, only one out of 25 girls played high school sports. Today it's one in three.

"People who participate in high school sports get more education and earn higher wages later in life," said Betsey Stevenson, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business.

A study released last month shows girls who play team sports in high school are 20 percent more likely to graduate high school and 20 percent more likely to go onto college. A similar study indicates that female athletes are half as likely to become pregnant in high school. And a University of Illinois study found that female high school athletes are 7 percent less likely to become obese in middle age.

But there is still some catching up to do. While only a third of girls play sports in high school, half of all boys do. The Lady Huskies record-setting win was only carried by a few cable systems. And unlike women athletes in individual sports who become household names, these star players don't get the star treatment or the money and endorsements that go with it.

"Tina Charles is going to be the number one first round draft pick. And she's going to get what? Like a pair of Nikes? You know a little bit of money?" Auriemma said.

The top salary for a WNBA player is only $95,000.

"We don't let it get us down. We just keep representing out on the court and in the classroom," Moore said.

For coach Aureimma, that's a winning attitude. Now the only lesson left for him to teach his athletes, is how to lose.

[guest173]

I hated playing sports in high school, girls I didn't know were calling me the b word pushing and calling my friends names too. when it is full of hate, it's hard to get into the spirit

[rational_1]

"And unlike women athletes in individual sports who become household names, these star players don't get the star treatment or the money and endorsements that go with it."

Well maybe if women supported professional leagues like the WNBA anywhere near to the same extent as men watch men's professional sports, then the women's leagues would be more financially viable. But, they don't, simple as that. Don't count on men watching women's sports (apart from maybe beach volleyball) as a means to save those leagues. It won't happen. And that's not being sexist - it's just reality.

[Ground-Soldier]

As a parting gift of the Greatest Generation, the 1972 Civil Rights in Education Amendment, by banning all forms of gender discrimination in American education, significantly extended the influence of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act. Long before women used the 1972 civil rights law to achieve the required gender balance in sports programs, they used the law to achieve gender balance in virtually every academic and administrative aspect of all educational endeavors in America receiving any federal funding whether directly or indirectly. Since sports programs was the very last area of emphasis, most people today think the 1972 law applies only to sports programs. It does not. The library full of legal precedents established through hundreds of court cases throughout the 1970s clearly established that equitable gender balance is mandated in every single aspect of education in the United States in order to be eligible for any federal funds. Academic balance is obviously far more important than sports balance, but the press that sports programs still receives greatly helps hide the far uglier truths, which, of course, is the intention of the press emphasis.

Even though the US every year imports 750,000 foreign-educated students, mostly male, to attend its universities, today nearly twice as many American women as American men are ensured university educations in the United States; this arises mostly from enormous gender imbalances in pre-college public education throughout the country. For example, ten times as many girls as boys are participating in high school advanced placement programs, which are near guarantees to college admission and academic scholarships. Girls get admitted to college and receive scholarships at far greater rates than boys. Boys greatly outnumber girls in every single negative aspect of American public education, including drop-outs, suicides, drug use, arrests, sub-standard test scores, academic failure and expulsion. American boys have gone from the top of academic world class to the bottom -- in one single generation.

Regardless of the reasons, all such imbalances are blatant violations on the 1972 Civil Rights In Education Act - which mandates that government use the power of the purse to force gender balance in virtually every aspect of education as rapidly as humanly possible. There does not have to be any discussion of who or what is at fault; the only requirement is to achieve the mandated balance in the results.

Today the automatic response to boys' truly dismal school performance is to blame the victims, the boys, for failing in a system consciously constructed over the past three decades to greatly favor girls. This, of course, is the very definition of sexist bigotry banned by the 1972 law. When boys are forced out of sports programs, and thus lose their athletic scholarships, in order to achieve sports program balance with girls on college campuses having a 65-35 imbalance or greater in favor of women, we have reached the epitome of despicable sexist bigotry. Gender imbalance in education is today the greatest single civil rights shame in America.

Sports programs, which are not even mentioned in the law, are actually the very bottom priority, but "news" stories such as this one assist greatly in hiding the full truth about education from the American people. Such "women-as-eternal-victim" stories fall into lock step behind the propaganda now generated by every single school system in the nation, propaganda which mandates the exclusive use of gender-neutral terms like "students" and "children" in their reports in order to hide the shameful and illegal gender imbalances which now exist throughout the whole sexist American public education system. All this is intended to hide the fact that no school system in the country is now in compliance with the actual intent of the 1972 law, that under the law no such school system should be receiving even one cent of federal funding. The law bans discrimination by gender, regardles of whether the gender is male or female, and requires that boys get the exact same benefit from American education as do girls.

To waste money and time reporting on the truly insigificant aspect of sports programs in such a deplorable situation is totally asinine. And sexist.