Watching the USA Women’s National team win the World Cup was awesome. Carli Lloyd, Alex Morgan, Abby Wambach and Hope Solo are now household names. But there is another, unsung hero of America’s rise to soccer power. It’s been around for years and it’s going to keep the United States atop the soccer world for the foreseeable future.
You’ve probably heard of this before, but you’ve never seen it actually on the pitch. It’s never scored a goal. It’s never made a save. But without it, women’s soccer in America probably would not be what it is today.
This mysterious entity is … Title IX.
Yes, the occasionally controversial rule that (in a nutshell) makes educational institutions provide as many chances for female students as male students, including in athletics, inadvertently started a movement that turned the USA in to the world’s per-eminent soccer force. I’m not just speculating here. There is hard evidence, and plenty of it.
Title IX was adopted in 1972 and had an athletics regulation added in 1975. Schools had until 1978 to be fully compliant. With more opportunities to get a college education, many of them through athletics, more and more young women started playing sports. The National Federation of State High School Associations has tracked participation levels since the 1970’s. Starting in the last half of the decade, the number of girls playing soccer started to skyrocket.
Exactly 13 years later the USA won the inaugural Women’s World Cup. That time frame is not coincidental. Once more girls had access to the game, they flocked to it and that first generation of Title IX athletes became champions. The 1991 Women’s World Cup didn’t make much of a splash state-side because the tournament was played in China and broadcast in the U.S. by the now-defunct Sportschannel America, which did not have nation-wide cable coverage. But it set up the unbelievable run of dominance Team USA still enjoys today (we’ve never finished worse than third in any of the seven Women’s World Cup tournaments).
In 1999 women’s soccer in the U.S. finally caught on. That team that won it on penalty kicks played all its games on American soil, with the final taking place in the Rose Bowl. It set TV ratings records and is still has the highest average attendance for the event with nearly 38,000 people in the stands for each game.
That team is often heralded as the reason women’s soccer is so popular in the United States. But, the data shows a SLOWING in the sport’s growth in the country.
From the late 1970’s to 1999, the number of girls playing high school soccer grew by nearly 225,000. From 1999 through today it’s only grown by about 125,000. Certainly nothing to sneeze at, and soccer is now the third-most popular high school sport for females (behind basketball and volleyball), but not the magnet to the game many believe it to be. Interestingly, during the last 16 years the real increases have been in other areas.
Lacrosse, hockey (both field and ice) and extreme sports like snowboarding and skiing have exploded with female participants. So you see it was not the 1999 team that made us soccer champions. That had already happened, several years before. Perhaps the real impact of the 1999 team was it inspired American girls to play sports … but not necessarily soccer.
Maybe those champions showed America’s youth they can do whatever they want to do. They can play lacrosse or jump on a half-pipe if they want to. Perhaps that will also be the legacy of the 2015 team. Only time will tell.
But one thing that I can guarantee is our standing as one of the best soccer nations on earth is in no way in jeopardy. Our sheer number of athletes will ensure that. At their last count (which took place in 2006), FIFA revealed there at about 1.6 million FIFA-registered female soccer players, of all ages, in America. That’s by far the largest participation number on earth. In fact, the seven countries we played en route to the World Cup title (Australia, Sweden, Nigeria, Colombia, China, Germany and Japan) COMBINED have 1,225,310 FIFA-registered female soccer players.
The U.S.A. will remain at or near the top of the pack for decades, and every four years we’ll be able to get together and root on a new group of women who got a chance to play because in the 1970’s people finally realized what became a popular social media hashtag this year:
#WeCanPlay
And in America, we can add another one:
#WeCanWin (and usually do)
