Today, more than 3.3 million U.S. girls play on high school sports teams. While this number still falls short of the number of the roughly 4.5 million boys who play, it represents a massive increase from 1972, when only 294,000 girls played on high school teams.
It may be common knowledge that girls’ sports took off after the passage of Title IX in 1972, but it may also come as a surprise to know that, riding a wave of feminist activism, girls’ interscholastic high school sports surged in popularity in the first decades of the twentieth century in the nation, and at Salinas High School.
Backlash against girls’ and women’s competitive physical activities in the late 1920s and early 1930s largely succeeded in eliminating interscholastic sports for nearly half a century. Instead, athletically inclined high school girls played mostly intramural sports that were governed by rules that severely limited competition, running, jumping and other vigorous bodily action. Once or twice a year, governed by the Girls’ Athletic Association, the girls of Salinas High School would gather with their counterparts from surrounding schools for a “Play Day” of limited sports, dance, theatrical performances and picnics. Though Salinas High’s student population was overwhelmingly white during the middle decades of the twentieth century, girls of color—especially Asian American girls—made up a disproportionate number of girls participating in the G.A.A.
As readers of The High School will see, the twenty-first century boom in girls’ high school sports is reflected in their increasingly respectful and celebratory coverage in the annual yearbooks. But several remaining “paradoxes of progress” raise questions about the current and future place of girls’ sports in campus life.