Issue Date: May 7, 2006

In this article: The future of women's sports achievement

SPORTS

Sports

Higher, faster, richer

If the next 15 years of women's sports advances like the last 15, look out!

By Christine Brennan

Picture this: a 31-year-old Michelle Wie makes the cut in the Masters golf tournament. Women dunk on every college and pro women's basketball team and land quadruple jumps in every figure skating competition. U.S. women win gold medals in the new Olympic sports of skateboarding and golf. Women own and run teams in professional softball, soccer and lacrosse leagues. And a star from the 1999 Women's World Cup soccer team runs for president of the United States.

Outlandish? Hardly. All of this is possible in 15 years, experts say. In fact, if women's sports move at the breakneck pace they've seen for the past 15 years, it's not only possible, most of it is likely.

One of the nation's most remarkable cultural advances over the past few decades has been what has happened on American playing fields since Title IX, mandating equality for women in sports, became law in 1972.

Not only will more women be playing against men in sports such as golf 15 years from now, they'll be narrowing the time-record gap in events such as the triathlon, the marathon and distance cycling, predicts Donna Lopiano, chief executive officer of the Women's Sports Foundation.

You also can expect to see women and men competing together more often in coed relays in Olympic sports like speedskating, snowboard cross, even rowing. But it will be the eye-popping exclamation points that spur the most interest. The 300-yard drives Wie hits on the golf course, the triple axels figure skater Mao Asada lands and the dunks college hoopster Candace Parker makes will become commonplace among the next generation of girls. "For the NBA slam-dunk contest to include a woman is not that far-fetched," says NBA all-star Grant Hill, a fan of women's college and pro basketball, as well as tennis. "In the women's game, there will be someone dunking on every team."

Golf might see the fastest acceptance for women because Wie and Annika Sorenstam already have shown they can compete with men, encouraging waves of girls to enter the game and make similarly ferocious tee shots.

But amid the exuberance, there are cautionary notes. Female athletes have been suffering a disproportionate number of knee injuries, specifically ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) tears. Medical science needs to catch up with women's sports, says Rosemary Agostini, a sports medicine physician at Seattle's Virginia Mason Sports Medicine. "Girls are being injured more because, like boys, they're playing so many sports now. We need to solve the ACL issue in the next 15 years."

By 2021, several generations of girls will have been raised to see sports as a birthright, and they likely will want to buy tickets to women's sports, creating a trickle-up effect in women's leagues.

"As women get into more leadership positions in corporate America and as the overall marketing of sports to women improves, the number of women who own and operate sports teams will increase," says tennis legend Billie Jean King.

"I definitely think a woman who played sports will be our best bet for president one day," says former U.S. soccer team captain Julie Foudy.

King foresees that that woman could be Foudy, now 35 and the founder of the Julie Foudy Sports Leadership Academy. "There's a reason that 80% of women executives participated in one or more competitive sports during their lives," King says, "and many of them, like Julie Foudy, have what it takes to lead our nation."

Foudy says she's honored and, if nominated, would be happy to consider the idea.

Sportswriter Christine Brennan's latest book, "Best Seat in the House: A Father, a Daughter, a Journey Through Sports" (Lisa Drew Books/Scribner, $26), is due out this week.

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