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Sports can teach girls confidence, resilience, teamwork, and leadership. But what else might they be learning along the way?

In this thought-provoking episode of How Long ’Til Bedtime?, Allison shares an essay she originally wrote after reflecting on her own experiences as a parent on the sidelines of youth sports. She asks a bigger question: Are the sports our daughters participate in actually preparing them to become strong leaders, or are we sometimes teaching them to tolerate bad behavior from people in positions of power?

Allison shares a pattern she has witnessed in youth sports: coaches behaving inappropriately toward young players or officials, parents recognizing that the behavior is unacceptable, and yet everyone continuing to participate because of the fear that speaking up could hurt a child’s opportunity to advance. She reflects on her own experience navigating this dynamic with her daughter and the uncomfortable lesson her actions could have inadvertently communicated.

The conversation also challenges the idea that tolerating inappropriate behavior is simply part of building resilience. Allison makes an important distinction between the difficult experiences she absolutely wants her daughters to learn to handle – competition, disappointment, hard feedback, and working toward a goal – and learning that someone in power can behave badly and that the safest response is to tolerate it.

Drawing on her own experiences as a competitive soccer player, coach, parent, and woman who has worked in predominantly male professional environments, Allison explains why being demanding and being inappropriate are not the same thing. Girls don’t need softer expectations; they need adults who can hold high standards while modeling self-control, respect, accountability, and good leadership.

Allison also shares her experience coaching her daughter’s middle school soccer team, where she held players to high expectations while emphasizing that experienced players should help newer teammates improve and feel included. For her, that combination of intensity and decency is one of the most valuable lessons sports can teach.

Ultimately, this episode is about much more than soccer. It’s about the messages our daughters absorb from the adults around them about leadership, power, accountability, fair treatment, and what they should, and shouldn’t, have to tolerate from someone in authority.

In This Episode:
— What sports can teach girls about confidence, resilience, and leadership
— The unintended lessons girls can learn from poor coaching
— Why tolerating inappropriate behavior isn’t the same as building resilience
— The difficult decision parents face when speaking up could affect their child’s opportunities
— Why being a tough coach and being an inappropriate coach are two very different things
— What good leadership looks like in youth sports
— Why intensity and decency can and should coexist
— How parents and coaches model leadership for young girls
— What youth sports can teach girls about power and accountability
— Why the lessons our daughters learn on the field can follow them into adulthood

Chapter Markers:
00:00 The power of tidying your space and productivity
02:21 The statistic linking girls in sports to success in the C-suite
04:24 Parents’ reactions to coach misconduct and the cycle of tolerance
07:20 The analogy of workplace behavior and youth sports
09:41 The importance of equal standards for coaching boys and girls
12:08 The systemic issues of gender and authority in sports and work
14:07 The risk of teaching girls to tolerate bad behavior
14:34 The importance of standing up against misconduct
15:28 The role of adults in shaping girls’ understanding of leadership
15:53 Closing thoughts and the importance of advocacy in sports

Join the conversation! Read Allison’s essay on LinkedIn and share your thoughts.

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Scroll down for a full transcript of this episode.

257. What Are Sports Really Teaching Our Daughters?
Allison Egidi: Before I dive in, I just want to talk about the power of tidying a space. So my office had become the catch-all for all things that didn’t have a home or things that needed to be saved or taken care of. And it was building up everywhere. It was building up on my coffee table. It was building up on the sides of my desk. It was building up on the chair in the room.

And then this morning I had a weird 30-40-minute window before I was expecting someone, and I was thinking about how my space was very overwhelming and I need to be productive. And I decided to use that time to organize my office, and I cleared everything out, I dusted, I vacuumed, I even pruned some of my house plants that I have in here, and I just put everything back in order, and I’ve had the most productive day.

Now, I still have to go through all of this stuff that I moved out of the room. There’s a bunch of stuff now in the foyer that does not belong in my office that all will need to find a new home. But I just want to talk about the great feeling I have of being back into a tidy space. And so if you have a cluttered space where you need to spend a lot of time and you can tell it’s cluttering your brain, take this as your sign to take 30 minutes to clean that space.

Okay, now on to today’s episode. Today’s episode is a little bit different. I am actually going to read a piece that I wrote out of a lot of frustration and deep reflection that I was having recently, and I felt like I was not communicating my concerns really well with the soccer organization or the other parents I was talking to. And so I decided to sit down and try to put it into words. And then I published it on my LinkedIn page. And it’s gotten a lot of great feedback, and I thought I’m going to go ahead and read it to all of you. I will also share the link in the show notes if you just want to go read it yourself. But that’s what today’s episode is going to be about. And the title of the piece that I wrote is What Are Sports Really Teaching Our Daughters? So if you have children who are in sports or you’re hoping to get into sports at some point, this episode is for you, and I would love to hear your thoughts.

And what are sports really teaching our daughters? The lessons girls learn about leadership, power, and what they should and shouldn’t tolerate. 94% of women in the C-suite played sports. People like to quote this statistic as evidence that sports set our daughters up for professional success. And I believe sports can absolutely do that. But simply putting girls in competitive sports isn’t enough. Because while sports can teach confidence, resilience, teamwork, and leadership, they can also teach girls something far less useful. That if the person in power behaves badly, your job is to tolerate it, keep your head down, and protect your place on the team.

I’ve spent years on the sidelines of youth sports as a parent, and every year I’ve become increasingly concerned by the behavior of some of the coaches, and maybe equally disturbed by how many parents sit on the sidelines accepting it.

Here is the pattern, and if you have spent any time around youth sports, you’ve likely seen your own version of it. A coach, usually a man, though I’ve watched women do it too, loses control. He belittles 11 and 12-year-old girls, repeatedly drops F bombs, and yells at referees until he gets a red card or a technical. The parents grumble on the sidelines about how out of line the coach is. The girls complain to their parents. The parents tell their daughters the behavior is inappropriate. And then they send their daughters back to practice the very next day.

I know this because last year I was one of those parents. I told my daughter repeatedly that her coach’s behavior was unacceptable. When it got bad enough that I wanted to raise it with her other coach or the organization, she asked me not to. She was worried that there would be repercussions. She had a goal of making a higher team the following year, and she was afraid that if I spoke up, it could hurt her at the tryouts. I thought she had a fair concern. And against my better judgment, I agreed to wait.

As I watched the coach’s behavior get worse over the final months of the season, I eventually realized something much more uncomfortable. I was part of the problem. Without intending to, I was teaching my daughter two lessons at once. With my words, I was telling her that the behavior was unacceptable. With my actions, I was telling her that when someone in power behaves unacceptably, sometimes the safest thing to do is tolerate it so you don’t jeopardize your opportunity to advance. And once I saw it that way, I couldn’t stop thinking about whether I was inadvertently teaching her how to tolerate that same dynamic in the workplace someday.

Imagine a manager who watches a senior colleague treat one of their direct reports poorly, belittling her, behaving in a completely dysregulated way at work, generally making the environment miserable for her. The manager privately tells the employee the behavior is inappropriate, but doesn’t actually do anything about it. The employee, worried that speaking up could lead to retaliation or cost her a promotion, asks the manager not to make waves, and the manager agrees.

In a workplace, we’d recognize this for what it is: a failure of leadership and a system quietly protecting the wrong person. In youth sports, we too often call it building resilience. But is it? Resilience is losing an important game and coming back to practice. It’s working hard for a starting position you might not get. It’s receiving difficult feedback, fixing your mistakes, competing under pressure, and persevering through disappointment. Those are lessons I absolutely want my daughters to learn. Learning to quietly absorb inappropriate behavior from someone who controls your opportunity isn’t resilience. It’s learning that sometimes tolerating bad behavior is the price you pay to advance.

Before I go further, some context matters. I played competitive soccer throughout my youth, captained my high school soccer team, played elite travel soccer, and even played on a varsity boys high school football team in the 90s before it was common to see girls doing that. I later spent seven years in investment banking in a predominantly male group and seven years as the only woman on the board of a publicly traded company. I have spent real time in men’s locker rooms and men’s boardrooms. I am comfortable with toughness, directness, competition, and male leadership. And I know the difference between being demanding and being inappropriate.

That’s an important distinction because I can already hear one response to this argument. Are we really going to make coaches afraid to be tough on girls? Absolutely not. This isn’t a case for coaching girls with a gentler hand or treating them as though they’re more fragile than boys. I’ve coached both middle school boys and girls, and I’ve coached them with the same expectations, directness, and intensity, all while behaving like a regulated adult who knows how to communicate. The standard doesn’t change based on gender. A coach can be demanding, competitive, and genuinely decent to their players and to everyone else involved in the game. I know because I’ve played for this type of coach, and so have my daughters. And that’s exactly how I coach.

Most recently I coached my daughter’s middle school soccer team, which included experienced travel players alongside girls with little or no soccer experience. I held them to a high standard. They also knew that I really like to win. But one of my biggest expectations had nothing to do with winning. The experienced girls were expected to help the newer players improve, to guide them, encourage them, and bring them into the game rather than simply play around them. Every girl was expected to compete hard while building up her teammates.

By the end of our undefeated season, 14 of the 18 girls on the roster had scored a goal. I was proud of the wins, but I was much prouder of that. Because those are the skills I think will help these girls thrive long after they stop playing soccer. Intensity and decency are not mutually exclusive. And sports don’t automatically teach girls good leadership. They teach girls whatever kind of leadership the adults around them model, and whatever kind of leadership the other adults allow.

Coaches hold real power over young girls at an age when they’re actively learning what leadership and accountability look like, how people in positions of authority are allowed to behave, and what they should and shouldn’t have to put up with. A coach who is fair, controlled, demanding, and accountable is teaching exactly the traits we celebrate when we talk about sports preparing girls for future leadership.

But a coach who is allowed to be verbally out of control while other adults see it and let it ride is teaching something entirely different. It’s teaching that the person in charge gets to be volatile, that the people below them need to absorb it, that everyone can know the behavior is wrong while no one actually does anything about it. And that raising your hand to say this isn’t okay, might cost you the opportunity that you’re working towards.

Women certainly don’t have a monopoly on good leadership, and men don’t have a monopoly on bad leadership. I’ve watched women coaches cross these same lines, and that can be equally damaging. But we also know that men continue to disproportionately occupy positions of authority in both youth sports and in corporate America. Many of our daughters will someday work for male bosses, compete with men for opportunities, and sit in rooms where most of the people with power to promote them are men. If sports are supposed to prepare girls for that reality, it can’t just be about teaching them to compete. Sports should also teach girls early and repeatedly what fair treatment from someone in power actually looks like and what they don’t have to tolerate. Because a girl’s sense of what’s normal from someone in charge starts getting built years before her first job.

Which brings me back to the uncomfortable question I think many parents, myself included, need to sit with. Are the teams our daughters play for setting them up to thrive professionally? Or are they setting them up to tolerate bad behavior from leadership as the price of staying on the team and getting the chance to advance? The hardest part is that standing up to someone in power sometimes does carry a cost. Our daughters already understand that. Mine certainly did. She was afraid speaking up could affect her opportunity to advance, and she may have been right.

But that’s exactly why our response matters. If we tell our daughters someone’s behavior is unacceptable, but also teach them that protecting their spot on the team matters more than addressing it, what lesson are they actually learning? Someday the team will be a company, the coach will be a boss, the tryout will be a promotion. And the fear that speaking up could jeopardize any opportunity will feel remarkably familiar.

Sports can absolutely be the leg up for girls that the statistics indicate they can be. But it can’t just be about helping our daughters make the team get the playing time, win the championship, or earn the scholarship. We also have to pay attention to who is coaching them and whether the adults around them are willing to act when someone crosses the line.

Our girls are watching us. They’re learning what leadership looks like, how people with power are allowed to behave, and what the adults around them are willing to tolerate. They’ll carry those notes with them long after they’ve left the field or the court.