A former Stanford and women’s professional basketball player, Mariah Burton Nelson is a popular author and motivational speaker. Among her favorite topics are the benefits—physical, psychological, and social—to be gained from participating in sports. She’s written five books, including We Are All Athletes: Bringing Courage, Confidence, and Peak Performance into our Everyday Lives (Dare Press, 2003), in which she applies the lessons of sports to the rest of life. Daughters interviewed her in her home outside Washington, D.C.

Why should girls do sports?
We are intellectual, emotional, and spiritual beings, but fundamentally we are physical beings. When we experience something with our bodies, we experience it in a deep and enduring way. Sports participation requires girls to use their bodies to pursue specific goals, to work closely with others, to think on their feet, and to assume leadership roles. All of these activities help develop discipline, teamwork, leadership, and a healthy sense of how and when to compete.

Team sports teach you to rely on other people, including people who are different, distasteful, more skilled, or less skilled. Through team sports you learn how fun it can be to work with others to achieve your goals. You learn to celebrate success, sharing the credit. You share disappointments, consoling each other. You reveal your strengths and weaknesses to other people, and learn about theirs. It’s intimate and rewarding in ways that can lead to lifelong friendships.

I remain friends with girls I swam with on teams when I was 6 years old. I’m still friends with girls I played field hockey, basketball, and lacrosse with in junior high. I’ve been naked with these people— both literally, in locker rooms, but more importantly, figuratively. We’ve exposed to each other our deep ambitions, our best efforts, our physical and emotional pain and joy.

Individual sports teach you to rely on your own inner resources. You learn in a visceral way that it’s all up to you. This is extremely valuable later in life. At the same time, most individual sports take place in a team context, so you can share the sports experience with others as well.

As a 47-year-old with damaged knees, I play individual sports now: swimming, weightlifting, and golf. I love all of those activities. But my favorite sports are the team sports in which the process becomes dance—like basketball, where you never really know what’s going to happen at the other end of the floor. In basketball, you run down court with plans and expectations but also a wonderful sense of anticipation and improvisation, because anything could happen. Individual sports (and team sports based on strength) don’t offer quite that same sense of GAME.

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