![]() It became way more fun for the kids - one. We put the power in our high school girls' hands, and so many different things happened. ![]() To that point in our evolution, we were still thinking coaches are the ones who were going to teach this stuff. So that next year we did clinics where we'd send two girls from one sport, two girls from another sport, to school A, and after school, the fourth- and fifth-grade girls could come and learn directly from our athletes. The kids had just a wetting of the whistle, just a sample platter, and we knew we needed to do a little bit more than that. At that first festival, we introduced the girls to each sport for about eight minutes each and then they rotated to the next sport. She figured out a way to create a nonprofit, and we went through that whole process that summer, and the next year we ran clinics at six grade schools. You guys have to come up with some more stuff than that." So the very next year we realized we needed to create an organization. The feedback we got from all the parents was, "This is really awesome, but one day? Come on. We were just kind of experimenting with it, and it was really successful. She's cool." We didn't know what we were doing. We would have A, B and C kids all there, and then we would send our high school athletes representing about 10 different sports who had graduated from that same school, because we wanted these girls to see the other girls and be like, "I want to be like her. Schools A, B and C feed into Middle School 1. So, we called our initial program the "Girls Play Sports Festival." We sent 10 of our female athletes from ETHS to each of the three big middle schools for an afternoon of sports with fifth-grade girls who would be attending that middle school the following year. We have to change the narrative that girls do play sports. I just remember our daughter saying, "Girls don't play sports." That was sort of a trigger moment. We just kept it "Girls Play Sports." We wanted to be really direct with the name. We wanted to try to see if we could try to change the narrative on that before they got to middle school so they already went into middle school wanting to be an athlete, thinking of themselves as being an athlete. They cared a lot more about their social circles and looking cool, and sports weren't a way to do that. ![]() But anecdotally with the kids that we encountered, we realized that for a lot of girls, as they got to middle school, sports weren't as cool as they were for boys. We read some articles, for sure, but we didn't do any real in-depth research. AB senior editor Paul Steinbach asked Livatino, who had previously coached boys' and girls' volleyball at ETHS, about the progress of GPS, now in its 10th year of existence. Livatino recognized that parent, Liz Brieva, as a "go-getter," and together with Megan they launched Girls Play Sports, a nonprofit organization dedicated to introducing young girls to a variety of sports through after-school clinics and weekend events. At the same time, the girls' basketball coach at ETHS was struggling to put together a freshman team, and another parent in the community was lamenting the lack of athletic participation opportunities for girls. The boys play soccer, and they told us girls don't play sports." Livatino and his wife Megan, a former Northwestern University volleyball player, looked at each other - incredulous. Chris Livatino, the athletic director at Evanston (Ill.) Township High School, asked his daughter if she played sports during recess. It started with a conversation with a kindergartner - his kindergartner.
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