They’re Pooling Their Power

It isn’t an easy thing for a girl to grow up to be a woman, not nearly as easy as it is for her to grow up to remain a girl. You can spend a lifetime in this world acting winsome and blaming your troubles on PMS and men. But womanhood--that takes guts.

Women don’t tend to walk around dwelling on such issues. (Or at least this woman doesn’t, except for once in labor, right before her epidural kicked in.) But we are in the stands at the local high school, and our teenager and her school chums are down there whupping their cross-town rivals, and cross-town whuppings have a way of bringing life lessons to mind.

The whupping on this day happens to be in a game of girls water polo, a quintessentially California kind of winter sport. Deceptively fun-looking, the game involves hurling a ball into the goal of your opponent while fending off attackers and treading water to the point of exhaustion in a pool. The bruising and dunking, the clawing and punching that go on under the churning surface are ruthless and perpetual. It is one of the roughest sports a kid can play, and in the past couple of years it has become one of the fastest growing sports among high school girls.

Two years ago, if you had asked us to name the activity in which our teenager was most likely to letter, this sport would have been last on the list. In fact, any sport would have surprised us. Her idea of a good workout was a little channel surfing, followed by a brisk trip to the mall. Then she started high school, and her father pushed her to get into sports and she found out that they were launching a girls water polo team. To humor him, she put her name on a list. From that moment on, her whole life changed.

*

Women’s sports has been in the spotlight this last couple of weeks, with names like Picabo Street and Cammi Granato providing inspiration in an otherwise ho-hum Olympic Games. But the dreams of Olympic gold that, in this country, have been fueled by legislation like Title IX are only half the story. The other half is in the smaller victories--such as the way the addition of just one more girls team to a high school roster can bring a shy adolescent into her own.

In a single season, thanks to that addition, our teenager dropped 20 pounds, became a juggernaut of drive and organization and learned how people act when they are part of a team. Learned how to compete, not with the manipulation and coyness that so many girls have been taught to fall back on, but with hard work and focus. Learned that girls can have guts. And that girls can have dreams.

Yeahhh! Get wet!

Heads up!

Get on her! Drive it!

The bleachers are packed. The crowd is going wild. At the top of the stands, someone is calming the top scorer’s dad, who has screamed so loudly at past games that the ref has had to tell him to pipe down. Down below, a beautiful freckle-faced girl whose team nickname is “Roach” is lunging for the ball in the face of an aggressive one-on-one defense. Underwater, the defender has pinched a particularly delicate hunk of Roach’s flesh and given it a vicious twist. Roach has lashed back with a brutal shove. The girl backs off and Roach throws her head back, catches the ball with one hand--and laughs.

It is that laugh that will stick in everyone’s minds the most, a laugh of invincible confidence. When the team recalls the face-off, no one will worry whether the pinch was fair, or whether the big bruise will show. They understand: There is pain. It goes with the territory. They are big girls. They can handle it.

“She’s, like, twisting it, and I’m, like, ‘Duuude! Kick back!’ ” Roach will recount afterward. And everyone will double over in hilarity. And then they’ll move on to the brilliant assist, the blocked goal, the Hail Mary score from half-tank. They understand this, too: There is glory. It, too, goes with the territory. And, as big girls, they can handle that as well.

*

There was a time when nothing in a teenage girl’s life would have told her that she was capable, that she could just handle it. A quarter-century or so ago, when Title IX was signed into law, mandating equal opportunity for girls and boys in education--including sports--the only life lesson for female athletes was that if they excelled in sports, they could quickly learn the meaning of the word “homophobia.”

Nice girls were supposed to be small and powerless or, at the very least, act that way. Pain and glory and all the rest of it--those things were supposed to be out of a teenage girl’s league. You can’t help but wonder how many women would be complaining today about sexual harassment and glass ceilings if they had been taught in girlhood to compete like grown-ups, to handle it. You can’t help but ask--without making too much of it--whether the world’s Monica Lewinskys would have been so unfortunately enamored of power if they’d known the personal power that comes with being a contributing member of a winning team.

And you can’t help but marvel at the power of these girls as they splash to victory with their high-fives and buff bodies and cheering sections of boyfriends in the stands. Here in the suburbs, or out there on the Olympic slopes of Nagano, there is something profoundly inspiring about a girl as it dawns on her that she isn’t small and powerless, doesn’t have to settle for shy. That she has guts. And womanhood. And dreams.

*

Shawn Hubler’s e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com