Take That!

Feel tentative about playing tough? Don't. To improve your skills, you've got to be competitive

Being competitive can help female athletes reach their goals. Peter Read Miller

By Jory Des Jardins

As a high school freshman I was a three-sport athlete. By my junior year I had quit sports and taken up dancing. "I'm a natural performer," I told friends. In truth, I was an uneasy competitor. When we were being trounced in a soccer match, my teammates would scream to rally the others. I would pass out lollipops during timeouts in hopes of sweetening what seemed to me a distasteful desire to kick the other team's butt. The idea of getting angry over losing was foreign to me. So was any compulsion to win.

"Many girls and women feel there's something inherently demeaning or destructive about defeating another person," says Carole Oglesby, a professor of physical education and sports psychology at Temple. "Women need to get rid of this notion. If you want to achieve to your potential, you must be challenged by a competent opponent."

Some women have no trouble confronting that challenge. Ila Borders, the first female to pitch and win in a men's professional league (she played last season for the Duluth-Superior Dukes), doesn't enjoy a game that isn't competitive and prefers playing against males because she finds men "more driven to win." Nor does she mind if opponents get cutthroat, as long as they're striving for their personal best. "If you're not competitive, you're going to get trampled," she says.

Five ways to toughten up Can competitiveness be learned? For sure -- here's how. Change the way you view competition: The purpose isn't to defeat others but to challenge yourself, so set goals. "When I'm on the block, I have a goal in mind that I want to reach," says Olympic gold medalist Amy Van Dyken. "If I get the win, that's great. But if I'm second or third and improve my time, that's still good." Because Van Dyken is asthmatic, it took her six years of goal setting to swim the length of a pool. "When I finished my first length, it was the greatest thing in the world," she says. "That's when I got the itch to compete." Build your skills: Competing is easier when you have confidence in your technique. Get extra coaching, ask teammates for tips and devote more time to practice. Try trivial pursuits: Worried you'll flub up under pressure? Author Mariah Burton Nelson suggests competing in "safe" endeavors -- like table tennis or Scrabble -- with family or friends. Play "with people who don't mind if you don't make all the right decisions," she says. Talk trash: "It puts pressure on the other person and lightens up the competitive atmosphere," says Nelson. Don't be afraid to express your competitive side off the field either: Nelson says that women tend to talk more about their failures than crow about their successes. Talking about competing -- and winning -- will help you learn to enjoy it. Learn when it is not appropriate to compete: After all, you don't need to spike a volleyball so hard it dents the ground during the family barbecue.

Allison Feaster of the WNBA's Los Angeles Sparks, a player who is known for her determination, considers her on-court intensity a sign of her confidence. "I am not too competitive," she says. "I just know that I can do anything."

Why do women like Borders, 24, and Feaster, 23, relish competition and others don't? One factor may be age: Changing times have given younger women a competitive edge. According to a survey conducted by former Stanford basketball player Mariah Burton Nelson for her book Embracing Victory: Life Lessons in Competition and Compassion (Avon Books, 1999), women who are competitive tend to have had more exposure to athletic competition. Today, more girls are playing organized sports. In 1971 one girl in 27 played high school sports; in '97 one girl in three did. Borders was playing competitively by age five. Feaster grew up shooting hoops with her brothers and got a spot on an all-boys team in fifth grade.

"Looking at the women I coach now, even compared to women I coached 10 years ago, it's like night and day," says Kathy Delaney-Smith, Feaster's coach at Harvard. "They're different athletes. They've been allowed to be confident."

Nevertheless, some women think competitiveness isn't nice, especially if it includes efforts to humiliate a rival. According to Nelson, "Women are less likely [than men] to hate or feel anger toward an opponent." But the lack of such feeling doesn't mean you're not competitive. If you have any desire to improve yourself -- in a sport or any personal realm like work or studies -- then you have the impulse to compete.

Yes, society still sends mixed messages about female competitiveness. Even women like Borders, who are hailed for their prowess, can be criticized for it. "I threw at the hitter once to back him off the plate," she says, "and the fans responded by saying I should be less aggressive. Sometimes they yell to me, 'Smile!' Are you going to tell a guy to do that?"

Olympic champion swimmer Amy Van Dyken, 26, says she pushed herself to get strong. "Some women say to me, 'You must feel weird for being so muscular,'" she says. "Well, no, I don't." Van Dyken, who lives in Littleton, Colo., says she spends much of her time with fellow Olympic athletes training in Colorado Springs and with members of the Denver Broncos "because I don't have to feel weird around them for being competitive or really muscular."

Whatever regrettable retro-think competitiveness inspires, the reality is that we can't excel without it. "To be highly successful," says Oglesby, "you must be unambiguous about your intention to win." That's true for both sexes.

 
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