Coos News

When youth tennis player Caitlin Arnold hit eighth grade, competition stopped feeling like a thrill and started to feel like a trap. “I was going into high school and wanted to try other things,” she said. “The whole experience had become overwhelming, and it felt like all I did was play tennis competitively.” In high school, she finally sampled new lanes, soccer, and track and field, discovering the variety she’d missed. She loved those seasons, but she didn’t keep competing in college. 

NCAA data show women account for about 43% of all student-athletes across divisions, indicating persistent underrepresentation relative to men’s participation. By exploring the NCAA’s participation dashboards, you’ll see steady growth for women. Men’s opportunities have grown slightly faster over the past two decades, with about 73,000 new men’s participation opportunities vs. around 67,000 for women from 2002 to 2020. The NCAA’s Sports Sponsorship & Participation reports trace these trends sport-by-sport and year-by-year, making the participation gap easy to visualize over time.

Caitlin’s pivot is a personal snapshot of a broader trend: girls and women face social, cultural, structural, and psychological barriers that depress participation and narrow pathways to keep playing. National research shows girls drop out of sports at roughly twice the rate of boys by age 14, driven by costs, confidence gaps, body-image pressures, and fewer visible opportunities to advance.

“If You Can See It, You Can Be It.”

For Heather Weber, Southwestern Oregon Community College women’s basketball coach and Chair of the Southern Region for the Northwest Athletic Conference, representation drives retention. “I’m one that for sure believes in if you can see it, you can be it,” she said. “I’ve had good leaders as males and females to support me in areas that aren’t typically seeing a lot of female participation… As a female official, I started to see and recognize a lot of things that were not equal. For instance, even just having a locker room to change in was rare. So definitely, I think it’s across all levels and I think there’s a big difference, if you can see her, you can be her. I believe in that push a lot.”

Weber’s path highlights the pipeline problem. “I wanted to be a college basketball coach… I don’t think you see a lot of young females interested in that anymore. Even myself, when I took six years off and officiated, I was the only female out of 62 officials in our region. That in itself shows we need more support and opportunity,” she said. 

Caitlin had similar experiences as a young athlete: “I only had one female tennis instructor from age five to fourteen, and when I would go to tennis camps, there were more male tennis players than female.” 

Weber also points to compensation and culture. “The pay has to increase to continue to excite people about this position. For females, they want to know what the opportunity is and how it helps them grow in life. Putting some money behind that so people stay, and don’t just do it for a short period, is important.”

Support and empowerment can go a long way. Weber believes that, “it’s not just females getting behind female sports. It’s not just males who support females getting behind female sports. It’s everybody.” In the digital media age, finding ways to throw negativity on positive moments is easier than ever. Making sure you have the right support around you and finding ways to shut out the negativity is key. Weber remarked, “Sue Bird getting a statue today, I’m sure you could go and do a comment thread and find just negativity. So, you know, that doesn’t help. So trying to find the right people who are going to support it in the right way.”

You can learn more about Sue Bird and her many accomplishments that led to he well deserved bronze statue by clicking here. To hear more from Coach Weber listen to her full conversation about the state of women’s sports on the Coos News Podcast.