Prep AD's Nonprofit Introduces Youth Girls to Sports

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It started with a conversation with a kindergartner — his kindergartner. Chris Livatino, the athletic director at Evanston (Ill.) Township High School, asked his daughter if she played sports during recess. Her response: "No. 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. 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. 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. 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.

Can you describe those early conversations among the cofounders?
We sort of brainstormed this idea that it would be pretty cool if we could try to figure out ways to introduce girls to more sports before they got to middle school and especially high school. Because a lot of times, at least in our community, if you play basketball or soccer, that's your introduction to sports for girls. Maybe gymnastics, and maybe you could come up with one or two more. But for the most part those are the two sports you start out with, and if you're not successful in either one of them, you feel like you're not an athlete, or you feel "less than," and so you just sort of resign yourself that you're not going to play sports anymore. And we wanted them to realize that there's badminton, there's tennis, there's water polo, there's cross country. There are so many other sports out there, and we just wanted to introduce them to all of those.

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