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It�s a great movie, well put together, and not as in-your-face as many American movies these days. It also helped that the writer/director had been a guest lecturer when I was studying at the British Film Institute. She was very nice to me.

It also thrills me to no end that there is a hit movie out there about a female athlete. In these days of civil unrest and open hostility between neighbors, it helps to restore my faith in humanity.

The protagonist of the film is a girl soccer player who�s family doesn�t approve of her being an athlete. And while her life didn�t exactly mirror mine, the film did evoke a feeling of familiarity with me that hasn�t reared it�s head in years.

I�d never really realized until recently just how much playing sports shaped my life and the person I am today. From the day I was born, I was constantly on the move, had excellent hand-eye coordination, and was bigger than most other people my age. All contributing factors to the turn my life took down the road of athletics.

Let me firstly quantify where I�m going with this by saying that from the day Eve was snapped off of Adam�s rib and then misbehaved in the Garden of (I-don�t-think-that�s-how-it-really-happened) Eden, women have gotten the short end of the stick. I�m not saying this to go off on a tirade about how every bit of Title IX should be kept verbatim, or how the WNBA should be dissolved and it�s players melded into the NBA. Personally, while I think Title IX is a godsend to the women of this country and I�m grateful for it�s existence, I do think it could use some tweaking. And while I do think that it�s criminal what WNBA players are (or aren�t) paid, women�s and men�s basketball may share the same rules, but are vastly different games. (Women play with their heads, and men play with their� testosterone.) But lets face facts: there is an enormous double standard for women in almost every facet of our society, and the playing field between the sexes is anything but level.

My first tastes of this were on the kickball fields of elementary school playgrounds, and wholly dropped on my tongue when as the last girl on the Little League roster, I was kindly asked to go play Pigtail softball. The lines were blurred for me a bit in middle school when I would be picked over boys to play in pick-up games after lunch, but drawn clearly again in high school when I was automatically labeled a lesbian simply because I was more interested in playing sports after school than crimping my hair and calling boys.

When I was a kid, I lived sports. I played basketball, volleyball, softball, I was on the ski team and in the summers I�d go to week-long athletic camps. I excelled at anything ending in �ball.� Sports are what I was good at. They�re what I clung to. At times, they were all I had. Your adolescence are the years that shape your life the most, and my adolescent identity was as intertwined with sports as the earth is tethered to the sun. If someone had taken sports away from me, I would have disappeared, too; wobbling off balance with nothing left to ground me.

I�m lucky enough to also be blessed with at least a moderate level of intelligence and relative quick wit, but I don�t think I would have found them had it not been for the presence of sports in my life. My athletic ability and the opportunities I had to hone and practice them provided me with the confidence I needed to go look for other qualities in myself that weren�t abruptly apparent. I don�t know a single former teammate that isn�t a better person because she played a sport. It�s a statistical fact that girls who participate in sports are less likely to have a teen pregnancy or develop an eating disorder. Athletics were such a good thing for me, such a positive, ego affirming time in my life, I can�t help but want every little girl out there to experience them as I did.

Granted, sometimes it�s not an easy thing to do. Some women (and men) just don�t possess some of the qualities it takes to excel in athletics, and simply lacking a Y chromosome can still hurt your case.

Just last year I was talking to my old high school volleyball coach who was telling me that her varsity team had to spend three entire practices measuring and carefully laying tape down on the brand new high school gymnasium floor because it had only been painted for basketball. And of course, as was the case when I was playing as a Petoskey High School varsity Northmen, (yes, Northmen), practices were still held from 5:30 to 7:30pm because the boys junior varsity team got first dibs on the court. Girl athletes today still get half the equipment budget boys do, have to wear the same uniforms for twice as many years as the boys, and get a quarter of the community�s support. But the fact of the matter is, that�s the way the world is and I�m glad my first taste of it was on a court with a bunch of other bawdy, loud-mouthed chicks than in an office cubicle, wondering why my check wasn�t as big as a coworker�s.

On the bright side, things have been changing in the last twenty or thirty years, and chances are that they�ll continue to change for the better. Of course, women will always have to give birth and men will still only clean the house one out of every six times, but if more and more little girls out there pick up bats and then books, care less about what others think of them and more about the geometry of a backboard-hitting jump shot, their lives will likely improve as mine did, and I�ll be the first one out there cheering them on.

�Lesbian? I thought she was a Pisces.� �- Wedding Guest, Bend It Like Beckham