Why Girls In Sports May Be More Likely To Lead, And How Coaches Help
What do Spanx founder Sara Blakey, former Deloitte CEO Cathy Engelbert, and former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi have in common? They all played sports growing up. In fact, 94% of women in the C-suite played sports, with 54% having played at the university level, according to research from EY’s Women Athletes Business Network. The same study finds that 80% of Fortune 500 female executives played sports as youth.
Sports are having a big moment, with the World Cup in full swing and the Knicks winning the NBA championship for the first time in more than 50 years shining a spotlight on “collective effervescence,” or the energy that happens when large groups of people come together to experience collective joy and belonging.
While watching sports can evoke a sense of a shared purpose, playing sports can also spark some unexpected benefits. For girls in particular, there may be a link between playing sports and stepping into leadership later in life.
Research from the Women’s Sports Foundation finds the longer a girl plays a sport, the more likely she is to hold a leadership role. Moreover, 67% of women believe they have carried the skills and lessons of sports into adulthood, including learning from their mistakes, handling pressure, and teamwork.
The Impact Of Coaches On Girls In Sport And Leadership Development
There is one particular type of leader that appears to have a big impact on whether girls want to play and stay in sports: The coach. Another study from the Women’s Sport Foundation finds that girls who like their coach are more likely to stick with it and also to say they love their sport. Coaches can be a tremendous influence for girls on and off the playing field, yet less than one third of the country’s six million coaches have been trained in youth development practices, finds the Aspen Institute’s State of Play 2020 report.
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If coaches are mentors for the future generation of leaders, putting a training framework in place could help systemize future success. That’s the mission behind the Million Coaches Challenge (MCC), an initiative supported by the Susan Crown Exchange that has trained more than one million coaches in youth development.
A lot of women learn skills such as resilience, the ability to take feedback, team building, and how to be a role model through sport—which are all skills required to be successful in the C-suite for both men and women, says Susan Crown, founder and chairman of the Susan Crown Exchange.
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“The issue is that many more girls than boys drop out of sports in early adolescence, but we also know that good coaching can be a factor in keeping girls engaged in sport and all the benefits it can provide,” says Crown. “Good coaching is not a one-way conversation; it's an iterative process. Good coaches diagnose before prescribing. Good coaches adjust themselves to the individual rather than expecting everyone to adapt to their model. They teach independence, not dependency. They make kids accountable without finger-pointing. I think above all, good coaches teach emotional intelligence—how to read the room, how to read the field, how to read the team—and they teach leadership, mostly by example. You can apply this to the C-suite, you can apply this to school, you can apply it to sports.”
Running and other sports teach life lessons such as overcoming obstacles, being disciplined about training, and taking recovery seriously.
Vanessa Garcia-Brito, vice president and chief impact officer at Nike, is an ultramarathoner who credits a coach with introducing her to running.
“I would have never thought of myself as a runner or that running was a sport for me, but a track coach at the new high school I went to said, ‘I really think you should try it,’” recalls Garcia-Brito. “Like the typical urban teenager, I had all the excuses why I couldn’t do it.”
Garcia-Brito says that when she said, ‘I can't get there in the morning,’ the coach broke down that barrier. When she said, ‘I have to work after school,’ he split up the training. When she said, ‘I'm not sure if I have the right clothing for it,’ he figured it out.
“He got rid of all of my excuses, and it was the best thing that happened to me,” says Garcia-Brito. “I started out doing cross-country and then the mile in track and field. One of the biggest lessons that has stayed with me has been: there's a sport for every season of your life. For example, I picked up ultra running a few years before the pandemic.”
Nike was founded on a relationship between an athlete and a coach 50 years ago, and Nike is a partner of MCC’s because they believe training coaches is key. “We often say, ‘A good coach can change a game, but a great coach can transform a life,’” she says.
Garcia-Brito says she thinks about life as a sport because it melds so many different pieces together, such as overcoming obstacles, being disciplined about training, and taking recovery seriously. “As grateful as I am to my body for all the things that it endures, it’s all about your mind,” she says. “You're not getting to that goal without the right mindset, without spending time building resilience, learning how to win and lose, and many other strengths or habits we need to tap into as a leader.”
The Benefits Of Training Coaches At Scale
Since MCC launched in 2021 to expand access to coach training grounded in youth development and related practices, MCC’s partners exceeded the one million goal by the end of 2025 to collectively train 1,173,354 coaches. Throughout the challenge, they partnered with The American Institutes for Research (AIR) to survey more than 13,800 coaches, one of the largest studies uncovering coaches’ perceptions of youth development–focused training.
The study, “Winning Beyond The Game,” found that 88% of coaches agreed that participating in training made them better coaches. Coaches also reported increased confidence in their role and responsibility as mentors, which in turn had an impact on the student athletes’ experience: 66% of coaches reported that athletes were experiencing more joy in their sport, 62% observed athletes developing stronger relationships with peers, and nearly 72% believed that training participation positively influenced athlete retention, making athletes more likely to continue participating in sport.
Girls On the Run, a national nonprofit program for 3rd through 8th graders centered on building confidence and life skills, requires all of their volunteer coaches to do the Girls on the Run national coach training program. Longitudinal studies of Girls On The Run participants show the impact of the coaches has been enormous.
One hundred percent of the Girls On the Run participants interviewed had vivid, positive memories of their coaches, says Elizabeth Kunz, CEO of Girls on the Run. “It was truly the coach who played a very positive role for them. The overarching themes the girls shared was that the coach made them feel emotionally safe, provided a welcoming environment, and focused on life lessons. They remembered their coaches as kind and encouraging and providing an inclusive environment. Roughly 96% of the alums interviewed said Girls on the Run was different from other sports or physical activities that they did in elementary school because of that inclusion of the life lessons and the curriculum.”
Kunz says that in the digital age, in-person connection and physical movement for children is more important than ever. Girls On The Run teams are anywhere from 8 to 15 in size to intentionally create a connection where it’s possible to listen and share in a trusting environment.
“Girls' participation in physical activity and sports often drops after elementary school, and one reason is that many traditional sports environments become more competitive or performance-focused,” says Kunz. “Many girls are looking for support, friendship, teamwork, and a space where they can stay active without pressure to be the strongest or fastest athlete. Girls On The Run is a way you can be active and moving and with your friends while developing team-building skills, regardless of your background.”
She says the coaches, as well as the community who show up at the girls’ 5k celebration at the end of the program, play a big part in that. “Seeing the look of accomplishment on the girls’ faces when they cross that finish line always makes me cry, even after 20 years of doing this work,” says Kunz. “It’s often a transformational moment in their lives that they remember forever. That sense of accomplishment they get, they just glow, and they're like, ‘Oh my gosh, if I can do this, what else can I accomplish?’”
The Need To Systemize What Good Coaching Looks Like
Coaching may be an under-recognized driver in shaping the environments where young people build confidence, communication skills, and a sense of belonging.
“We are one of the only countries that doesn't have a minister of sport, so everything is very decentralized and fragmented,” says Crown. “Only in the most elite sports are there networks for coaches and sports professionals to talk. For youth sports, no infrastructure really exists to support the coaches working every day with our kids.”
To help more children experience the benefits of quality coaching, MCC launched Empower Every Coach (EEC) in June 2026, a new national initiative designed to advance systems-level change across youth sports and help make quality coaching the norm. Their partners include the Ad Council, Center for Healing and Justice Through Sport, the National Recreation and Park Association, and many more.
Nike is a partner of MCC because the organization believes collaboration is essential for scaling training for coaches. “You're bringing in different types of organizations, locations, geographies, etc, and people really coming together to drive towards a shared goal,” says Garcia-Brito. “This is super important, because impact is a team sport. We're not going to achieve that scale on our own. We want to make sure that it's something that’s not only scalable, but also meaningful and sustainable. This gives everyone a shared language around what quality coaching is for youth sport.”
The research shows that training can shift how coaches show up day-to-day, and build stronger relationships for athletes beyond performance, which is critical for helping to keep girls in sport. “That relationship between an athlete and a coach can be a make-or-break experience for whether or not kids stay in sport, and, in some cases we’ve heard from the kids, may be the most reliable adult that they ever see on a regular basis,” says Garcia-Brito. “Whether a child comes back tomorrow, whether she sticks with it, whether she believes that she can or that she should, can really come down to a coach.”
On and off the field, the link between sports and leadership and professional success is emerging. “As we think about these girls growing up to go out in the world and to be leaders of their lives, good coaching and participating in sports is the foundation to make that possible to thrive and to activate their limitless potential,” says Kunz.
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