Thursday nights at Academy USA mean basketball practice.
The loudest voices in the gym? One group of 15 girls between the ages of 14 and 17. They are the only girls in the room.
For the Los Angeles Select girls’ basketball team, this is not just a gym.
“I don’t see my home as my home anymore,” Celine Najarian, 14, said.
“It’s just basketball. Day and night, every day. I’m on the court.”
A study published last October by Dove and Nike found that one in two teenage girls drop out of sports. That’s twice as often as boys.
The leading cause: A lack of body confidence.
These girls in Glendale are the exception.
They call themselves a family, even if some have known each other for just a few weeks. They practice victory dances. They check hair and makeup.
“It’s a really good sisterhood and community,” Ava Nawrocki, 17, said.
Why do so many adolescent girls ditch sports?
According to the New York-based Women’s Sports Foundation, girls have 1.3 million fewer opportunities to play high school sports than boys do.
So if girls want to play basketball, it’s typically with the boys. And the boys don’t play the same.
“The boys would never really pass,” Elise Dermovsesian, 11, said. “They didn’t really care about girls’ basketball.”
Step one to keeping girls in sports: Give them a league of their own
L.A. Select does that with teams for girls aged six through 17.
Bad coaches, a lack of community and low confidence lead girls to quit. A study published two years ago by the Women in Sport (WIS) organization said about 68% of girls quit sports because they feel judged; 61% quit because they aren’t confident; and about three in four quit because they don’t like others watching them.
“I used to be the worst player on an all-boys team,” Sidney Besser, 10, said.
Sidney’s dad, Matt Besser, said they had trouble finding an all-girls team for her to play on. L.A. Select was the “unusual” exception.
“Now, I’m fitting in perfectly … on teams of girls,” Sidney said.
Step two: Give girls a reason to stay
“If their mother or female figures in their lives are active, that sets up a norm,” Meredith A. Whitley, a health sciences professor at Adelphi University, said. “It’s a pattern in their life … to be comfortable being active, to expect that you can go out and join a game.”
Allexa Valencia, 15, earned a spot on her Flintridge Sacred Heart Academy varsity team as a freshman.
Then, one week before the season opener last November, she tore her ACL.
The doctor said she would have nine to 12 months of recovery on the bench, or her college basketball dreams would stay just that: dreams.
For Valencia, the choice was a no-brainer.
Six months in, she said three things have kept her spirit up: The love from her team, the support from her coach and UConn’s Paige Bueckers.
Bueckers, a redshirt junior guard on the women’s basketball team, also tore her ACL, but one year before Valencia. After a year of recovery, Bueckers led the Huskies to the Final Four in this season’s March Madness.
“Seeing her growth and her progress after all that time not playing and all that time not being able to do what she loves — it inspires me,” Valencia said.
The recent spotlight on women’s sports did not just top viewership charts.
Among the girls aged nine to 17 across L.A. Select’s teams, almost everyone had a female role model.
“People like Caitlin Clark, Cameron Brink, Angel Reese, Paige Bueckers … I couldn’t imagine the effort I put into basketball without looking up to them,” Najarian said.
“JuJu Watkins … I want to be like her,” Averie Wiggins, 10, said.
But how does one combat the lack of body confidence leading girls away from sports?
Two girls, one 16 and one 11, said Caitlin Clark is why they’re in the game.
“She motivates me to go to practice,” Lucia Simon, 11, said.
“For her to push herself to get to that kind of stage and show her abilities more, it’s really inspirational,” Lara Kasbarian, 16, said. “It shows me, ‘This is what I want to do.’”
The National Youth Sports Strategy says girls who stay motivated are eight times more likely than their non-athlete friends to stay active when they turn 24.
Still, two in five girls say women’s sports just aren’t valued as much as men’s — even when 70% of girls in a sport “dream of reaching the top,” a September 2022 WIS study found.
Step three: Let girls dream big
Helping her players dream big comes easily to L.A. Select girls’ coach Alexa Mirzaian, who played high school ball herself.
“Juniors, sophomores, freshmen have even said to me, ‘Alexa, I want to play at the next level,’” Mirzaian said. “When a kid says that, that’s rare.”
“I always talk with her about going big, going pro, playing in college, maybe WNBA,” Valencia said.
When the court becomes a “home,” the team a “family” and the role model a woman like Mirzaian, Clark or Bueckers, it builds confidence in girls. Not just on the court, but off it, too.
For one 14-year-old, it brought real life lessons.
“Basketball makes me stronger more mentally than physically,” Maral Shahnazarian said. “Nothing comes for free. You have to work for it.”
Among other lessons: discipline, resilience and patience.
“Sometimes, when I don’t make shots, I feel bad about myself,” Sidney, a 10-year-old who dreams of the WNBA, said. “But I remember there’s always another chance, and it’s not the end of the world.”