ORLANDO - This year’s women’s college basketball final between South Carolina and Iowa was the most watched basketball game – men’s or women’s and college or professional – since 2019. The game averaged 18.7 million viewers and peaked at 24 million, according to Nielsen, making it the most watched women’s college basketball game on record since 1992.
With all that momentum, the expectation now is that more girls from around the globe will want to participate and engage in the sport.
That certainly appears to be happening on a local level, observed Thursday during the Orlando Magic and AdventHealth’s latest Her Time to Play all-girls youth basketball clinic held at the AdventHealth Training Center.
The 250-plus 11-to-17-year-old girls learned some of the fundamentals of the game from Community Ambassadors and former Magic players Nick Anderson and Bo Outlaw, as well as three female coaches from the National Basketball Academy.
“We are so excited with the growth of the college game – we’ve just all seen this boom happen over this month,” said Magic Executive Vice President of Marketing and Social Responsibility Shelly Wilkes, who in college played on the women’s volleyball team at the University of Central Florida. “It’s just so important for us as the Orlando Magic to continue to spread the joy of basketball and really those key leadership lessons that you learn as an athlete. So, we want girls to be playing as youth, but we (also) want them to continue playing. We are seeing dropout rates in that middle school age range. Events like today really keep people engaged (and) excited. It keeps our young female athletes wanting to play sports and really be a part of a team, and learning all those critical, valuable lessons that happen for the future of their lives.”
Her Time To Play is the WNBA’s initiative dedicated to championing change on behalf of girls and women and providing them with ways to connect, collaborate, and actively engage with basketball and one another. The program, created to inspire the next generation of girls to play basketball in a positive and healthy way, provides girls access to the Belonging in Basketball Resources, connects them with other girl-serving organizations, and keeps them up to date on development opportunities to help recruit and keep girls in the game.
There are 1.1 million fewer opportunities for girls to play sports than boys, according to the WNBA. In addition, 85 percent of surveyed women who played sports say the skills they developed playing were important to success in their professional careers.
It is also important for young girls to have female mentors in sports, their local communities and everyday lives. However, according to The Aspen Institute in 2020, only 25 percent of youth sports coaches are women. Her Time To Play aims to increase opportunities for women in coaching and athletic leadership across the youth sports landscape.
Recognizing how inequity in sports can impact young girls’ mental and emotional wellbeing, an AdventHealth for Children licensed mental health counselor kicked off the clinic with an activity about managing stressors and the importance of mental health. Removing the stigma around mental health and empowering Central Florida children and teens to care for their minds as well as their bodies is part of AdventHealth for Children’s recently launched Be a Mindleader movement.
“We are so proud of our partnership with AdventHealth. We’ve been partners for 35 years now and finding ways where we can really expand both of our goals and initiatives into the community is one of the reasons why partnerships work,” Wilkes said. “That’s just another piece of where we can get everybody’s mind right about mental health. That will also help them in school. It will help them in their futures. It will help them on the court as they play sports. So, ways where we can partner together around health and wellness is really the goal with AdventHealth in what we are doing here today.”
Thursday’s Her Time to Play clinic was the second one the Magic held recently. On March 22, also at the AdventHealth Training Center, Magic players Gary Harris, Caleb Houstan and Admiral Schofield attended to help assist with the basketball instruction.
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