Karen Kelser, who runs one of the top soccer programs for young girls in Washington, DC, firmly believes that playing sports provides essential training, not for scholarship purposes, or for the Olympics, but for the real world. “It mirrors life as not much else does,” she says. “There aren’t that many other opportunities for girls to work as a team, to win, to lose, and to learn to get over failure, and to help each other get over failure.”
