More than two decades ago, the folks at Kartemquin Films spent several years following the lives of two young basketball players from Chicago. Their efforts resulted in Hoop Dreams, an acclaimed three-hour film now firmly lodged in the canon of sports documentaries.
Now Kartemquin, the nonprofit organization behind dozens of award-winning documentaries, is turning once again to an urban neighborhood for a film about sports and society. This time the focus is on the impact that Title IX, the federal law best known for swelling the nation’s sports teams with women, has had on inner-city girls.
The film, In the Game, is still in production and won’t be released for at least another year. Directed and produced by the longtime filmmaker Maria Finitzo, it traces three parallel stories about female athletes: an inner-city girls’ soccer team, a professional women’s basketball team, and a handful of teenage girls as they investigate gender-equity matters at Chicago’s public schools.
The story of the soccer players is set at Kelly High School, a public school in the working-class, mostly Hispanic neighborhood of McKinley Park, on Chicago’s southwest side. In many ways, it’s a tale of Title IX’s unfinished work: More than a few of the players at Kelly are new to the game. The school itself, hemmed in by two busy thoroughfares, doesn’t have a field, so the players jog laps through the school’s empty corridors and run drills in the gym. And practices are often held in the early morning, when the space is available.
But to the players, the haphazard nature of this team experience is still exhilarating. Elizabeth Moreno, the team’s captain, says in the film: “If I didn’t have soccer in my life—" she stops abruptly, with a gasp. “My breath just goes away, just the thought of it.”
Lost Opportunities
Title IX seeks to open up opportunities in education, but for the girls at Kelly and others like them, Ms. Finitzo says, that hasn’t necessarily been the case.
“You have a population of girls who desperately need that opportunity to go to college, and yet they’re not being given a tool that can get them a scholarship,” she said in a recent interview. “If there are no programs for you, if your high-school program isn’t very good, then you don’t have that opportunity.”
Despite gains elsewhere, girls in urban school districts still participate in sports at far lower rates than do their peers in suburban schools. Advocates say the gap has sobering implications not only for the students’ health—research has shown that girls who play sports are less likely to become obese or pregnant—but also for their chances of graduating on time and pursuing a college education.
Indeed, the racial and ethnic makeup of college rosters appears to reflect these deficits. NCAA statistics show that more than three-quarters of all female college athletes are white, and that African-American female athletes remain clustered largely in two sports—basketball and track and field.
As Deborah L. Brake, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, told The Chronicle last year, “Title IX did not introduce problems of racial inequality into our nation’s school system. The problem is, Title IX doesn’t do anything about it, either.”
The issue, though hardly a new one, has drawn attention of late: In November, the National Women’s Law Center, an advocacy group in Washington, filed administrative complaints with the Department of Education against a dozen school districts around the country, including Chicago Public Schools, citing double-digit gaps between the percentage of female students in the districts and the percentage of athletes who are female. (Chicago’s school system had the largest average gap—33 percentage points—among the 12 districts, according to the complaint.)
Dismal statistics aside, Ms. Finitzo says she was surprised at first to encounter such emotion among the Kelly players, given the limited resources of their program.
“I went looking for a sad story about lost opportunity, and what I found is a team of girls who have so much spirit and take what they’re given and run with it,” she says. “They’re not moping around that they don’t have a facility. It’s not about winning or losing. It’s about this experience of being on a team.”