Dirty Boots: Irregular Attempts at Critical Thinking and Border Crossing offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on the culture, politics, and general milieu of the 21st century.

About two weeks ago, I went to Tuscaloosa for the girls’ flag football state championship game, which was being played in Bryant-Denny Stadium. My daughter played quarterback for her school’s team, and they were one of the two teams there from a division that lumps 1A through 5A schools together. Her school is classified in 4A, and during the regular season, the team went undefeated against teams 5A and lower, with their only losses coming from 7A teams. The championship game was nailbiter, with the two teams trading touchdowns. A 12–12 tie at the end of the fourth quarter took the hard-fought game into overtime, and their opponents scored on a fourth-down play in sudden-death to win. It was a tough loss for us, but finishing the season as state runners-up ain’t too shabby.

What I saw in Bryant-Denny that day was remarkable to me for its celebration of girls by the sports community. The team was given all the amenities, including a police escort from their hotel to the stadium. There was also strong turnout to support them. The cluster of students cheering them on were predominantly boys, whole families showed up in school colors, alumni of the school came, and the band traveled to be there, too. It was a far cry from my experience in high school in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when hardly any of us – me included – paid much attention to girls’ sports. It was an even farther cry from my mother’s days as a three-sport high school athlete in Montgomery in the mid-1960s, when girls basketball was half-court because no one believed that they were physically capable of running up and down the court for a whole game. Back then, all girls’ games were played right after school, and their uniforms in every sport included a skirt since girls were not allowed to wear pants. When my mother and I discuss my daughter’s participation in sports, as well as my and my wife’s habitual attendance at her games and matches, she usually mentions that her parents never once came to see her play, not even in the years that she and her teammates won city championships. (There were no state championships for girls back then.) My mom was with us at the game in Bryant-Denny, and it must have been a marvel for her to see.

Perhaps I noticed these things at the flag football game because they were already on my mind. Earlier that week, I had been watching my usual evening news on PBS NewsHour and saw a story about how a few elite universities were addressing anti-Semitic acts on their campuses (related to the Israel-Gaza conflict). As the story was being introduced, they showed the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT, then the person leading the congressional committee— all women, white, Jewish, and black. I wasn’t shocked, I wasn’t surprised, but it did give me pause . . . in a good way. I hit rewind and watched again, thinking: The presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT are all women, and they’re testifying before Congress in a committee meeting led by a woman. Going back once again to the 1980s and ’90s, when I was young, girls and young women would have seen their dads watching the news, seen a congressional panel like this, and probably seen only white men, including in the gallery of spectators.  That night, I would have called my wife and my daughter in to see the story, too, but nobody else was home. They were out getting ready to travel for the big game.

Raising two kids who are active two-sport athletes has been odd for me. I tried a few sports as a kid myself – first tee ball and baseball, then tennis, and finally football – but was barely mediocre at any of them. (I found my place later among literature and the arts. That’s another story.) I’m as awkward a sports dad as has ever been, but there is one thing I’m certain of. I’m thankful that my son and my daughter have these opportunities. I’ll admit freely that boys’ football – one of my son’s two sports – dominates the scene and draws the biggest crowds. But other sports, ones played by boys and by girls, are taken seriously by the school’s administration, the athletic staff, the parents, the students, and the local news media. In soccer – my daughter’s other sport – the boys are there for the girls’ games and vice versa. When the school’s volleyball team won the state championship earlier this fall, they were regaled and honored. Their school doesn’t treat the female athletes and teams as second-rate.

This spring, my daughter will finish high school, and her mother and I will send her out into the world for college. She has worked hard and done well, both inside the classroom and outside of it. The world she’ll encounter isn’t fair, and it will sometimes be downright demeaning, which is why her mother and I have tried to show her in a variety of ways that she can face the adversity with dignity. All people face adversity, but girls and women have long been advised to yield to it, to give in, to take the subordinate position. Especially in conservative cultures like the South. That seems to be changing, even down here. We’ve raised our daughter to tolerate no such attitude that she should just smile and be pretty and agreeable. And athletics have been part of that education. She and her team might not have won that very last game, but what she got to experience in Tuscaloosa should augment an expectation that her hard work deserves respect. Frankly, seeing her get that lesson – that affirmation – means more to an awkwardly inadequate sports dad than any championship trophy.