By Michael Sadowski
Pocono Record Writer
February 21, 2010

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EAST STROUDSBURG — The moms watched their daughters and smiled — even though they might have been a little envious.

Nearly 100 of their young daughters were getting chances many of them never had to experience sports — some of them for the first time ever — at the second annual National Girls and Women in Sports Day at East Stroudsburg University on Saturday morning.

The girls, ages 7 to 12, were invited to a free clinic of sports overdose — five sports in two hours, set up at different stations in Koehler Fieldhouse. They received some very basic introductions to the sports from ESU's women players and coaches in field hockey, softball, track and field, basketball and soccer. Despite the basic nature of it — you can't teach much in 15-minute increments — the young girls already started picking up the sports.

"One girl just got the ball and started going," said field hockey instructor and ESU graduate assistant coach Katie Ritter, 25. "I said, 'Oh, so you've played before, right?' She said no, it was her first time. But you could never tell by how smooth she was."

Those are the girls the event is looking to find, the ones who may not have ever played a sport before or never had the opportunity to be exposed to it, but start enjoying it almost immediately.

It is the kind of chance some of the moms watching wish they had when they were younger, products of different generations where girls sports may not have been available to them until high school or even college.

"I'm jealous," Chris Nelson of Price Township admitted. "We didn't have days like this when I was growing up. We had field hockey and cheerleading. That's it, take your pick."

Nelson said her daughter Noel, 8, has played soccer and taken swimming lessons, but the Saturday tour de force of activity is the kind of thing that can help more girls be involved with sports.

Noel enjoyed it all, she said, while explaining how the softball station worked and why she liked it the best.

"It's just like baseball," she said with an ear-to-ear smile and enjoying the free post-event pizza. "You have a bat, and they put a ball on the tee, and you hit it into a net. I like to hit things."

Michelle Traub of Stroudsburg said her daughter Emily, 9, only gets to play organized soccer, so Saturday was a chance to try out some new sports.

"Maybe she'll find something she enjoys and wants to keep playing," she said. "It's easier than signing her up for something she doesn't want."

The event's instructors took the twinkling eyes and the long smiles as evidence that the young girls may carry on the tradition of women's sports.

"My mom played field hockey, my grandmother played field hockey, so that's how I got into it," ESU freshman field hockey player Karen Delle Donne, 19, said. "But a lot of other girls don't have that kind of interest. It's good to give that to them early."