5’9″ 235 Pounds

That’s what the star New Mexico athlete Carla Garett measured and weighed when she graduated from Santa Fe High. At a time when girls’ athletic teams received little or no attention and funding—changed now—she grew up as the daughter of a single mother who worked long hours to provide the funds for her daughter’s career and a grandmother who gave her a basketball when she was three years old.

“I was born twenty-five years too early,” she commented in a recent Santa Fe New Mexican interview. “I played most of the time in empty gyms or with just a few people watching. Everything is so different now. People really pay attention now.”

A multisport star in high school, a 10-time All-American track and field at the University of Arizona, she was a member of the U.S. team at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona who is grateful for the mentorship of Meg Stone, a 1984 Olympian in the discus who went on to become the first woman strength and conditioning coach for an NCAA Division 1 football program. Carla Barett is now a strength and conditioning coach herself at the University of Arizona.

Her mother, her grandmother and her coach must have been enormously influenced by the women’s movement of the 1990’s, allowing them to escape from their traditional roles as influencers preoccupied with a female child’s looks and heterosexual appeal. One of the great losses for individual girls and for our society at large as the women’s movement is largely eclipsed by the drum beating of war—as it always is—is that a girl now who looks as Carla Garrett did then would probably be shaped by older women who wanted her to lose weight and wear dresses. They would not have supported her realization when she played football with the boys in the scrappy parks of her neighborhood that “You can’t be a girl if you want to play with boys”—and it was playing with boys that taught her the skills and the toughness she needed.

Girls need to learn to play rough, a lesson we may be trying to forget today with our return as mothers and grandmothers to a relentless obsession with our female offsprings’ looks. Yet this has always been one of the more neglected truths of growing up female. I noticed in a Zoom meeting last week with some of the now-elderly women who were part of my 1954 class at Collegiate School in Louisville—then a small girls’ school that exposed me to the best all-women teachers I’ve ever known—that the ones I remember fiercely battling in field hockey games were the ones who have kept their brains intact. According to the old Southern dictate, “Horses sweat, men perspire and women glow”—but there is something about honest sweating that is essential to our success as women.

In New Mexico, Women Sports