Games Girls Play: Understanding and Guiding Young Female Athletes

Wish we read this when our high school athletes were in elementary, middle-school. Advice applies to parenting girls as well! Great!!

If you are a parent of a daughter beginning her journey in soccer (or, any other sport) - this book is a must! AND, don't be afraid to buy one for your daughter's coach. It's well written with points of particular interest outlined in each chapter. My daughter even enjoyed reading it with me.

This is a fantastic book for coaches & parents of female athletes who participate in individual sports! It is particularly helpful when dealing with teen girls! Would recommend this book to all who want to see their athlete succeed & work through this emotional period in their life.

This book is a great resource. The author clearly demonstrates the necessity for promoting sports programs in public schools for girls.

Highly recommend!

Very concise and clearly written book to help parents and coaches understand and motivate children in sports. As another reviewer mentioned, though it is written for girls it can be applied to boys also. And though skating is mentioned, it applies to all competitive sports. It helps to open communication with the child and the coach. It doesn't shy away from the dark aspects. Parents should read the chapters dealing (very well) with abuse and eating disorders before just handing the book to their child.Its drawback is that it does not provide a detailed blueprint of how to help your child. It has good concepts and a few charts and exercises, which were very useful, but I would have preferred a more specific set of steps. Overall, however, it covered a very extensive subject in enough detail to help a parent understand and overcome some of the pressures that children encounter in sports today.

This book is the best I've ever read on the subject of young female athletes; Silby and Smith have a complete understanding of the challenges faced by girls who are involved in athletics, and the book gives example after example of how a young female athlete can cope with various critical issues. As the step-father of a female high-school athlete whose team won the Maryland soccer championship, I can attest to how valuable the book has been to her.Silby knows her stuff, and Smith's prose is clear, concise, and always on the mark. Interestingly, Smith is also the co-author of the book, "Just Give me the Damn Ball," written with football-star Keyshawn Johnson.If you've got a daughter involved in athletics, this is the book for her (and you'll find it useful, too). I can't recommend the book more highly--it's great.

I have coached club volleyball for six years and have been a club director for three years, a lot of the lessons that Dr. Silby presents are pretty lessons that I have learned over the years through sheer hard lessons. I wish that I had this book to reference when I first started to coach young women.Dr. Silby's book has been less a revelation but a reinforcement of what I had learned these last few years. This is not to say that I learned nothing from the book, on the contrary, I feel like I have gained important nuanceson communicating with young women and allowing them to tell me how I can help them get better and stronger both physically and mentally. An invaluable book indeed.The only slight problem is that the book is geared toward the coaches of both individual sports and team sports, so not all the lessons are applicable completely.I would recommend this book for anyone who coach, or are looking to coach. The lessons embodied in the book will make the road to success in coaching much smoother.