GoHeels Exclusive: UNC Women Share Sports With Young Tar Heels

By Pat James, GoHeels.com

A former member of the North Carolina women's basketball and track and field teams, Jackie Myers received plenty of exposure to the sports available at UNC as a student-athlete.

There's still a few more years until Myers' 4- and 6-year-old daughters potentially follow in her footsteps. But on Sunday, they joined hundreds of other girls and boys at Fetzer Gym, where Tar Heel student-athletes from 14 women's teams taught kids about their sports as part of the Carolina Athletics celebration of National Girls and Women in Sports Day (NGWSD).

"There are so many sports that my girls have never seen before and certainly have never gotten to try," Myers said. "They're super excited to see all the athletes, and all the athletes are really superheroes."

For a chaotic 90 minutes, members of the women's basketball, cross country, fencing, field hockey, golf, gymnastics, lacrosse, rowing, soccer, softball, swimming and diving, track and field, and volleyball teams demonstrated various aspects of their sports at individual stations set up around the two gyms. (The only Carolina team unable to participate was tenis, which was preparing for a match against Princeton.)

A nurse practitioner at UNC Orthopedics, Myers encourages athletes not to specialize in one sport. She said she hopes the children who attended Sunday's event are compelled to try out many of the sports they learned about.

"It just gives you good variety," Myers said. "You don't get bored with things, you don't get burned out and you're less prone to injury. I think it's great just to have the experience of getting to even see all these things and know what's available."

Perhaps the sport that attendees knew the least about before Sunday was rowing. But no team's station was more popular.

Although on dry land, members of the rowing team still taught children about their sport by showing them how to use their rowing machines, known as ergs or ergometers. Sarah Haney, the Tar Heels' head rowing coach, said her team brought even more ergs to the event than it did the previous year. Haney also brought her two children.

"Our team loves to do it and I know this is something all the other teams look forward to doing because if you're playing at the collegiate level, you're very passionate about your sport," Haney said. "And if you're passionate about your sport, you just want to show that to other people.

"So, it's fun for me to see my kids get involved and it's also fun for me to see my team show their love for the sport to other people."

The chance to show her love for field hockey is part of the reason why senior Malin Evert has attended UNC's celebration of NGWSD each year. She said she's also enjoyed watching the number of attendees increase each year.

"It's just great to see how girls keep coming back for this and try out all the different sports and really fall in love with all the sports and actually start playing them," Evert said. "It's great we can give them the opportunity to try all the sports that we offer here at UNC.

In some ways, this year's NGWSD was even more special for Evert.

Not only did she help organize the event for the first time, but she and her teammates watched children and their families take photos with the national championship trophy the field hockey team captured in November.

"I remember from different events every year we always had the trophies of other teams and you could see who won NCAA championships in past years," Evert said. "And having our own trophy out there this year feels great."

Carolina Athletics would like to thank Docusource for their support of Carolina Athletics, Women's Basketball and National Girls and Women In Sports Day. Docusource—an award winning marketing and logistics company focusing on supporting all levels of communication for life science, technology, health care, academic and non-profit organizations

GoHeels Exclusive: UNC Women Share Sports With Young Tar Heels

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