Two courageous young women wrote independently to The Enterprise last week. Each of them are ninth-graders at Guilderland High School. Each of them are athletes on the school’s track team.

They wrote with specific questions about how they and the other girls on their team had been told to dress for track practice.

I reviewed the April 12 email that began, “Hi Girls Track Families.” The email started with sensible warm-weather advice, listing several bulleted points on the importance of athletes staying hydrated and another on bringing sunscreen to practices and meets.

The coaches were looking out for the health and comfort of their players, as they should, not just because they will perform better but because it’s the right thing to do, to value the whole person.

The next four bulleted points, “speaking of warm weather,” were on dress code.

“Athletes are not allowed to practice in only their sports bras because the school dress code states that students must ‘Ensure that underwear is covered by outer clothing,’” the email said. “Athletes can wear a running top that exposes their midriff, but it cannot be a sports bra. Sports bras must be covered by another article of clothing. Please understand that this is not a team policy, it’s a school policy that the administration is asking us to enforce.”

The two athletes who wrote to The Altamont Enterprise sent the same letters to the school board, which briefly discussed the matter at its May 23 meeting and decided that, in time, the matter of allowing sports bras, or not, would be taken up by the board’s policy committee.

When I read the girls’ letters, I was thrown back in time to my own young adulthood. As a new mother, nursing my first-born baby, I was shocked by the public reaction.

One of the biological functions of breasts after all is to produce milk, to nourish babies. My mother had nursed me, and everything I’d read anticipating motherhood led me to believe my milk was better for my baby than formula.

I know now, having recently stayed in the hospital when my own daughter gave birth, that new mothers are currently encouraged to nurse — given instruction and support. This was not my experience in the 1970s when bottle-feeding was pushed as more convenient and modern.

When I was out in public and my baby was hungry — say in a store or a restaurant or a park — I was accused of indecent exposure for nursing. I endured rude remarks from men and intrusive advice from women.

I would hide out in bathroom stalls or other uncomfortable places — often so uncomfortable that my milk wouldn’t flow.

New York was the first state in the nation to pass a law protecting a mother’s right to breastfeed in public — but that wasn’t until 1994.

It has taken our culture a long time to understand what many other cultures have long known — breasts are a natural part of a woman’s body, not objects to be hidden in shame, covered up as indecent or, in a still largely patriarchal society, considered provocative for boys and men.

I hesitated at first to publish the letters from the two young Guilderland athletes for fear they would get teased or worse by their peers. I knew one of the letter writers, Olivia Mair, well because her mother had been a reporter for our newspaper. As a child, Olivia had a desk in her mother’s office at the newspaper.

Even as a child, Olivia was a gifted artist and a clear thinker. I remember, for an elementary-school assignment where the class was to report on family heritage — often a child will report something like she knows of her Austrian heritage because her grandmother taught her to bake strudel — Olivia began her report by stating she was descended from both slaves and slaveholders.

I knew just a bit about the other letter writer, Angelica Sofia Parker, because her mother speaks up on important matters as a member of the school board, and we had written about her father who said his three daughters were proud when he self-published a book. I had interviewed her older sister, who independently pursued a college degree while her peers were in high school, and spoke warmly in a podcast about how supportive her family was.

Also, Angelica had volunteered to have her picture taken when COVID vaccines first became available for her age group, to encourage others.

Who was I to stand in the way of two strong and thoughtful young women who had something important to say?

What I liked about their letters is that they weren’t nasty or self-righteous; rather, they were contemplative and thought-provoking.

“In discussions of the dress code, people always talk about the need for girls to dress modestly so that boys are not distracted,” wrote Olivia.

She correctly concludes, “This problem should not be put on girls to solve.”

That reminded me of Golda Meir speaking at Wellesley College in the 1970s about the absurdity of a recommendation, because of nighttime assaults on women in Israel, that women observe a curfew for their own safety when it would make more sense to require the men to be indoors after dark since they were the perpetrators.

Olivia did her own research, talking to friends on boys’ teams who “agree the rule is absurd. They have stated sports bras aren’t even revealing and that they aren’t concerned with us and our practice because they are focused on their own.”

That made us think that the current generation of boys at Guilderland High School may be more evolved than the administrators referenced in the coach’s email.

Angelica, in her letter, pondered the difference between “cropped running tanks,” which are allowed, while sports bras are not. Her mother bought her an athletic crop top to compare.

Doing her own research, Angelica discovered that a crop top is the same length as all the sports bras she and her two sisters had but “the fabric on the sports bras is thicker and more supportive.”

Any woman active in sports before the so-called “jockbra” — a sort of jockstrap for breasts — was invented in 1977 can tell you that such support makes a huge difference in comfort and no doubt in winning sports performance in the long run.

Research by Joanna Wakefield-Scurr at the University of Portsmouth in England found that running in a poorly supportive bra shortened women’s stride by up to 4 centimeters — which could add up to an extra mile over the length of a marathon.

Beside pain from chafing and sagging, lack of a properly-fitted sports bra also made exercise feel harder for female athletes, and increased their upper body muscle activity, which could mean they feel tired sooner.

“If the breasts are well-supported you have a more natural breathing flow, particularly during physical activity, and you move more efficiently,” Wakefield-Scurr told Linda Geddes, science correspondent for The Guardian, for her 2021 story on how Great Britain’s female Olympic athletes had been fitted with individually designed sports bras to enhance their performance.

“So what really is the issue here?” is Angelica’s prescient question.

After I heard the May 23 presentation the district’s director for diversity, equity, and inclusion gave for the school board on a “cultural proficiency continuum” that Guilderland is using as a tool to judge progress, I thought the rule on sports bras sounded like cultural blindness — “See the difference; act like you don’t” — since girls have breasts that need support while boys don’t.

If the district were to act with the sought-after cultural proficiency — “See the difference; respond positively as an advocate for equity and inclusion” — sports bras would be allowed and even embraced.

Last year, at about the same time Albany High School was dealing with the highly publicized issue, I was pleased to do an interview with four Guilderland track-and-field athletes who were named All American. 

The girls shared their glowing love of their sport in an Enterprise podcast, and the mother of one of them sent in an equally glowing picture of the four athletes. I had assumed what they were wearing was the school uniform: black shorts and red cropped tops, midriffs exposed, in what looked like comfortable stretch fabric.

I had thought at the time that Guilderland was ahead of the game, already issuing uniforms that allowed female athletes to practice and compete comfortably. The tops looked similar to those worn by United States female runners competing in the Olympics.

But I found out from reading the letters from Angelica and Olivia that Guilderland’s uniform is a singlet, which offers no support for breasts, so of course the girls wear a sports bra underneath.

“On a particular day recently, when it was very hot out, we were told to put our shirts back on, and all of us tucked our shirts completely into our sports bras, because it was too hot otherwise,” Olivia writes. “This shows the exact same amount of skin a sports bra does, but for some reason it was acceptable, while a sports bra isn’t.”

Angelica writes, “If students and/or staff members are distracted or uncomfortable with a female student running in a sports bra, or a male student running shirtless, then isn’t really the onus on the person feeling distracted? Isn’t it also distracting currently for staff to try to assess whether a student is wearing a crop running top or a sports bra?”

I hope both track athletes and coaches are invited soon to a board policy committee meeting to share their views just as recently the board’s president said much was learned when volunteer firefighters came to the board’s business practices committee meeting to discuss a possible tax break.

The athletes and coaches are the people who are closest to this issue. The email sent to the girls’ families said, “Please understand that this is not a team policy, it’s a school policy that the administration is asking us to enforce.”

A school dress code that applies to a classroom should not be made a blanket rule for sports.

Our editorial originally ended with this: A simple solution may be worked out where the athletes can be issued uniforms, for both practice and competition, that allow them to stay cool and comfortable. Such a resolution would offer both physical and moral support — a winning combination.

A mother of one of the athletes pointed out that supportive uniforms would need to be individually fitted and also a single practice top would have to be washed daily.

More important than the practical drawbacks of expense and inconvenience is this philosophical stance: “I am not looking for them to change or issue what we wear for competing or practicing in,” Olivia said, “but rather the stigma behind girls practicing in sports bras and how it’s seen as distracting to boys.”

As Angelica succinctly put it: “Please give us a policy that gives us options, makes sense, and is fair.”

After all, this is a school program and one of the lessons young women should be learning is to be proud of their bodies. At the same time, one of the lessons young men should be learning — and it appears they may already have — is to be respectful.

The best way to teach these lessons is for school leaders to recognize — and codify — a girl’s need for support.

— Melissa Hale-Spencer, editor