Role Models
If young girls wanted to be professional athletes about forty years ago, the only people that they had to look up to were male athletes. There were not many professional female sports and the ones that did exist were not as widely known as the male sports. 
Today, there are many of sports for women to work at and most of those sports have to possibility of going to the Olympics. Young girls are finally able to have dreams of going to the Olympics one day with a team of other women that want the same thing they do; to win a gold medal and say they are just as good as the guys. Just taking one women’s team in account, the USA Softball national team won the gold medal just about every year that softball was played at the Olympics. Girls that want to play softball had that to look forward to. They were a legacy, and once they got into medal play they were serious about what they were doing. It is even getting so that there is supposed to be an equal number of male and female athletes at the 2012 Olympics.
Mia Hamm is a great example of a female role model. She was one of the best female soccer players in the United States, and possibly the world. Most girls just looked up to her for everything that she did for the sport, not for the fact that she was a soccer player. She is an excellent athlete and most girls would love to be like her some day, even if it is in a different sport, just be the best pl
ayer that they are able to be and make it as far as she did in her career.
Every sport has one person that young girls are able to look up to and idolize. Since each sport does have that option there are more young girls realizing that they can play sports and go somewhere with it if they work hard enough. Girls have to know that there is someone like them that worked hard in life to become a professional athlete. Once they figure that out then they can work hard to achieve the same thing. Role models do that for them.
'To find what you seek in the road of life, the best proverb of all is that which says: "Leave no stone unturned."' - Edward Bulwer Lytton
"Every artist was first an amateur." -Ralph Waldo Emerson