Small Towns Produce More Female Athletes

March 5, 2009 -- When it comes to developing elite female athletes size makes a difference, a team of sports scientists has found.

Smaller towns and cities produce a disproportionate share of professional sportswomen, a recent paper published in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport shows.

The Australian-Canadian study looked at the place of birth of all American-born female athletes playing in the Ladies Professional Golf Association and the Women's United Soccer Association.

Using U.S. Census and the sports association data, they found that about 57 percent of all female American adolescents were born in cities with a population less than 500,000.

However, almost 85 percent of professional female golfers and about 80 percent of professional female soccer players were born in these less-dense communities.

The discrepancy was even greater as the size of the cities and towns grew smaller.

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While 26 percent of females were born in cities of less than 50,000 population, these same centers accounted for 38 percent of all professional female golfers and 40 percent of all professional female soccer players.

Co-author Bruce Abernethy, of the Institute of Human Performance at the University of Hong Kong, said the findings support their earlier work that found elite male athletes are also more likely to come from smaller towns and cities.

Abernethy, who is also attached to the University of Queensland's School of Human Movement Studies, said however place of birth is unlikely to be the critical factor in developing sports expertise.

Rather it is "a proxy for describing different types of developmental environments, experiences and opportunities."

Abernethy points to the virtuous circle created for talented sports people growing up in a small town.

"It is much easier to be the best 13-year-old hockey player if you are living in a town with a population in the thousands, then it is in Sydney or New York," he said.

"If you have early success it changes your self-concept -- you believe you have talent."

Abernethy said this belief is nurtured because the talented regional athlete is picked in all the representative teams and gets more attention from coaches.

Their success also encourages them to practice more, which enhances their skills.