Research & Advocacy
The gap is measurable.So is closing it.
Idaho does not have a girls’ sports data problem because the data is unknowable. It has one because nobody has been counting. The Taylor LEAD Foundation is building the evidence base — who plays, who leaves, who leads — and putting it in front of the people who can act on it.
Evidence → Advocacy → Access
Who gets to play
Youth sports participation, ages 6–17, by household income
CDC / National Center for Health Statistics, National Health Interview Survey, 2020
Our research agenda
Three questions we intend to answer about Idaho.
National research tells us the pipeline from first sport to lasting leadership is real. What it cannot tell us is where that pipeline breaks in Ada County, in Elmore County, in the Panhandle. Our agenda maps directly to the three stages we fund.
What does it actually cost an Idaho girl to play a season?
Registration, gear, travel, time off work for a parent. We are building the first line-item cost picture of youth sport participation across Idaho districts — the number families face, not the number listed on a flyer.
What keeps a girl in the game through ages 12–14?
The drop-off window is well documented nationally and almost entirely unmeasured here. We track season-over-season return rates, belonging, and stated intent to continue among the girls our grants and camps reach.
Where do Idaho’s athlete-leaders end up?
Eleven years of scholarship recipients are now in college, in graduate programs, and in the workforce. Longitudinal follow-up with that cohort is the closest thing Idaho has to a natural experiment on sport and leadership attainment.
The evidence base
What the national data already establishes.
We did not invent this case. We are applying it. Below is the research that underwrites every grant we make, every camp we scholarship, and every conversation we have with a funder or a legislator.
Income predicts opportunity more reliably than interest does.
Just over half of American children play organized sport. Break that number apart by household income and the average dissolves: a child in the highest income band is more than twice as likely to play as a child in the lowest.
FPL = federal poverty level. In this federal survey the 4.1-point difference between girls and boys was not statistically significant. The 39-point difference between income bands was. Source: CDC/NCHS, National Health Interview Survey, 2020.
Girls do not leave because sport stopped mattering to them.
Seven in ten women say something stopped them from playing as long, as competitively, or in as many sports as they wanted. When asked what, they name money first — not talent, not interest, not time.
Bars scaled to a 50% axis for legibility. Among women now in their 20s, eight in 10 report a barrier — more than any older group. Source: Women’s Sports Foundation, Play to Lead, 2024 (n=2,886).
The athlete-to-leader pipeline is documented, and it is steep.
Women who played sport carry it forward at rates that are difficult to explain by selection alone. At the top of the corporate ladder, the pattern is nearly universal.
First four figures: Women’s Sports Foundation, Play to Lead, 2024 — a nationally representative survey of 2,886 American adults who played girls’ or women’s sports. The 71% is measured among respondents who held a formal leadership role, equal to 54% of the full sample. The 94% comes from a separate and much smaller study: EY and espnW’s 2015 survey of 400+ senior women executives across five countries.
The Idaho baseline
What the state’s own numbers already tell us.
One Idaho dataset is public, annual, and reliable: the participation counts every high school reports to the NFHS. It is a floor, not a full picture — it starts at ninth grade and misses every girl who left before then. But it is where our baseline begins.
Idaho girls hold 8,017 fewer high school sports participations than Idaho boys.
In 2024–25, Idaho high schools reported 23,423 participations by girls and 31,440 by boys — 54,863 in total, ranking Idaho 36th nationally.
Idaho girls’ participations, three years
Read this carefully. These are participations, not girls. A three-sport athlete is counted three times. The number of individual Idaho girls playing is meaningfully lower than 23,423 — and nobody currently publishes that figure. Source: NFHS High School Athletics Participation Survey, 2024–25.
What this dataset cannot tell us, and why we are building our own. It begins at ninth grade, so every girl who left at twelve is already invisible in it. It counts participations rather than students. It carries no information about cost, household income, or why anyone stopped. Those are precisely the questions our grant applications, camp intake, and scholarship files can answer — which is what the Impact Dashboard is for.
How we measure
One framework. Three stages. Reported every quarter.
Every program we run reports into the same structure, so a dollar can be traced from a grant application to a season played to a leadership role held. Nothing here is aspirational — these are the fields our intake forms already collect.
Stage 01
Access
Did the money reach a girl who would not otherwise have played?
- Girls funded through IX Grants
- Cost categories covered — fees, gear, travel, camp tuition
- First-time participants as a share of grantees
- Geographic distribution by district and county
Stage 02
Retention
Did she come back the following season?
- Season-over-season return rate
- Belonging and confidence, pre- and post-season
- Stated intent to continue playing
- Camp return rate within the ages 12–14 window
Stage 03
Leverage
Did sport become something she leads with?
- Mentorship touchpoints delivered
- Leadership identity, self-reported over time
- Post-secondary enrollment and persistence
- Career and leadership steps among alumni
Our data practice
Most of the people in our dataset are minors. We build accordingly.
Research credibility rests on method and on care. These are standing commitments, not aspirations, and they govern every form, survey, and story request we send.
Minors are protected first
No identifying detail about a student under 18 is published without written guardian consent. Aggregate reporting is the default; named stories are the exception.
Consent is specific and revocable
Families choose what a story is used for — annual report, social, funder materials — and can withdraw that permission at any time without affecting their support.
Method travels with the number
Sample size, collection window, and instrument are published alongside every figure we release. Small samples are labeled as such rather than rounded into confidence.
Findings are shared, not held
Aggregate Idaho findings are released publicly — to schools, leagues, funders, and other nonprofits — whether or not they flatter our programs.
What we are building
The Taylor LEAD Impact Dashboard.
A single public instrument that shows what Idaho girls face and what changes when someone intervenes. Built in three phases, on the same schedule as our statewide scholarship rollout.
Set the baseline
Standardized intake across IX Grants, camps, and the scholarship. Network survey fielded. First story-intake protocol in use. Quarterly reporting begins.
Publish the first Idaho report
An annual state-of-play report for Idaho girls: participation, cost, and retention by district. Distributed to schools, athletic associations, funders, and legislators.
Follow the cohort
Longitudinal follow-up with scholarship alumni spanning more than a decade of recipients, linking early access to post-secondary and career outcomes.
Early signal
What our own first year of data shows.
We are early. We would rather show you a small, honest dataset than a large, decorative one.
A note on what these numbers are. These are inputs and early indicators, not outcomes. We have not yet run a season-over-season retention cycle, and we will not describe one until we have. The first outcome data — return rates, belonging measures, post-season intent — is scheduled for release in our 2027 report.
Partnerships
We are looking for research partners, not just funders.
Idaho is a manageable state to study well. If you work in sport science, education policy, public health, or workforce development, there is a dataset here worth building with us.
Academic collaborators
Joint study design, instrument review, and co-authored analysis with faculty and graduate researchers.
- Access to de-identified program data
- Survey and instrument co-design
- Practicum and capstone placements
Schools, districts & leagues
The participation and cost picture only resolves with school-level data. We share back everything we learn about your students.
- District participation and cost reporting
- Custom findings returned to your athletic department
- Named study sites for the annual report
Research sponsors
Underwrite the fieldwork. Sponsors receive early access to findings and named recognition in the published report.
- Sponsor the annual Idaho report
- Underwrite the longitudinal alumni study
- Commission a focused analysis
Behind every data point
A number is a person who almost didn’t get to play.
The quantitative data on this page tells us how many. These tell us what it cost them to get there.
We do not have them yet, and we are not going to borrow or invent them. The three below are held open, and each says exactly how the person will be identified when their words arrive — because how much of somebody we publish is a decision, not a detail.
A 2026 LEAD Scholar
On her first year on campus, and what the award changed about the decision she was facing.
Will be attributed asFirst name, last initial · Idaho high school · Class of 2026
A Mountain Home family
On a first season in organized sport, and what the grant actually covered.
Will be attributed asParent · Mountain Home, Idaho
A Throw Like a Girl participant
From our first clinic, fall 2026, on what it was like to be there.
Will be attributed asFirst name only · Age · Idaho
These three appear in the Q4 Impact Update, our light quarterly report. The full Impact Report follows in Q1 2027, ahead of the February 10 gala.
Sources
- Access figures — 54.1%, 52.0%, 56.1%, 31.2%, 70.2%. Black LI, Terlizzi EP, Vahratian A. Organized Sports Participation Among Children Aged 6–17 Years: United States, 2020. NCHS Data Brief No. 441. Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics, August 2022. Based on the 2020 National Health Interview Survey. DOI: 10.15620/cdc:119026.
- Barriers and leadership figures — 7 in 10, 27%, 20%, 20%, 17%, 67%, 49%, 69%, 71%, and the eight-years-versus-six finding. Sharrow E, Staurowsky E, Davis B. Play to Lead: The Generational Impact of Sports on Women’s Leadership. Women’s Sports Foundation, September 2024. Nationally representative survey of 2,886 American adults who played girls’ or women’s sports between ages 5 and 26, fielded by YouGov, February 2024.
- 94% of women in the C-suite played sport. EY Women Athletes Business Network and espnW. Where Will You Find Your Next Leader? 2015. Survey of more than 400 senior women executives across five countries; 52% of C-suite respondents played at university level.
- Girls leave sport at twice the rate of boys by age 14. Attributed to the Women’s Sports Foundation and widely cited across the field. The Aspen Institute has published a smaller estimate of 1.3×. We cite the higher figure to the Women’s Sports Foundation and note the Aspen figure alongside it, because neither organization publishes Idaho-specific attrition data — which is one of the gaps this Foundation’s research is designed to fill.
- Idaho high school participation — 23,423 girls, 31,440 boys, 54,863 total. National Federation of State High School Associations, High School Athletics Participation Survey, 2024–25, Summary of Athletics Participation, Totals by State. Idaho ranks 36th nationally. Prior years: 23,181 girls (2023–24) and 22,467 girls (2022–23). The survey counts participations rather than individual students — a student who plays two sports is counted twice.
- Taylor LEAD Foundation program data, 2026 cycle. Scholarship application funnel and awards, iWIN IX Grant recipients, and Change Make*Hers Gala figures. Internal records.
Take action
Evidence is only useful if somebody funds what it points to.
Whether you build the data, fund the fieldwork, or write the check that puts a girl on the field this season — the research says the same thing about where to start.