"Power Hour" for most college girls is the 60-minute period between 11 p.m. and midnight when, at a place like Bar None in New York's East Village, well drafts and mixed drinks cost a dollar apiece. For women athletes, however, "Power Hour" has an altogether different connotation.

Andrea Cafiero, a varsity volleyball player for Quinnipiac University's Division I Braves, submits to eight required "Power Hours" every week. For periods of about two hours at a time, she signs herself into a room with her books, and on most days, does her schoolwork. "Trust me," she says of the temptation to skip out, "there are repercussions. We're at practice and our coach will say, 'Andrea didn't do her eight hours this week, she only did six,' so the team is going to have to run two suicides in lieu of the hours I missed."

There is no chance for the other kind of "Power Hour" either. Athletes at Quinnipiac College must adhere to a 48-hour ban on drinking before a game or practice. "So basically, we can't drink at all during season," says Cafiero. The same is true at Yale, where Christine Anthony, a field hockey player, says the disciplined life of the athlete has put special strains on her friendships as well as her social life. "I remember my freshman year roommate when I was in season in the fall, said she didn't even know who I was until the spring," says Anthony. At Yale, she finds athletes make friends among the athletes. "They understand where you're coming from," she said. "They understand when you need to go to bed."

At a point in life when, for most young women, the most important new relationships are being forged, bonds to parents are being loosened, identity is being solidified, and child-bearing years are just ahead, female athletes are molding the concept of gender into a shape all their own. Eve as Athlete has to participate in relationships in a whole new way, even her relationship to self.

For Marie Golden, a junior at Holy Cross University, crew is the all-consuming activity in her college life. "It's frustrating sometimes not to be able to go out on your roommates birthday, or your friend's birthday-or even your own birthday," she says. Golden has practice six times a week, for three hours at a time, not including a weight-lifting program twice a week. Passion, she says, is what drives her to row and row well. Knowing when she gets out there, there will be eight other girls in the boat, feeling what she is feeling is what gets her to go. It's the camaraderie. "In every sense," says Golden, "we're all in the same boat." She said some of her best friends are also her teammates because of the concentrated time that they spend together.

In the words of Mary Jo Kane, a sports psychologist and Director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota, the impact sports can have on a woman's life is boundless. "It can help with her sense of identity in terms of belonging to a team or group," says Kane, "which in turn can make her feel part of a larger community like a school or a state or a university, or even her country if she's an Olympic athlete."

College sports can have impact - both positive and negative - on family life, even when student athletes are far from home. Andrea Lytle, a junior who plays water polo for Boston College, says her participation in sports has actually improved her familial relationships. "It lets parents and siblings become involved in your life in a non-intrusive way," says Lytle. "Having a parent ask about your game is a lot less intrusive than having them ask about your boyfriend."

"There were some of life's hurdles that were just too high for me to jump..."

Not so for Penny Vastakis, whose parents pressured her to make dean's list while she was attempting to break track and field records at Rensselaer Polytechnic institute two years ago. "I just couldn't swing it," she says. "There were some of life's hurdles that were just too high for me to jump."

At the professional level, women's tennis has had its share of intense father-daughter interaction played out in public. When Venus Williams backed out of a match against her younger sister, Serena, claiming a knee injury at the Indian Wells tournament, the crowd was not shy about their fury. There were plenty of accusations that the girls' coach and father, Richard Williams, was behind the decision.

The phenomenon demonstrated by the Williams duo clearly represents the problem for girls whose parents are directly involved in their sporting careers. For most children, the grip of parents begins to yield as they move into adulthood. But for female athletes, the parental clutch in this period may be more relentless than ever. Melissa Garren, who plays field hockey for Yale, says growing up with sports, she has "definitely seen some crazy parents who are living vicariously [through their children]. And even today," said Garren, "at 20 years old, sports is a major source of bonding for us [Garren and her father]. Sports have been an invaluable tool in keeping us tight-it's something we can always fall back on."

The Williamses aren't the only sisters who compete in the same sport. Suzanne and Christine Anthony, 20 and 22 respectively, are the two middle children of four daughters. Both play field hockey for Yale and both are highly competitive. Luckily, they play a team sport and that keeps them from being too competitive with each other. In high school though, they played tennis. They played each other for spots on the team, and could potentially play each other in tournaments, but their parents encouraged it.

"Some families who had similar issues never made their kids play each other, but my parents thought that was stupid," said Christine. "The competition is supposed to be on the court, and the family stuff is supposed to be at home. We were pretty good at separating that." Next year, the youngest Anthony, Katie, will be playing field hockey for Duke.

The relationship of young women to sports as they mature also warrants examination. The Women's Sports Foundation reports that 87 percent of girls seven to ten years old play sports, but that the rate falls to 75 percent between ages 15 and 18. "Just about the time that girls are entering high school, they are getting into that girly stage," says Cafiero, the volleyball player. "Society has traditionally said girls don't play sports and guys don't like girls who play sports."

We give female athletes very schizophrenic messages about their body images and appearance, says Kane, the sports psychologist. On the one hand, she says, particularly for basketball players, centers and forwards, we want them to be bigger and bulkier than the average female. "But the minute she steps off the court, we want her to revert to this hyper-feminized notion of what it means to be a woman." Kane has seen this bifurcated message affect athletes first hand. Women athletes in her classes said they believed if they got bigger and stronger and lifted weights more and put on more bulk, they'd be better athletes. However, they also perceive that bulking up will make their roles as traditional females all the more difficult. So they don't do it.

"I think especially on the college level, there's the stereotype that women athletes are lesbians."

Suzanne Anthony found a way to overcome this dilemma. "If you talk about the typical field hockey body, your quads get huge and your butt gets huge, because your squatting down the whole time, and the lifting we do is to build those muscles," she said. "Everyone on the team jokes about how when we start lifting again, we can't fit into our pants. Our coaches yell at us and tell us you have to push yourselves and not worry that your butt is going to get too big."

At a very practical level, the upsurge in popularity of women's sports has widened acceptance of various body types. "Now there are role models who are the antithesis of Kate Moss, women with muscles, women with power," said Hugo Schwyzer, a professor of history and gender at Pasadena City College in California. "They literally know how to throw their weight around."

Schwyzer adds that one of the most controversial issues in women's basketball right now surrounds "the dunk." Very few women traditionally have had the physical ability to slam dunk. But in the newest generation of female athletes, there are more and more young women who can defy gravity. "The dunk has always been seen as a particularly aggressive move, a way of saying, 'look what I can do,'" says Schwyzer. He says that for women's basketball in particular, there's an assumption that women are going to be more sportsmanlike, better at passing, and less concerned with individual statistics and more concerned with a cooperative approach. "To some extent, that may be true," he adds, "but some of that may also reflect certain sexist assumptions about women's nature."

Katie Corey of the Emmanuel College in Boston basketball team finds the tendency to make presumptions about women athletes frustrating. "I think especially on the college level, there's the stereotype that women athletes are lesbians," said Corey, flipping her long blonde hair out of her eyes. "I think that a lot of people think that just because you're underneath the boards, dribbling, playing your ass off.

Schwyzer thinks it's important to "break down the connection between female aggression and lack of femininity," he says, because a woman can be both. Schwyzer thinks what is clear is that men are ambivalent. While a lot of men support women's sports, they also see it as a potential threat. The woman whose life involves sports is less likely to be dominated by a man, both physically and emotionally. Kane believes one of the reasons why there's so much resistance to women's participation in sport and often a backlash against it, is that it is an arena that is so liberating for women. "It potentially is a site where all of the traditional stereotypes and practices of gender can be undermined, challenged, sabotaged," she said.

Andrea Lytle, who plays water polo for Boston College, says that while she thinks a guy wants a girl who is into sports, she thinks he would be threatened if the girl knows more about the subject or is a stronger player. "I've generally found that I date guys who play a different sport than me because there isn't that competitive edge to [the relationship]," she said.

Penny Vastakis, who ran track for Rensselear Polytechnic Institute, says she has always associated female strength with sexual attractiveness."I use my body to perform, to run, to jump, to fly," she said, adding that her boyfriend loves the fact that she is athletic. "He never encouraged me to look like all those anorexic models," says Vastakis. "Let's just say he liked the fact that I was fit."

Vastakis, on one hand, feels proud to be among the many females who are pioneers of post-Title IX sports, but still feels exasperated by the struggle. "You'd think, by now, we wouldn't have to have bake sales and sponsor dances to rent the bus for our away meets or buy new uniforms," she says.

"With male participation, women have the right to both motherhood and individual career satisfaction."

It was worse in Donna Kauchak's day. Now the Strength and Conditioning Professional for NYU's women's basketball team, Kauchak remembers how difficult it was to be a female athlete when she was in school. "Unfortunately, I am one of those pre-Title IX babies and it was just really difficult to do anything at that time," says Kauchak. Today, she participates in triathlons, soccer coaching, personal fitness training, and scuba diving. Her sister, Ann Salgado, says there is not a sport you can name that her sister hasn't played.

"All sports pre-Title IX were club, or during school time," says Kauchak. She says the level of talent and competitiveness we see today just wasn't there. "There were very few people that could bring it to a level that you needed to be at," she adds. "You didn't know how you could fair with other people."

Christine Anthony, of the Yale Women's Field Hockey team, recalls a banquet Yale held last year to celebrate the 25th anniversary for women in the Ivy League. She listened to women tell stories of what it was like to not have a playing field; women who had to pick the trash off the field after the tailgates on Sunday morning before they could start to play. "They were the pioneers," says Anthony. "And we're the first generation of women who because of Title IX and other things, have it easier, so we need to not take that for granted."

While Ann Salgado, 35, was a cheerleader in high school, she envisions a different future for her daughters. At an NYU women's basketball game, she tried to divert the attention of four-year-old Jacqueline from the purple bobcat mascot parading around the sidelines. Salgado wanted her daughter to focus on the game. "Don't worry about the mascot," Salgado told her. "They don't make much money." Holding Jacqueline tight as they watched a free-throw shot, she said, "You see, if you get really good at this, you can make your own money. You don't have to rely on a man-ever." It's hard to imagine the same advice being parlayed when Salgado and Kauchak were growing up.

Women's involvement in sports is affecting parental relationships in ways once unimaginable. In 1998, WNBA Comets guard Sheryl Swoopes took maternity leave to have her first child. When she first returned to the game five weeks after her son's birth, the child's father stayed at home with the infant.

"If we start to see men being house-husbands and doing for women what women have always done for men, I think that just opens up space for what's considered an appropriate relationship between women and men," says Kane. She says this accelerated movement of women as sports icons is beneficial not only for female athletes, but for all of society. It expands opportunities women might not normally have.

Swoopes' story illuminates the false dichotomy of forcing women to choose between athletic - or any professional - success and loving relationships, including motherhood. "What Sheryl Swoopes role models," says Schwyzer, "is the notion that with male participation, women have the right to both motherhood and individual career satisfaction."

Schwyzer says that sport teaches women ownership of their own body. That's why he likes women's sports so much. He adds, "Most of the time, our culture teaches young women that their body belongs to other people, it's something for other people to look at, lust after, but it doesn't belong to them.

"Women in Sports" was produced by the journalism students of NYU's Undergraduate Honors Advanced Reporting Class, Spring 2001, under the instruction of Brooke Kroeger.

To view the Women in Sports 2001 Online Magazine Project in its entirety: http://journalism.fas.nyu.edu/wis/index.php