OPINION | Not Having Access to a Sports Bra Can Keep Girls from Playing Sports. A Seattle Program Has a Solution

by Megan Burbank

Sports bras change lives.

That isn't an exaggeration: As girls go through puberty, they're likely to turn away from sports, often because they don't have access to a sports bra — an essential piece of athletic equipment for anyone who plays sports and has breasts, but one you're not likely to receive if you can't afford it or don't know where to look.

When I think back to my own experience as a high school cross-country runner, I remember all the mental energy my teammates and I expended on our sports bras, whether it took the form of doubling up on bras for better support, struggling to pull too-compressive bras over our heads in the locker room, or just running in the unsupportive bras we'd worn to school on days we forgot to pack our sports bras for practice. It's not like there were any extras lying around.

Sports bras were crucial to our running, but they were also something tinged with a mild teenage shame, something we only talked about with each other or our parents, if they had the budget and the sports knowledge to take us to Moving Comfort or Lucy Activewear. Our coach was a middle-aged man, and none of these things was covered in our gym or health classes.

But maybe they should've been.

That's the philosophy behind Seattle nonprofit Bras for Girls: to normalize education about breast development and access to sports bras for girls who play sports, so they can continue to participate as their bodies grow and change. Coaches and teachers can request bras and educational materials from the organization, which sources apparel from local and national brands and also provides on-site fittings at schools in the Puget Sound region.

Though it's difficult to gauge exactly how this distribution is impacting girls so far, Executive Director Sarah Lesko says the feedback from participants suggests the bras are having an impact. "The coaches and teachers tell us, 'Oh, this girl participated in these activities that I've never seen her do before after she received her sports bra,'" she says.

The need is also apparent: Lesko estimates that among the younger girls the program serves, over 50% of participants get their first sports bra from Bras for Girls. Girls entering sports like wrestling — currently the nation's fastest-growing girls' sport — may need more specialized sports bras or risk disqualification; Bras for Girls can set them up with compressive bras with no hardware so they meet these requirements. The program also provides bras for athletic activities that are popular with girls but not always grouped with sports (or resourced like them), including dance and cheer, neither of which are exactly low-impact. "It's a sport like any other sport, and they need support doing it," said Lesko.

Before she started her work with Bras for Girls, Lesko was a family doctor working at the Carolyn Downs Family Medical Center in the Central District. In 2015, she took what she thought would be a brief break from her medical career and started working with Oiselle, the Seattle-based women's running gear company. In 2017, she found herself tracking research out of Portsmouth University's Sports Bra Lab, where researchers "basically test every sports bra that comes to market" and had conducted the first large-scale study showing that issues related to breast support could have a huge impact on girls' participation in sports. At the time, Oiselle had some extra bra inventory sitting around that needed somewhere to go.

It was a problem with an easy solution.

Lesko and her colleagues decided to donate the bras through running events in Seattle and the Bay Area. "That calendar year, I actually got requests for over 68,000 sports bras with very little PR," she recalls. The interest made it "pretty quickly apparent that this was a big issue and a need that wasn't being addressed really in any systemic manner," she said.

In 2022, Bras for Girls donated 15,000 sports bras. In 2023, that number jumped to 30,000. And this year, the organization is hoping to donate 50,000.

It does this by working with local and national brands that have bras to offload or sell cheaply. "Everyone always has inventory that's sitting around that they need to get rid of somehow," said Lesko. To date, the program has sourced bras from Hoka, Brooks, Reebok, and Champion, and has partnered with schools in communities throughout Seattle and South King County, including Renton and Skyway, and all the way south to Tacoma. The program provides bras in cup sizes up to FF, and when larger sizes are needed, they're sourced from the Pencil Test, a Renton bra boutique whose size-inclusive inventory covers cup sizes D—O. And though the organization includes the word "girls" in its name, it also serves nonbinary students and provides binders upon request.

As the program grows, Lesko hopes to reach out to every gym teacher at a Title 1 middle school in Washington State with an offer to work together; to date, Bras for Girls has already partnered with at least 10 local Title 1 middle schools. "Even without any outbound advertising or anything, we're growing so rapidly, and we're still struggling to keep up," said Lesko.

May no young cross-country runner have to double up on bras ever again.

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