Why Girls' Schools Are Right to Invest in Athletic Facilities

The Spence School's new Athletic & Ecology Center in Manhattan rises six stories on East 90th Street: an NCAA regulation gymnasium with seating for 500, nine squash courts across two levels, and a rooftop greenhouse. A few blocks north, the Nightingale-Bamford School has launched a capital campaign to build what it calls the largest athletics facility of its kind among independent schools in Manhattan, and it will be anchored by a 15,000-square-foot indoor turf field.

At first glance, this can look puzzling. Space in New York is scarce. Construction is expensive. And girls' schools are already under pressure to justify tuition and expansion. Why invest so heavily in athletics?

The answer is simple: these schools are not building amenities; what they are actually doing is rebuilding and investing in the community.

For decades, American education treated athletics as enrichment: beneficial, but secondary; character-building, but optional. Then came No Child Left Behind. After 2002, schools across the country sharply cut physical education - in some districts by more than 30 minutes a day - to make room for additional reading and math instruction. What could not be tested was treated as expendable. The message was clear: the body was a distraction from the mind, and shared physical activity was a luxury schools could no longer afford.

That framework produced a generation of students who are more credentialed and more isolated than any before them. According to the U.S. Surgeon General, loneliness now carries health risks comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. Among adolescents and young adults, reported isolation has risen sharply even as academic performance and structured achievement have intensified. Students are doing more and belonging less.

What these New York girls' schools deeply understand is that community does not emerge from shared values, mission statements, or even academic excellence alone. It is built through shared effort, mutual dependence, and repeated, embodied cooperation. Athletics provides exactly that, and very few other activities in modern schooling create these conditions as reliably.

In the classroom, success is largely individual. Grades are private. Competition is quiet but constant. Even leadership increasingly resembles a credential rather than a lived responsibility. Athletics flips that logic. Effort is visible. Dependence is unavoidable. Preparation affects others.

When a teammate shows up unprepared, everyone pays the price. When someone succeeds despite her own mediocre performance, she learns that individual merit is not the only thing that matters. These are not extracurricular lessons. They are civic ones: the precise habits a functioning democracy requires but rarely teaches directly.

The cost of skipping this education is visible in adult life. Robert Putnam's research on civic decline shows that Americans who came of age after the 1960s are far less likely to join organizations, attend public meetings, or trust their neighbors. They vote, sometimes intensely, but voting is not the same as cooperating. A democracy requires citizens who know how to subordinate personal preference to group function, how to lose gracefully and keep showing up, and how to hold others accountable without destroying the relationship. These are skills learned through practice, not lectures, and athletics is one of the last institutions that still teaches them.

That investment is also striking because it runs counter to a national trend. According to the Aspen Institute, regular team sports participation for youth ages 6–17 declined six percent between 2019 and 2022. At precisely the moment when shared, formative experiences are disappearing elsewhere, these schools are choosing to rebuild them deliberately.

Athletic facilities function differently in urban schools. They are not just places to exercise. They are anchors of routine: same people, same time, same place, week after week. Sociologists have long noted that trust is built less through intensity than through repetition. Athletics institutionalizes that repetition. In Manhattan, where students move between apartments, subways, screens, and schedules that rarely overlap, these spaces do not materialize on their own. They must be built.

Girls' schools have been especially clear-eyed about the stakes. Research from the Women's Sports Foundation has long documented what young women gain from team sports: not just physical health, but the confidence to take up space, the practice of asserting authority in group settings, and the resilience that comes from failing publicly and continuing anyway. No workshop on teamwork substitutes for a season where effort is uneven and excuses don't matter. No seminar on leadership replicates being responsible for others' performance in real time.

"Sports has always been my foundation," says Jada C., a varsity athlete and member of the Class of 2025 at Nightingale. "It's where I've met the most people, it's where my community's really started. Being the leader of a sports team, that's the foundation, and then you go out, and you can do bigger things in the bigger world."

At a moment when schools talk endlessly about community, these girls' schools are doing the harder thing: building it.

Critics will note that Spence, Nightingale, Brearley, and Chapin are among the most expensive schools in the country. Aren’t these wealthy communities just building nicer facilities? That objection has some force, but it misses what these institutions are modeling. Nightingale has explicitly framed its new facility as community infrastructure, citing the Aspen Institute's research on the lack of athletic access in East Harlem, and is committing to partnerships with local organizations. And the underlying insight of their new facility - that athletics builds the kind of trust and cooperation that transfers to civic life - is not exclusive to the wealthy. It is, if anything, more urgent in communities where other institutions of shared life have eroded.

The irony here is that girls' schools, often mischaracterized as traditional or insulated, may be modeling something genuinely forward-looking: an education that recognizes human flourishing requires more than individual excellence. It requires shared life.

For years, we told schools to optimize what could be measured and cut what could not. These girls’ schools are reversing that logic. They are building places where character is formed through effort, loyalty, and shared risk - week after week, season after season.

In a culture obsessed with individual achievement, these schools are investing in something rarer: the habits of belonging.