By Shelley Smith

I watch in horror from the stands as one of the players on my daughter's high school soccer team takes a swing at an opponent who has been taunting her since the beginning of the game. As the rest of the girls run towards them, my daughter rushes smack into the fight to break it up, grabbing her teammate from behind while trying to push the other girl away, ending up on the bottom of the pile kicking and clawing to get free.

I cringe as I hear a father, storming the sidelines of the field yell at his daughter: "That was your fault. That's six mistakes in a row. Get your head together or you're gonna hear about this at home." The young girl looks over at him, terrified by his words even though it was clear she had heard them before.

I listen with concern upon hearing about the number of female athletes now using steroids or other performance-enhancing drugs, the number who have eating disorders or who have been physically and verbally abused by their coaches or sexually harassed. I shudder as I listen - to my own daughter and her teammates - talk about the pressures and stress they feel to be the best, which makes them physically ill before a game and has even led to nastiness between them because of the competition on their own team.

"It's fun and I love to play," my daughter tells me. "But sometimes it's really tough." The number of girls competing in sports has never been higher. National studies estimate that one of every three high school girls competes in some kind of sport. Close to half the nation's volleyball players are girls and 40 percent of the nation's soccer players from ages 7 to 19 are female, compared to just 8 percent 10 years ago. But as the numbers of female participants has increased, so has the number of problems. Fighting, steroids, abusive coaches and problem parents have most generally been associated only with boys' sports. Sadly, no more.

"There are so many things I see my daughter confronting being on a volleyball team that I never experienced or even thought of when I was growing up," one of my friends confided in me. "If we played anything it was either because we were forced to do it in gym class or we knew the boys were watching. Our biggest problem was keeping our uniform clean and our tennis shoes white." This is a dilemma many women my age who have daughters in sports are facing. Most of us missed out on the big sports boom. Title IX was nothing more than another piece of ignored legislation when we were in middle and high school. Plus, there was no one telling us about the benefits that come along with participating in sports. There were no NIKE ads telling us that girls who play sports are more likely to do better in school, have higher self-esteem, are less likely to do drugs or join gangs, or even become sexually active. We didn't even have NIKE yet. Competing or not competing was never an issue. Just do it? We didn't.

So, like my friend, many of us don't have a clue. What do I tell my daughter about fighting, or at least breaking up a fight? What role, if any, should I take with regards to an abusive parent? How do I help my daughter focus on the good things sports can bring into her life? What do I tell her when she plays poorly or her team goes on a losing streak? How do I motivate her without pushing? What is my role as a mom in this very strange new world?

It is often confusing. For example, the girls who were fighting were suspended by their schools for two days. I know what I would have done at home beyond that if it had been my daughter fighting - a lot of privileges would have been taken away. But what do I tell her about her role in trying to break up the fight? I know her intentions were good and that loyalty is important, but should she have involved herself, risking possible serious injury or, perhaps, mistakenly be named one of the instigators? I have never been in a fistfight and I had never seen girls fight.

I called a friend who coaches men's college basketball. He told me that teammates need to learn to stick up for one another and that sometimes means joining in the fray, or at least pretending to join in.

"I always tell our guys that if a fight starts, go find a guy on the other team who doesn't really want to fight either and act like you're restraining each other," he said. "That way you're sticking up for your teammates, but you're not putting yourself at risk." That seemed to make sense.

"But I had to do something to help Stephanie," my daughter insisted when I passed on the advice. "And I was the closest to her." I sighed, and just told her to be careful. What else could I say?

Should I have said something when I heard that father berating his daughter from the sidelines? Or at least should I have told the girl's mother or counseled the girl? I've seen enough of Bobby Knight to know that I don't approve of a coach using verbal abuse as a motivating tactic so I know that I don't approve of it coming from a father. But would confronting him make the situation better or worse for his daughter?

As it turned out, I didn't have to say anything to the abusive father, who repeated his tirade the next game. The coach told him to stop yelling negative remarks and the father reacted badly, threatening to pull his daughter off the team. Another father told me that as a child, he had been coached that same way and just figured that was how he should coach his daughter - until his daughter stopped talking to him. It took years for the damage to be repaired.

"Some athletes need to be yelled at," he said, "but I've never seen a girl respond positively when she's berated by a parent or a coach. But some parents don't get it. Some will never get it. And so you have to deal with the girl - somehow get her to understand that he means well and is trying to help, he just doesn't know how."

Fathers, it seems, need to learn a few things about their daughters, too. With my own daughter, I worry constantly that she doesn't eat enough based on the amount of training she does every day, competing in soccer and running track. According to a national study, between 1 and 3 percent of all female athletes are anorexic or bulemic, and that the percentage is even higher in adolescent females. I pack her a healthy lunch (something that won't get stuck in her braces) every day, but too often it comes home barely touched. She tells me that sometimes there's no time for her to eat and sometimes she's just too tired. There have been times in the morning where she's finishing up homework and I am literally feeding her bites of her breakfast. And what about burnout? One afternoon she came home completely spent from a two-hour track practice and had just 90 minutes until soccer practice. She had guest-played for another team in a tournament the previous weekend and was about as down and tired as I had ever seen her. When I suggested she skip soccer that night, she exhaled with relief.

"I had nothing to look forward to today," she said. "I was so tired but I knew I had track and Mondays are the hardest. We also get a ton of homework on Mondays and then I knew I had just an hour or so until soccer. There was nothing that I could feel excited about." We talked about the need to push and strive and challenge herself, but also the importance of taking a break now and then to recharge the batteries. This was something I've had to learn myself in my career - like my daughter I tend to want to do everything and more and do it better than anyone else. I used to drag myself in from a long trip and jump into something else immediately. Now, I spend a day or two doing nothing, and then get back up and do it again. At least I was speaking from experience and she now is trying to cut herself some slack and relax for at least a couple of hours every day. And when soccer season ends (does it ever end here in California?) she says she's going to work out on her own, but take more time to be a teenager and have some fun. That's important especially for girls, many of whom quit their sport before ever finding out their true potential. One of my daughter's high school teammates, for example, got a soccer scholarship to play at Michigan State, but turned it down to be a "normal" college student at UNLV. The challenge is to keep girls interested without making their sport their entire life. A high school track coach I talked to reinforced the idea, saying that he even approaches coaching girls differently than boys because of their need to socialize.

"With my girls team I give them the first 15 minutes of practice just to talke, catch up on the day's gossip, doings, whatever they want," he says. "Then we start our drills. I don't need to do that with the boys. We start from minute one. If I give them 15 minutes to socialize, they'll never get their intensity back."

Both boys and girls need to understand the importance of valuing the process rather than the result, several sports psychologists told me. Young athletes have to learn to buy into the theory the act of competing is as important as the competition itself, that performing well is just as good as winning. This, I've found, is almost impossible. Everybody wants to win and winning is always the goal. But it's very clear that most athletes will lose more often than they win. So does that mean that playing is a waste? Of course not. But try telling that to a young girl who just missed the winning shot or feels as if she didn't do enough for her team.

"I just feel so bad," my daughter said after her team lost in the semifinals of the city playoffs. "I couldn't find any intensity. I couldn't do anything to help." Understand that she feels lousy, the experts say, letting her know that it's okay to feel bad and that the reason she feels bad is that she cares.

"The reason you feel horrible is the same reason that makes you so good," I say. Did that make her feel any better? "Not really," she said. "We still lost." So much for the experts.

During the season, she witnessed a lot of sniping and finger pointing - some directed her way for various reasons - she was the youngest on the team and yet she was trying to direct players on the field as she has always done. The comments got back to her and they stung.

"You can't worry about what you cannot control," I told her. "You can't control what they think or what they say, but you can control what you think and what you say. If you think you're right in what you're doing on the field and your coach thinks you're right, then you don't have anything to worry about." It still stung. Acceptance by peers is still a crucial part of adolescence - sports or no sports - but acceptance by teammates has taken on even more importance. Being part of a team doesn't necessarily mean she's part of the team.

So it was somewhat ironic when, at school the day after the big fight on the field, my daughter found that she had become a celebrity because of her willingness to come to the aid of her teammate without regard for her own situation.

"Major props for jumping in like that," a senior teammate said to her. "And you're just a freshman, I've got to give it to you." Who would have thought that something that horrified me ended up being something really positive for my daughter because of her thought process and actions. It's very different, I think, than what I would have done. But I wouldn't have been playing.