What a Time (For Girls) to Be Alive

Towner Magill’s older daughter, Weller, doesn’t usually watch sports with him—not when it’s baseball or basketball or the NFL, anyway. In part, that’s because she’s 6. “She doesn’t usually have the attention span to watch a whole game,” her dad, 37, says with a laugh.

Several months ago, however, Weller walked in on Towner watching the U.S. Women’s National Team play soccer. Weller, who was the only girl to finish the season on her coed soccer team in Charleston, South Carolina, this year (and was initially a little discouraged by the fact that she had only boy teammates), sat with her dad for a few minutes before she noticed something unusual: ponytails on the field. “She was like, These are girls?! She couldn’t believe it,” Magill recalls. “It was like, I haven’t seen this before.”

Last month, when