Sisterhood in Sports: How Female Athletes Collaborate and Compete tells the stories of all kinds of female athletes in a variety of sports. Their natural tendency to use talking as a primary form of communication is essential to their experiences and successes in sports. Women and girls tend to have BFFs, collaborate during periods of stress, express empathy for one another, worry about themselves and others, and desire to have fun in sports, which makes their experiences of sports and competition different from their male counterparts. Female strengths are grounded in both mind and body, and they take these strengths onto the court, field, and track. There are now dozens of studies showing how the female brain and hormones operate quite differently than those of men. This book reveals the ways in which these differences confirm that intense emotions about relationships are part of the sporting life for female competitors. Joan Steidinger uses real stories to show that women and girls compete at very high Joan Steidinger, Ph.D., is a Certified Consultant through the Association of Applied Sports Psychology and on the United States Olympic Committee's Sport Psychology Registry. She has written columns online for PsychologyToday.com and SFGate.com. She has worked as a sports psychologist for close to 30 years with offices in Mill Valley and San Francisco. In the 1990s, she was a competitive ultrarunner and competitive Ride and Tie participant. You will see her running the trails of Mt. Tam in Mill Valley, California where she lives with her husband, JP, and two goldie dogs, Spencer and Parker.