It's too bad that Hillary Clinton didn't play sports as a girl. Through sports, she would have learned to lose gracefully or win like a champ.
I went to Simmons Graduate School of Management. There women learned the rules of winning in a man's world of business but also learned how to win or lose gracefully as women.
The reason women have pushed for more funding for women's sports is because the lessons of competition are valuable in changing not only how men see women competitors but also in how women experience losing and winning in building their characters. It's valable to lose, it teaches one to learn to win in the future when the stakes are high: When one's economic or family relationships are dependent upon the win. Or, in this case, when the White House hangs in the balance.
I thought Hillary Clinton had learned these lessons at Wellesley. Going to an all-female school helps young women test the limits of their leadership credentials and how to go beyond them. It is important and many successful women come from this experience stronger, not only as women, but as leaders.
The most important leadership test for Sen. Clinton will be not when she loses but when we judge her, not through the eyes of a man, but through the eyes of a young woman competing in a man's world who has lost one game for equality but is still in the running for the leadership of her company, her college, her country. I hope she understands how important this is.