NBA and WNBA back Lean In Girls program that tells facilitators not to call participants 'girls'
- NBA/WNBA promote 'Lean In Girls' for ages 11-15, but facilitator handbook tells adults to avoid calling participants 'girls'—suggesting 'folks' and 'leaders' instead.
- Handbook pushes pronoun-sharing, 'social power' analysis, and 'active allyship' to help teens 'contend with injustice.'
- Santa Clara schools used the curriculum as a 'Tier 2 Intervention' for struggling students, with recruitment based on grades, attendance, and 'diversity.'
- OutKick's repeated requests for the full curriculum and answers from NBA, WNBA, and Lean In were met with silence and runaround emails.
Brief Summary
The NBA and WNBA are proudly backing Sheryl Sandberg's 'Lean In Girls' program—a leadership initiative for girls—which conveniently instructs its own facilitators to never actually call the participants 'girls.' The handbook tells adults to use 'everyone' or 'folks' to avoid upsetting any attendee grappling with the terrifying label of their own biological reality.
OutKick obtained the 2023 playbook showing a curriculum obsessed with pronouns, 'social power,' and a mission to dismantle societal biases in 11-to-15-year-olds. The leagues, which run commercials during WNBA broadcasts and feature star players like Aliyah Boston, have apparently reviewed nothing—OutKick asked them directly what they vetted, and the response was a collective shrug and silence. A California school district deployed this as a targeted 'intervention' for at-risk students, keeping parents in the dark about the gender ideology sprinkled into the confidence-building.
Why This Matters
This is your tax dollars and your children's attention being hijacked by woke virtue signaling from billion-dollar sports leagues. If the NBA and WNBA are going to slap their logos on a 'girls' program that is terrified of the word 'girls,' they owe the public a straight answer on what the hell they actually approved. The silence from the league offices tells you everything you need to know—they know they’re peddling nonsense but are too cowardly to admit it.
For parents, this is the ultimate wake-up call: your child's school might be using 'leadership training' as a Trojan horse to push gender identity exploration and anti-bias agitprop. The program preaches 'active allyship' and 'social power' while its corporate backers play dodgeball with basic accountability. If the leagues can't explain why they're funding a curriculum that tells girls they can't be called girls, maybe it's time to stop buying the tickets.