This story is part of Teen Vogue’s Girls in the Game series with Jessica Luther, which examines the role that gender plays in football today.

More than 3.3 million girls played high school sports last year, according to the National Federation of State High School Sports Associations, and Willa Smith, an 18-year-old swimmer from Austin, Texas, is one of them. So if there are so many girls playing sports, and we know that representation is so important and valuable, why aren't there more YA books about athletic girls?

“I definitely wish there more sports lit for girls,” Willa, who has been blogging about books and writing reviews since she was 12 and is now an intern at a literary agency, tells Teen Vogue. Editors in the industry say it's hard to say the exact number of YA sports books about girls that are out there, but it is true that “girls tend to get the short end of the stick when it comes to fiction about sports,” Wesley Adams, executive editor at Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Macmillan Children's Publishing Group, tells Teen Vogue.

YA author Miranda Kenneally — whose name is well-known in YA sports conversations because the girls in her books are soccer players, softball players, horseback riders, and runners — said it was an uphill battle for her first book, Catching Jordan to find a publishing home. (Catching Jordan is about a female high school football captain and quarterback, working toward an athletic scholarship.) Miranda says she received 30 rejection letters over the course of nine months while trying to sell the book in 2010. Eventually, she found a publisher in Sourcebooks, and it was released in 2011. “Publishers at the time were only buying paranormal, witches, and vampires,” Miranda tells Teen Vogue, “and they were saying things like, ‘No one wants to read about a sporty girl set in the real world.’” Now, Catching Jordan has sold 125,000 copies, Miranda says.

More YA novels featuring athletic girls should exist. Here’s why.

Representation matters.

By 14, girls are dropping out of sports at twice the rate of boys, according to the Women’s Sports Foundation.

That’s why representation is so important. “Having girls play traditionally masculine sports in books just makes it more normal,” Claire Westerlund, 18, tells Teen Vogue. “If you’re in seventh or eighth grade and you’re kind of like trying to decide ‘what should I do in high school’ or ‘what should I start to get involved in,’ I think it’s really important to see that.”

When Willa read Miranda’s June 2017 release Coming Up For Air, a story following a swimmer with Olympic aspirations, she happened to be struggling with whether or not she wanted to stick with the sport. The book kept her in the pool.

“To read a book about you, to read a book about your story as an athlete, makes you fall back in love with the sport that you do,” she says. “I felt represented and that someone saw a passion that I had.”

The books can inspire those who want to get started with a sport or push harder.

The summer after Claire read the On the Road to Find Out, written by Rachel Toor, she ran her first 10K, which was twice as far as she’d ever raced. In the book, the character Alice went from not running at all to training for a half marathon. “That definitely got me thinking, ‘Oh, I should definitely train for bigger races,’” Claire says.