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On any given day, there are hundreds of sports programs for young boys and girls at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan. But season after season, they're continuing to put more girls on the roster for special programs.

“We have some very advanced training programs for girls at BlueStreak, which is really focused on individual sports-specific training in baseball, basketball, soccer,” says Chelsea Piers General Manager Mollie Marcoux. “And those programs are often divided by gender. And then we have girls’ hockey. We have a girls’ hockey camp in the summer that we offer. We have a girls’ golf program, which is excellent, an after-school girls-only program.”

One of the girls taking advantage of those programs is eight-year-old Casey O'Brien – the only girl on her all-boys hockey team.

“It's really fun and I like it ‘cause you get a lot of speed and there's just a lot of reasons that I really like it,” says O’Brien.

Her coach Alana Blahoski, a gold medalist with the 1998 U.S. Women's Hockey team, recalls a time when things were a little bit different -- but still very similar to when she first took the ice growing up in Minnesota. According to some of the latest statistics from the Women's Sports Foundation, only about 60 percent of girls in urban communities like New York are involved with sports compared to 80 percent of boys.

“I remember signing petitions. We would go into arenas and they would want the girls to play ringette instead of hockey,” Blahoski recalls. “And ringette is essentially ice hockey but instead of a puck, it's a giant rubber ring and you use sticks with no blades and you kind of try and stab the ring. And I just could wrap my head around the fact that they wanted the girls to play ringette and not ice hockey.”

And she has high praise for O’Brien.

“She's like the toughest, coolest little girl,” says the coach. “Just that type she's not afraid of anything you know, there isn't a challenge to great for her.

That's just the kind of fearlessness the organization Girls, Inc. is trying to instill in more young girls through their "Sporting Chance" program – often getting them to try sports like football that girls aren't traditionally encouraged to play.

“There's a growing body of research about the benefits of young people participating in sports,” says Girls, Inc. Associate Executive Director Jennifer Weidenbaum. “We also know at Girls, Inc. that helping girls break gender stereotypes will not just increase their self esteem, but really help them break stereotypes in all areas of their lives.”

It looks like that idea is more than taking shape.

“We can also step up our game and show we can also play as good as the men can. I feel confident in this game,” says participant Sadia Akhter.