The high five is the universal sign of celebration.

And Brandi Chastain, perhaps the most iconic American soccer player this side of Mia Hamm has given hundreds of them during her lifetime, maybe even thousands.

"A million probably," she says. "I love giving high fives. I love it because it makes me feel good and hopefully makes someone else feel good. It's kind of empowering."

Over the past three years, Chastain has been trying to spread that power to girls across the Bay Area, one hand slap at a time. The retired three-time Olympian who has played for the United States in three World Cups will be in Santa Cruz on Saturday to share high fives and some of the lessons has learned from playing sports while speaking at a National Girls and Women in Sports Day event at UC Santa Cruz. In May, she hopes to help local girls put those lessons into practice when she brings her active after-school program to Gault School in Santa Cruz.

Chastain intends for the girls to learn teamwork and assertiveness, to improve their positive body image and feel the effects of good health. They are the kinds of attributes people often glean through having active lifestyles and playing sports. Yet as Chastain has discovered, the universal sign of celebration has became a sign that girls still need encouragement when it comes to trying sports.

She remembers reaching up to give one girl a high five at the end of one of the first sessions of he after-school program. The girl just stared back at her like she was a madwoman.

"I was giving them high fives, and they didn't even know what a high five was," Chastain recalls. "It's just normal, right? But for some of these girls it was so foreign and kind of weird. Now they're giving each other high fives all the time."

Chastain realized years ago that boys and girls are treated differently when it comes to athletic opportunities, even three decades after the enactment of Title IX, which was designed to provide equal opportunities for men and women in sports. However, support for women's athletics began to swell in the late '90s with the debut of the WNBA and the success of the U.S. women's national soccer team. Chastain played a part in putting women's sports in the spotlight with her sports bra-bearing celebration in front of 90,000 fans after making the game-winning penalty kick in the Women's World Cup. It became an iconic moment and landed her on posters on many a little girl's wall.

Some of that excitement was in danger of waning in 2003 after the collapse of the WUSA professional women's soccer league. To keep the support for women's sports thriving, Chastain, teammate Julie Foudy and Marlene Bjornsrud, the former general manager of the WUSA's San Jose CyberRays formed the Bay Area Women's Sports Initiative.

"We didn't know what we were doing," Chastain says of the program's early going. "We were all hopes and no expectations."

The program was an instant success. One school's principal told them to expect no more than 20 girls, but 90 returned permission slips for the program. To deal with the numbers, organizers recruit athletes from college programs, like the San Jose State University women's basketball team, to help out. Once a week, they take the girls in small groups through a series of stations that include activities like jumping rope or juggling a soccer ball, as well as discussions about words like "confidence" and "leader."

Every week the girls learn something new. And every week, Chastain celebrates their progress by sharing a high five. Their high fives get better, too.

They go from timidly raising their hands to receive a high five, to gently touching hands, to eagerly seeking out people to slap hands with. Chastain says she sees parallels between the girls' evolving high fives and the development of their personalities. And she links it all to the power of sports in making the young girls confident and assertive.

"It's the reason I get so excited about sports in general for girls," she says. "It's the kind of camaraderie you get."

BAWSI has begun promoting that kind of growth to girls and women outside the Bay Area and Santa Cruz. Recently, schools in Arizona, New Mexico and Mexico have also shown interest in the program. That's fine with Chastain, who is happy to keep inspiring girls even though she spends less time on the field than public speaking and caring for her 20-month old son Jaden [who already knows how to give a high five "to the side, down low, the whole thing," Chastain says].

"I love to encourage women and girls to do things they're passionate about -- just to push forward and never let anything get in your way," she added. "Because the alternative is what, stopping and doing what everyone else wants you to do? No way. No way."

High five to that.