* Tribune…

U.S. Rep. Cheri Bustos is among female athletes featured in Sports Illustrated’s Campus Rush in a story examining the correlation between women who left the playing field for the political arena.

Bustos, a Democrat who represents the 17th Congressional District in the state’s northwestern corner, played volleyball and basketball while attending Illinois College in Jacksonville. Now she’s the shortstop for the Congressional Women’s Softball Team.

The women in the story said sports taught them to be competitive, show teamwork and not to stew after defeat.

Another Illinoisan in the piece: Susana Mendoza, a Democrat running for Illinois comptroller who was all-conference in soccer at what’s now known as Truman State University in Missouri. She’s now Chicago city clerk.

In the past, SI says, women were left on the sidelines in politics and sports. The magazine noted that in 1961, the Amateur Athletic Union barred women from road races after “fringe opponents” worried “that a woman might run so hard, and so fast, her uterus could just fall out.”

* From the story, a version of which also ran in the magazine…

A 2013 study from the Women & Politics Institute found that women who played sports were 25% more likely to express political aspirations than those who did not. It certainly made a difference for Cheri Bustos (D., Ill.), who has been in the House of Representatives since 2013 and is currently seeking reelection. Bustos grew up in an “incredibly competitive neighborhood” with siblings who each received offers to play Division I sports: basketball for her sister, Lynn, and baseball for her brother, Dan. (Her father, Gene Callahan, was the lobbyist for Major League Baseball when Congress threatened to strip the league of its anti-trust exemption.) To earn a spot in pickup games, “you had to prove yourself, every single day,” Bustos says. That competitiveness fueled her at Illinois College, a Division III school in Jacksonville, where she played volleyball and basketball, and propelled her into politics—another competitive arena.

Bustos isn’t the only female former athlete on the campaign trail. Susana Mendoza, who was all-conference in soccer at Northeast Missouri State, is running for Illinois comptroller. Senator Kelly Ayotte (R., N.H.), who’s up for reelection, was on the ski team at Penn State, while her colleague Kirsten Gillibrand (D., N.Y.) played tennis and squash at Dartmouth. Gillibrand told The Times that sports “took the fear out of losing.”

Gillibrand and Bustos formed a friendship through the Congressional Women’s Softball Team, which plays the Washington Women’s Press Corps every June in a game benefitting the Young Survival Coalition. (Gillibrand is one of the team’s pitchers; Bustos plays shortstop.) They are also tennis partners, often playing singles matches in the morning before work. It was during that time, in multiple conversations over the net, that Gillibrand, a passionate advocate of sexual assault prevention and education, persuaded Bustos to join her in working to address campus sexual assault. They’ve both been vocal supporters of the Campus Accountability and Safety Act.

“At practice, you’re talking about everything: Your family, your kids, legislation,” Bustos says. “I’ve built close enough relationships with people there that it’s led to me to crossing the aisle legislatively and do things that were good for our country.”