National Sports Day for girls and women in the USA

February 7^th is National Sports Day for girls and women¹ in the USA to celebrate women’s achievement in sport and to encourage girls’ participation in sport. I think this is a great idea. Billie Jean King’s foundation ‘Women’s Sports Foundation’² is one of the 4 premiere organizations that are in this coalition supporting women in sport.

This is something I feel very strongly about having trained to become a professional tennis player on a shoestring and with only the support of my mother who was also my coach. That’s a tough, impossible ask but I learned a great deal from it and I’m pleased I gave it a go even if not very successfully. I haven’t given up tennis, I’m still a professional player member of the ITF. It was a combination of severe financial constraints and family crises, bereavements, together with unfavourable conditions at Uni to put it mildly that disrupted my tennis career. After completing my Uni degree/life, I carried on as an independent researcher in my field of philosophy but my parents’ long, drawn out, traumatic divorce and the knock-on effect of that has prevented me from returning to competitive matches. So now I am even more passionate about creating sporting opportunities for all girls and encouraging girls to take up exercise/sport whether as just a lifelong interest or as professional athletes which is one of the reasons I started this blog and I also wish to use my knowledge about tennis and sport in general to inform my interest in the relatively new field of the Philosophy of Sport. Nevertheless, I would also like to be involved in a more practical, grass-roots way too.

What did I learn? To think for myself and work together with my mother as coach and between us work out how best to train be it physical fitness or tennis practice. It was tailor-made for me. We didn’t follow any standard/pre-existing specific regime but rather created one that would suit me the best and help me with what I needed to improve. We covered everything, including nutrition, sports science, psychology, injury prevention/treatment, to fitness and tennis skills. We also learnt a great deal from both of us sitting down together and analysing matches on TV. I couldn’t possibly give a figure of how many hours I’ve watched tennis it would come to hundreds maybe a thousand. This enabled me to develop a deep understanding and love of the game.

My mother was, and is, very sporty, having played the usual school team sports. After school, she developed an interest in golf and spent time improving her game of tennis. She has been my fitness buddy and a hitting partner for me throughout my life, which is no small task when keeping up with an athlete! But she has an unnerving accuracy when placing the ball so I find myself scrambling after it since I hadn’t anticipated it there. She has unusual placement choices and an extreme grip that’s well disguised. So, right from the start, she encouraged me to be very physically active. I never walked anywhere, I ran. I was a good runner, learned to play tennis, table tennis, and had a children’s set of golf clubs to start me off on the game. I still love being physically active, even in daily life so will often walk instead of taking public transport and re-use my old trainers as slippers at home so I can run around the house faster! 

I took it all for granted and assumed that it was the norm but found that after a certain age girls tend to stop wanting to do sport. I’m not sure exactly what the reason is but, part of it is probably due to pressure in society that sport is unfeminine. We need to dispel this myth and promote women athletes and give girls lots of opportunities to participate in a great variety of sports with the view to continuing some form of exercise or sport throughout their lives. There have been some interesting, inspiring examples recently of women still being physically active well into their eighties and beyond eg table tennis, ballet, gymnastics, running. It would also make a huge difference if women’s sports had the same percentage of media coverage (TV, Radio, newspapers, online) as men’s sports. This is something that needs addressing. I remember wanting to play football when I was about eleven years old but it wasn’t easy to find a girls’ team and coverage of women’s football was non-existent. Now there’s some media coverage of the game, I love sitting down to watch women’s footie when it’s on TV!

¹http://ngwsd.org/about/

² https://www.womenssportsfoundation.org/advocate/ngwsd/