Girls and Women in Sports Day

Girls and Women in Sports Day 

This week (1st week of February) is Girls and Women in Sports Day (in the USA). Girls and women means ALL who identify as girls and women, trans and intersex included! 

We can go around saying- oh yes, we must get girls and women into sport, get them active, all they need is a pep talk and a bit of encouragement and all will be well. We'll have lots of girls and women in sport soon, they'll be no holding them back! But this is a rather dispassionate and uninvolved take on the issue. So what I'm going to do here is my personal angle on it, my personal experience as a sporty woman who doesn't have family who have worked in the Sports world. 

I was always physically active, literally from a few months old, whether I was jumping up and down on my mother's lap with her holding my hands or whether I was playing my percussion instruments on the sofa. Dancing and walking came at practically at the same time and by 1 & 1/2 I'd already started throwing and catching a ball and doing sports like skittles 🎳 for kids ie plastic skittles and a soft ball. By 3, I was already using a climbing frame meant for older children and I took my first steps onto a tennis court (outdoor red clay). By this age I also had a tiny golf club set for small children, the driver had a plastic end instead of a wooden one. So after tennis practice 🎾on the (paying) public clay court, I transferred to the grass area of the park and learnt to drive 🏌and putt. I used the rounded hole in the earth around a young tree as my putting hole! ⛳ Back home, I had a trampoline which I loved to use daily and my climbing frame which I enjoyed climbing all over and doing stuff - sometimes dangerous stuff so I was occasionally given a helmet to wear in case my manoeuvre misfired and I fell on my head! By 3 years 11 months, I was in Kindergarten doing ballet and gymnastics. From the time I could walk, I ran everywhere. By the age of 4, I was at Theatre School, I was doing tap and drama (I could read which was the entrance requirement). When I reached the age of 5, I was doing ballet classes there too and began group tennis classes at a National Tennis Training Centre, as well as adding more sports as part of fitness and to acquire more ball and racquet skills. So by the age of 5, I've probably done more fitness and sport than most kids. You'd think, here's a girl who's all set for a career as a sportswoman! Yes? 🤔 Well, yes and no. 

Yes in terms of I'm doing sport early on, I have a parent who is very sporty, participates in it with me herself and coaches me in all of them. And yes it's enough if your goal is for girls and women to merely participate in sport in some way e.g. as a hobby instead of only doing sedentary activities. However, even that is not enough. You need local facilities and ones which encourage and expect girls (or women) to participate in the activities/sports on offer. So for instance, I wanted to join a girls' football team around the age of 11 ⚽. But there wasn't a team for girls anywhere nearby within 10 miles or one that accepted girls on their team. So as compensation, my mother bought me a football ⚽ and as time went by, she gave me a few more and she encouraged me to learn some football skills and football footwork while playing footie in the park with her. She'd played mixed (girls and boys) football during lunch time with kids when teaching at weekends so she knew a few footie moves! (Maybe I should check out whether the situation has changed since then in my area for girls and women's football, but I'm not aware of any off the cuff.) 

No, in terms of - that's not enough if you want to do sport professionally. For instance, you won't make it on just group tennis classes. The vast majority of coaches are men, if you are very lucky, you might spot a woman as a lower ranked coach. So you don't have a role model like the boys and it creates a toxic masculinity at sports clubs, even at a children's class level. Not that I had any problems with the boys! I was good at tennis, generally sporty and I was used to having boys as my mates in the playground at school, possibly because I was as physically active as they were. I could climb up fences and hang over the edge like they did whereas girls were tentative about things like that so boys lost interest in them. 

Back to sports clubs, the coaches don't talent spot girls the way they talent spot boys. First problem! Second problem, they want to keep girls down at just being children playing at playing tennis and can become very negative towards you and start gossiping about you because you are kicking up a gear and training seriously. Worse still, if your coach is your mother, not your father, then that's taken more negatively than e.g. boys being taught by their fathers. They are negative about women coaches, never mind women players! Fine if you are wealthy enough to have a tennis court in your back garden but if not, you simply can't get enough hours in, whether it's a sports club or a public court. Most public courts are tarmac and in poor condition. Besides, everyone needs a club because you need different surfaces and access to indoor courts. They also have this expectation that you should be using a coach but that is prohibitively expensive. You can join a junior tennis scheme but that's not perfect either. In my day, it would have disrupted my education because it's only recently that junior schemes try to pair up with a school and provide an educational system alongside the tennis training.

However, I'm not sure how well this is working, since British women's tennis is still not doing that well. This week, Konta didn't go deep into the first tournament in Australia (3rd round Gippsland Cup) and has only kept her ranking in the top 15 due to C-19 rule changes which count your last 2 years results towards your world ranking. And Konta hasn't only come through the British / LTA system because she started in the Australian tennis system at the age of 8 (and represented them until 2012) then trained at the Sanchez-Casal Academy in Spain at the age of 14, for 15 months before settling in Eastbourne, UK. Even so, after turning pro in 2008, it took her until 2015 to break into the top 50, then a further 2 years to make it to world number 4. If I had a career like that, peaking at number 4, I'd be very proud of myself and think - good job! 👍🙂 But the point is, she hadn't had to come through the British system as a child, she trained in other countries and her grandfather was a top footballer and a good football coach. So this isn't your average British kid growing up in the UK, navigating the British tennis system. Interestingly enough, Konta is the first woman since Jo Durie (who was in the elite group of British women players: Ann Jones, Virginia Wade, Sue Barker) to be that successful. 

Only Andy Murray has done better but his mother was an LTA coach working in the British tennis system and, I think I'm right in thinking, he received LTA funding for him to train in Spain. His brother stayed in the British system and was less successful in singles. 

Having written this, I've suddenly realised I should have gone to Spain to train! I can speak Spanish, this could have been done! Except for the funding...🤔 forgot that bit. 

And there's another problem - you need to be a millionaire or rely on your National Tennis system to fund you very well and consistently every year just to get started and even then, there's no guarantees and it takes a lot of years on the tour to be even within sniffing distance of being in the top 100. Until you are in the top 100, you don't break even between tournament /travel /accommodation /equipment etc expenses and prize money. People have this fantastical idea that tennis players earn a lot of prize money 💰 - no, that's only if you are playing on the WTA circuit, going deep into Grand Slams and are consistently in the top 10. 

I was going to ITF tournaments with only 1 new, recently strung racquet and my back-up racquets were older versions, different makes and worn out, original factory strings. Later on, I learnt that you should never jump into playing with a new racquet and you stick to racquets with a similar feel to your childhood one, preferably the same make too. I've always played with a heavy racquet and there I was at the tournaments with the lightest racquet I'd ever had! I think the thinking was, I could get a better whip on it with a faster racquet head speed. 

Then later, I found out that the strings I was provided with by the ITF tournament stringer (who strung them for me) were amateur level strings (apparently strung for power! 😂), which is why, even though I was hitting very hard😤, I didn't understand why the ball wasn't going deep into the court😲😮😯. That also meant the strings didn't respond properly to my opponent's hard hitting ball😠. And, when using fresh balls out of the tin, controlling the ball is challenging under these conditions😤. Never mind that I didn't know the first thing about my opponents 🤔 and had very little practice time at the tournament with very old balls handed out by the tournament. The surface was equally new to me because all my tournaments were clay or grass, the two surfaces I had least experience in 😪 and change the most between tournaments. I had next to no experience in grass because, ironically, it's very difficult to find real grass courts to play on in the UK. I had only played on artificial grass the previous couple of years😢 and practised just once on a real grass court 😭by travelling to Eastbourne (one of the outside courts used at the WTA tournament there). 

Given all this, it is not surprising that parents are hesitant for their daughters to go into sport, especially if (even when the parent is sporty) they don't have experience in working in the sports world in some way. Not that this has helped me in academia, where both my parents have degrees and my mother has done postgrad too, she understands the university system very well yet she was totally baffled by the problems and prejudices I was experiencing at uni and had never seen anything like it and didn't know how to tackle it because it's just something that's not supposed to happen in the first place. 

So when we say we want girls in sport, we should also be aiming for them being involved at professional level and working backwards to see how best we can help them achieve this in large numbers. For the many, not the few. It's nice to have Jones, Wade, Barker, Durie and then much later, Konta, but that's over a long period of time. And Laura Robson? She's had quite a few injury problems for several years and so has struggled to stay in the rankings, despite reaching a high of 27 and winning a Silver Medal at the Olympics. Her family are wealthy and her mother was a professional basketball player and sports coach. So one can see that a sports career is fraught (mind you, so is an academic one despite being a traditional career choice). It's difficult to know in advance who's going be successful. The USA has a 'blue chip' system which the Williams sisters participated in, which maybe makes a lot of difference to some players. This Blue Chip status gained through the USTA junior tennis system gives you a choice of a scholarship to uni or turning professional under 18 and so being fast-tracked onto the WTA. If the UK had that blue chip system and I had blue chip status, I would have chosen to turn professional under 18 rather than go to uni because there is always the danger of getting stuck as a college player only. 

So, in conclusion, it's not just encouragement, pep talks, role models, mentors and getting rid of sexism and prejudice against sporty girls that's needed. There's also a severe lack of tennis academies in the UK! By this I mean e.g. Nadal's tennis academy, the Sanchez-Casal tennis academy, Bollettieri tennis academy, Evert tennis academy etc. Young British players shouldn't have to go outside the UK just to train at an academy for a year or two. So it's even more important in the UK that there should be easily available, heavily subsidised sports facilities so they are free or very affordable, and have a National System that has a great infrastructure which funds all girls to train and travel to competitions. And you need many of them so they can push each other on - there's no point in having the token one. That doesn't help anyone, not even the lucky token one.