How to Create A Supportive Environment for Young Athletes
If girls refuse to play sports, how to convince them to stay in the game?
Young female empowerment is still an issue in today’s sports world. Parents and coaches must level up their game, support young athletes’ dreams, encourage them to reach their goals, and provide them with a supportive environment.
Encouraging and sustaining young female athletes is not just a popular concept. It’s a well-researched, powerful move that we as individuals and even as a community must do to ensure our girls’ physical, mental, and emotional health.
Today, schoolboys are far more physically active than girls in the same age range. This discrepancy occurs at a young age and goes through high school. Part of the physical activity gap can be attributed to lower levels of sports participation among girls.
Data from this report showed that a smaller percentage of high school girls engaged in one or more sports, as opposed to the higher percentage of high school boys.
This variation is caused mainly by the high rate at which girls in their teen years drop out of sports. When they reach 14, girls are 1.5x more inclined to stop playing sports than boys, and by the age of 17, more than half of girls drop out completely.
So why bother? If girls refuse to play sports, why should we direct so much time and effort to convince them to stay in the game?
Benefits of Youth Sports
The main reason is that playing a sport presents girls with advantages that will affect their entire existence.
These benefits include:
- decreased risk of cancer
- enhanced development skills (teamwork, leadership, and determination)
- boosted self-esteem
- advanced academic achievement
- lowered risk for obesity-related conditions (heart disease and diabetes)
- enhanced emotional strength and flexibility
Reasons Why Girls Keep Dropping Out Of Sports
Despite the many benefits of physical activity, girls keep dropping out of sports at a fast pace. There are many reasons behind their decision to quit youth sports. Here are just a few.
Internal Perception
One of the most significant influences on a girl’s decision to drop out of youth sports is her self-esteem. More than one-third of girls stated that they dropped out of sports because they thought their performance wasn’t enough. This lack of confidence can originate from body image issues, a lack of social acceptance, or the thought that they require more performant athletic skills.
External Influence
Although many campaigns encourage girls’ involvement in sports, many girls regard sports as an originally “male” occupation. Girls drop out of sports to avoid social stigmas, blend in with their peers, or proceed with other activities such as arts, music, or education.
Low-Quality Opportunities
As a generality, youth sports for girls still need trained coaches and proper financial support funding. This shortage, added to small budgets covering facilities, uniforms, and equipment, will affect sports participation, turning it into an unpleasant activity. Unsafe tour conditions and facilities will increase the decline in young female athletes’ attendance.
The challenge here is how to tackle all these influences.
Steps To Create A Supportive Environment for Young Female Athletes
If you are a parent or a coach and you want to create a supportive environment for young female athletes, we put together a list of steps you can follow to promote girls’ participation in youth sports. Your actions can empower the girls surrounding you.
Be Active
According to stats, girls are more inclined to prioritize sporting activities when their parents lead an active life. To incorporate sporting activities into your family’s routine, you could plan bike rides together, sign up in an exercise class together, or plan a friends and family soccer match.
Make Time for Sports Exercise
Encourage the young ones to prioritize exercise by being a role model and incorporating sports activities seamlessly into your daily routine. Make suggestions on how to fit sports into their schedule, such as getting an early walk-in before school or dividing the regular, longer sports sessions into several, shorter segments across their day.
Encourage and help: Join your girls in exploring new ways to remain active. From individual or team sports, choreography lessons, or scheduling after-school walking sessions, discover new methods for young athletes to include sports activities in their busy schedules.
Concentrate on Immediate Benefits
It may be a contradictory concept, but studies demonstrated that teens look at immediate benefits rather than long-term results. Discussing with the girls about the impact of an active life could boost their attendance in sports activities. One note is to focus on the immediate advantages, like an improved attitude, boosted energy levels, and increased self-esteem. Avoid mentioning appearance-related perks and highlights the mental and social benefits.
Make it a Habit
Starting sports at an early age will develop the skills and physical performance to be confident of their skills as they grow older. Attending sporting activities even from elementary school will turn physical activity into a habit, remaining a priority for girls even in adulthood.
Encourage Young Athletes to Speak Up
Encourage girls to speak up and defend themselves and express their needs or worries. Tell them there is nothing inappropriate for them to ask a team member or the coach belittling them to stop that or to point out an adult who is disrespectfully speaking to them. Ensure young female athletes that they can trust you and reach out to you for help.
Show Them How to Be Leaders
This is an opportunity for moms and female coaches to shine. Your girls should know that leadership isn’t destined only for men. Set an example through your actions, regardless if it’s your approach toward winning, the way you manage team problems, or even your style of practice.
Allow the Young Athletes to Fight Their Own Battles
You will notice the importance of this with the children playing sports from a young age through college. As they learn to fight their own battles in sports, their confidence and resilience will improve. This will be observed later in life, including at the professional and personal level. You will be more relieved being well aware that your girls aren’t pushed around or forced to do something they don’t approve of.
Believe in Them
Remember to constantly demonstrate and express your belief in girls, endorsing it with unconditional support and motivation. This can boost their self-esteem and confidence and reduce anxieties. Your young athletes will become more resilient to risk-taking circumstances.
Encourage Their Dads to Get Involved
The value of a father’s part in raising confident girls is well explained by Australian psychologist Steve Biddulph. He emphasizes that a father sets the tone for what she can expect from the future males in her life.
Most fathers are proactive when it comes to supporting their daughter athletes, but others are unconsciously crushing self-esteem by their inactions. Take, for example, a father of a very talented boy at football and a girl playing middle school basketball. The dad was present at every of his boy’s matches but was never to be found at his daughter’s basketball games. One can help but wonder how did that make her feel? You’d think it hurt her feelings of value in his eyes, and you’d be right.
Watch Together Women’s Sports
At first glance, male sports run media reports, but if you look closer, women’s sports are thriving. Take, for example, Serena Williams in tennis or Danica Patrick in racing.
Shed some light on the fact that sportsmanship and femininity aren’t contradictory terms and that sweat, hard work, and strength are not attributed just to male athletes.
Final Thoughts
Young female empowerment is still an issue in today’s sports world. Parents and coaches must level up their game, support young athletes’ dreams, encourage them to reach their goals, and provide them with a supportive environment.
Encouraging and sustaining young female athletes is not just a popular concept. It’s a well-researched, powerful move that we as individuals and even as a community must do to ensure our girls’ physical, mental, and emotional health.
Our project is to encourage sports participation and a healthy lifestyle for young athletes of all ages, skills, and backgrounds.
We hope that our efforts will improve the sporting youth experience. This way boys and girls will start to enjoy physical activities again while sharpening the skills and habits that will make playing sports an indispensable activity in their schedule.
(thank you to Andreea Purel for contributing to this article)
