My friend’s daughter, Maisie, is nearly 7 years old. I was playing with Maisie in the back garden at the weekend, just kicking a ball about. “Do you like sport?” I asked her. She wrinkled her nose. “Not really. Sport is for boys and I’m rubbish anyway.” Maisie’s Dad is a certified sports geek and a 5-a-side footballer. Her Mum enjoyed sport throughout her teens and twenties and is now a keen runner and gym-goer. What happened?
We know a considerable amount about WHAT affects girls’ relationship to sport – such as their school experiences, a lack of female role models, and the limited portrayal of women’s sport in the media. What we are unclear about is HOW the process of disaffection from sport occurs. When they are very young, girls (like boys) are active and playful but by the time they reach young adulthood, almost half are not. When do girls turn away from an active, sporty lifestyle, and how does this process occur?
For the sake of the next generation, we must begin to better understand this. WSFF has teamed up with the Institute of Youth Sport, and with the kind support of the Big Lottery Fund, have launched a two year programme of qualitative and quantitative research to establish exactly how and when in the lifecycle these attitudes are formed, and how their impact can be lessened. The Youth Sport Trust will partner with us to disseminate results, and a steering group made up of the great and the good in the sport, fitness, health and education sector will check and challenge our findings. Results will be published in autumn 2011. For Maisie and her friends, it can’t come soon enough.
Check back at www.wsff.org.uk for regular updates on the project.
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