#it's haaard espeically bbeing not as fit from covid

[petrareads]

My dad is a PE teacher and he’s told me a few times that a lot of girls who enjoy sports don’t continue after high school. I did some digging and there’s a lot of reason why girls not only stop sports after high school, but are discouraged from joining in the first place:

I think most of the reasons boil down to these three: 

less opportunities / sports teams  

at my school we had to actively ask other students to join our football team because we often didn’t have enough girls. At uni, none of my friends like sports & those who I saw playing are really good. There’s no middle level team.

not as many female role models / coaches

the years I had female coaches were the years that my team and I were pushed. Male coaches were always well intended, but we weren't expected to want to push ourselves and therefore we didn’t. 

and the big one LACK OF CONFIDENCE

Without trying to be braggy, but I was pretty good at sports in high school. But there’s this thing called spotlight anxiety and it stems from negative stereotypes or “stereotype threat.” This theory suggests that when there’s a dominant stereotype against a certain group of people, -such as girls shouldn’t play sport/boys are just better - their behaviour changes. 

This behaviour change is based on spotlight anxiety. We all KNOW the stereotypes aren’t true but we still are emotionally affected by them. We either 1) subconsciously believe them or 2) under-perform because we’re stressed to prove the stereotypes right. 

This happened a lot to me when my girls football team trained with the boys. By ourselves we would be great team workers and put all our effort into the game. But with the boys - they took over. I was worried about making moves because I didn’t want to mess up and embarrass myself. They actively didn’t include us because they thought we were kinda shit. 

I know this is a long post but I just wanted to say to you girls out there who are like me and desperately want to get into sports again but finding it difficult after being separated from that world - you got this. And to any girls who never took it up as a kid but are interested now, go for it!!! 

#unless that's a covid risk #that should be obvious #also this is the first long post about such an irrelevant topic to books #I just thought I should right more opinion things?? #and my friend posted a picture of our old sports team and it reminded me of this #and I've been thinking about trying to get back into sports for like two years #it's haaard espeically bbeing not as fit from covid #knocking another bit of confidence #but i'll do it back in NZ!! #and hopefully make some friends hahah #petrareads #petraposts #sports #feminism #psychology #gender stereotyping #stereotypes #spotlight anixety #PE #football