I’ve been playing sports ever since I could walk. Soccer was my first love, but hey — you name it, I probably tried it.
Truth is, sport has profoundly shaped my life in a thousand small ways and a handful of really, really big ones.
Sport has taught me how to work hard for something. How to be a good teammate. How to be a good leader. How to pick myself up and try again after I failed. Sport helped me cultivate healthy habits like daily movement and fueling my body to both feel good and perform well. It also helped me to build a healthy relationship with my body — seeing it as something that was so much more than something to be looked at. (A message that our girls hear all to often). Sport provided me with a family. Girls who were teammates, who became friends, that became sisters. These things… all of them… transcend sport. These lessons that I learned through my experience in athletics impact my life on a daily basis, still to this day.
I’m a better person because of sport.
So it’s really troubling that the latest research suggests that nationally, athletic participation is dropping at alarming rates. In virtually all ages and developmental stage brackets. For boys and girls — but especially with our girls. They’re dropping out faster, and much earlier than our boys. This is incredibly disappointing (heart-breaking?) for me to see, because through the 20+ years I’ve been immersed in sport — I’ve seen the countless ways that participation in athletics has profoundly changed kids’ lives.
Tomorrow I have the opportunity to be a part of the 2018 Women in Soccer Symposium here in Wisconsin. I’ll be moderating a panel on health and well-being, and helping our audience better understand the tangible things they can do as coaches, as parents, as administration to keep girls healthy, engaged, and growing into their best, most confident selves.
Really excited and feeling ridiculously grateful to have the opportunity to spend the whole day talking about the intersection between girls and sport w/ a bunch of passionate people who want to continue to push us forward, make us better, and keep girls in the game.
Because, it’s so much more than just a game.
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