Anna Geary’s on a mission to get girls back into sport
Half of all teenage girls drop out of sport from the age of 13, so Anna Geary decided to find out why and take on a team of youngsters to show them how much fun sport can be. She tells Mary Carr what they all learned from their experience
I‘They don’t want photos of themselves sweating’
t’s a measure of how the tentacles of All Ireland camogie star Anna Geary’s celebrity have spread beyond the sporting world, that so many of the exercise-averse girls of Ringsend College signed up to join her new ladies football team.
For it’s doubtful there would have been more than a trickle of names if Anna was a non-entity rather than a burgeoning TV and radio presenter, a coach on Ireland’s Fittest Family and Dancing With the Stars finalist. Or had she been unaccompanied by a film crew, to tap into the lifeblood of these hyper-connected Gen Z teenagers, promising them an unprecedented level of TV exposure to bolster their online popularity.
But whatever their motives, more than 30 girls whose ages range from 13 to 18 with varying levels of alacrity volunteered to unplug from social media to form a team which, under 33-year-old Anna’s expert tutelage, could compete in a GAA Blitz.
The resulting two-part documentary, Why Girls Quit Sport shows how with lashings of encouragement, innovation and an atmosphere of fun and positivity, the competitive spirit of teenage girls can be harnessed to undo their prejudice about sports and allow them enjoy something that is a lot healthier than the limited finger workouts that derive from endless scrolling on their phones or eyebrow raising exercises from watching Love Island.
‘I was so privileged to have a life in sport and I want other girls to experience that,’ says Anna, who lives in Kildare with her GAA official husband Kevin Sexton. ‘I have always loved sports and being a player, but this documentary has been a steep learning curve for me.
‘I admit that when I started, I thought that I’d teach the girls the basic skills of GAA football like handpasses and catches and then get them playing matches. But I had to quickly change tack — I realised that I went into it too competitive and too mainstream.
‘We chose this school because it had low sports participation for the girls, but the boys were engaged. They reflected the statistics from
Sports Ireland which show that from the age of 13 onwards about 50% of girls drop out of sports and that girls are about three times more likely to give up than boys.’
The girls offer various reasons, both amusing and self-deprecating for their reluctance to ever break out in a sweat in public. Thirteenyear-old Amber said, ‘I’d rather do home economics, maths, anything rather than PE.’ Another girl mused how ‘I can’t kick a ball for me dinner, I think I’m too lazy for it,’ while 15-year-old Holly, a keen DJ says, ‘my exercise would be walking to the shop and back’.
But through their sparkling personalities and candour the girls helped sports-mad Anna understand why they drop out even though some, like 17-year-old Erin who was an avid boxer and Sophie who liked football, regret it.
‘The documentary has really forced me to change my mindset,’ explains Anna who like many sporty people is intensely competitive, not to forget talented. With four All Ireland medals to her name, Anna has a cupboard of trophies and medals, and has been garlanded with praise for her sporting prowess all her life.
‘I always associated sports with winning and losing. But now I don’t think that sport is meant to be that serious, particularly if it means we are turning so many girls off it that it will become an elite pursuit for the one per cent and lose touch with the core focus of what it’s meant to be about.
‘I realise that even being on the Junior D team is worthwhile — it’s an outlet and it gives youngsters the opportunity to participate and get the benefits of friendship and play. Once the fun and craic are there, everything else will fall into place. Everyone has a right to feel good about themselves leaving the pitch.’
Anna, who grew up in rural Cork in the village of Milford, freely admits there wasn’t much to do besides the GAA or the Girl Guides, and that her farmer father and schoolteacher mother ‘threw’ her into the local GAA club, aged five.
The girls in the documentary are city girls, with a multitude of distractions at their fingertips and no
shortage of alternatives to the GAA.
Yet for all that, Anna maintains that ‘the biggest difference between these girls’ lives and mine is social media, without a shadow of a doubt. Some of them are borderline addicted, they are upset when their phones are charging or worried if the cable lead is too long.
‘Social media dropped out of the sky on all of us and it has particularly affected teenagers. They feel excluded if they are not on it. Their phone is going 24/7, if they are not scrolling through Instagram they are on Netflix.’ But social media also exacerbates the growing body consciousness of teenage girls which in turn has a bearing on their enthusiasm for sports.
‘Teenage girls are selfconscious and now they have the added challenge of having their images on WhatsApp groups and Snapchat,’ says Anna sympathetically.
‘They don’t want to see photographs of themselves sweating at sports or dressed in shorts or tshirts which some girls consider hideous. A lot of the girls would prefer to wear leggings on the pitch and why not? If it keeps them participating, what’s the harm? I also think we can offer girls different warm-up exercises. I knew the girls were into doing dance routines for TikTok so we did that for warm-ups which they enjoyed more than drills across the pitch. If we are continually losing girls to sports, we should be focussing on solutions, not just discussing the problem.’ As Anna puts the girls through their paces, she also talks to health specialists about the longterm effects of low female participation in
sports on mental health and general health. ‘Exercise is a wonder drug,’ says Niall Moyna from DCU’s School of Health and Human Performance.
The most penetrating contribution might come from Cliodhna O’Connor, former senior Dublin ladies’ footballer who suggested that schoolgirl sports is meant to be fun and that ‘you’re doing it wrong if it’s being run like an adult team’.
Covid interrupted the filming of the documentary, forcing Anna to conjure up a new way of completing the project while adhering to the contact sports ban.
Since giving up her career in corporate marketing she has diversified into broadcasting while also working as a performance and mindset coach. Over lockdown she also became an influencer, gaining more than 100,00 followers as a lifestyle-cum-fitness guru. ‘I love being involved with media, the energy and buzz is like what I got from camogie, if you make a mistake, you still have to keep going,’ she enthuses.
Despite her success, her career has not been without setbacks. Overcoming sporting disappointment taught her resilience, she says, but they also gave her insights that helped her
‘We did TikTok dance routines for the warm-up’
keep her fledging GAA team engaged.
‘I hope the documentary makes parents and coaches think about getting girls involved and if they have given up, getting girls to try again. Success for a coach should be about having 20 girls walk in the gate at the start of the summer and 21 girls coming back the next summer. At younger level, success is retention. And the first question a parent should ask when their child gets into the car is not “well, did ye win?” but “well, did ye have fun?”’ Why Girls Quit Sport airs on Thursday, July 15 and 22, RTE 2 at 9.30pm.