We need a Miss Jean Brodie to give Scots a Serena

POOR Serena Williams. She’s won 23 Grand Slam titles, four Olympic gold medals and spent an astounding 309 weeks as the world number one. But can she get on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine? Not on your nelly.

Instead, all three covers (three!) of this year’s famed Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition go to a well-endowed 24-year-old model named Kate Upton, whose crowning sporting achievement is participating in a Taco Bell All Star Legends and Celebrity Softball Game.

Meanwhile, the greatest female tennis player of all time must be content with a few pictures inside the mag. You can almost hear the sound of Judy Murray gnashing her teeth from here.

Judy has been on the warpath again, as well she should. Given the amount of time Andy and Jamie’s mother has spent traipsing up and down the country trying to get young people into tennis over the past few decades, I’m not sure anyone knows more about the difficulties of getting young people – and particularly young women – into the sport.

And it is difficult. According to SportScotland, while 71 per cent of boys are active in sport, only 51 per cent of girls say the same. Girls tend to drop out of sport at 11 or 12 when, as Judy says, ‘the body awareness stuff is taking over’. A sobering thought: it used to be 15.

Part of the problem, she points out, is capturing girls’ attention when their role models tend to be ‘models and reality TV stars’ rather than the Williams sisters. So what is the answer? Judy thinks it may be same-sex PE lessons.

‘When it comes to girls,’ she says, ‘we need to have more girl-only activity because girls are often intimidated and put off by boys as they get older.’

I am probably showing my age when I say I attended a girls’ school. Back then Glasgow was full of them, all with distinctive uniforms (mine’s most notable feature was a Miss Jean Brodie-esque round collared blouse and no tie).

Now they are rarer than a Scottish team at a World Cup tournament, and viewed as a throwback to prim and proper educational days of yore.

Yet I loved my single-sex education. I was rubbish at tennis but those with talent excelled, allowed to get hot and sweaty on the court without any boys on the sidelines giggling at them.

WHETHER it was PE, chemistry, English or woodwork, there were no boys to be pitted against, put off by or look pretty for, and though we moaned about it at the time (and forged many a friendship with the young gentlemen from nearby boys’ schools) most of the old girls in my year would agree: singlesex education was the making of us.

This is not just nostalgia. Girls have been consistently proven for years to perform better at single-sex schools than mixed ones. Education standards across the board are higher. It works.

I hope someone is listening to Judy Murray and that the notion of single-sex PE classes moves forward. I hope, too, that someone shows today’s young women those pictures of Serena Williams lurking inside the covers of Sports Illustrated. She looks strong, toned and muscular – a fearless athlete in peak condition at the very top of her game.

If that’s not something for young women to aspire to in today’s body conscious world, I don’t know what is.