Campaign urges more women and girls to take part in sports activities
A CAMPAIGN to encourage more Welsh women and girls to get involved in sport has been launched.
Sport Wales’ Our Squad campaign aims to get women involved in sport regardless of fitness level, ability or activity.
And as part of the first phase, the campaign is looking for Welsh women and girls willing to be part of a “virtual squad” to share their positive experiences of sport. They will be assisted by sporting ambassadors from around Wales.
It comes after research shows fewer women and girls are taking part in sport than their male counterparts.
In a recent study, 576,000 women in Wales said they don’t currently participate in any form of activity, while 54% say they’ve done at least one sporting activity in the past four weeks, compared with 63% of men.
Sarah Powell, chief executive of Sport Wales, hopes Our Squad will allow women to share their positive experiences of sport and encourage other women and girls to try new activities.
She said: “There are some truly outstanding programmes and projects out there already successfully engaging women and girls – whether it’s Streetgames’ Us Girls programme, Run Wales’ social running programme or Merthyr Girls Can’s life-changing fitness programme.
“They are making sport and physical activity, and the many benefits that come with it, more accessible for females and it’s usually down to the people who run the projects and take the time to ensure others have a good experience.”
She added: “Together with our partners, we want to showcase these opportunities and give a platform to the ladies who have helped to break down barriers for other women and girls to enable them to try something new or get back into sport.”
The campaign launched across Sport Wales’ social media channels on Monday. Women and girls looking to be a part of Our Squad are invited to like its Facebook page and follow on Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram. Jin was inspired to become a fitness instructor after her passion for sport helped her overcome depression in her teenage years.
Since then, the 34-yearold says her active lifestyle has saved her life after she was diagnosed with a rare auto-immune disease which causes the walls of her blood vessels to become inflamed.
Jin believes attitudes to sport should be more about its health benefits and the fun that exercise can bring, as opposed to what it does to our physical appearance.
“Everyone has their issues with their weight, but I feel like we put too much pressure on how we look and trying to look a certain way,” Jin said. “Sport shouldn’t be about looking like Instagram models, it should be about being real and having a realistic goal about your body.” Having lost interest in sport by her teenage years, 35-year-old Stephanie Howarth’s friends invited her to watch a Tiger Bay Brawlers roller derby game.
The experience ignited a passion for the sport which has since taken Stephanie to international tournaments and introduced her to a “second family”.
“They said it was really cool so I thought I would go and have a watch,” Stephanie, from Cardiff, said.
“And it was really cool – there were these strong, fearsome women, some of them with tattoos, and I thought, ‘This is something I want to be a part of’.” At 26, Caroline was told by doctors that she would never run or jump again due to an aggressive form of osteoarthritis in both knees.
Despite this, the 43-yearold went on to represent Team GB at the 2004 and 2008 Paralympic Games and now coaches her own wheelchair basketball squad.
“I thought losing the ability to run would be the end of the world,” she said. “But it ended up leading to sporting opportunities I would never otherwise have had.”