You’re 12 or 13 years old, have started secondary school, everything is changing, including how you look, how you feel and how you feel about how you look. You’ve been swimming at your local pool for years; nothing major, just lessons.
Then you get your period; you know about it but it’s awkward. You don’t know what to do. Would the pool go red if you got in? Would it be your fault? Would everyone know?
Even the walk from the changing room to the pool feels new, your body developing and exposed, making you want to shrink. What to do? Call in sick, go back next week? That’ll work.
But then, of course, that happens every month and it’s too much effort to think of a new excuse every time. So you don’t go back. Not worth the hassle. Afternoons when you once had swimming are now free. What to do instead? Maybe join a new sport? But you don’t want to go in with people who’ve been playing for years, so maybe you just won’t bother.
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These types of mental obstacles are what the Sport Ireland Her Moves campaign is looking to work through with practical solutions. It has long been reported that teenage girls drop out of sport but the reasons vary between sports and individuals.
“It’s the layers of challenges that they’re facing,” says Nora Stapleton, Sport Ireland’s director of strategic national governing body programmes and the organisation’s women in sport lead. “There’s the change in hormones, the introduction of your menstrual cycle, the navigating of that teenage life stage, the impact of social media, peer pressure – whether you’re in a group or not.”
The solution to getting teenagers involved in sport doesn’t lie in simply telling them they will enjoy it once they get used to it, says Stapleton. It entails, in the first instance, acknowledging the barriers they face.
“Some of them are internal barriers – fear of judgment; they don’t have confidence; they feel they’re not going to be good enough,” she says. “How do we start to reduce some of those so that they’re encouraged to then come on board and try out something?
“Girls were telling us that they don’t have enough opportunities to try new sports. They don’t have enough opportunities to try sports as beginners in something.”
If you don’t provide young people with information they will fill in the blanks for themselves, possibly with inaccurate and limiting beliefs. Part of the Her Moves campaign is to demystify sport and concepts around it before wrong ideas have time to develop. Sport Ireland contacted girls themselves and asked them, what would a campaign look like?
“So the girls are the ones that came up with the name Her Moves. They came up with the look, the feel, the colours – everything that’s associated with it,” says Stapleton.
Thammy Nguyen, who became the first Irish weightlifter to win a medal at the senior European Weightlifting Championships, winning bronze earlier this year, visited schools in Ashbourne and Balbriggan as part of the campaign. Stapleton describes her as a “fireball of energy”.
“She is so small and so strong and the girls were in awe of her,” she says. “They were like, ‘Oh my God, she’s lifted these incredibly heavy weights and she looks like we do.’ It’s breaking down that stereotype of what they think of when they think about what ‘sporty’ is.”
Weightlifting as a sport was something that girls in the schools Nguyen visited as part of the Her Moves campaign hadn’t previously considered. “Thammy just made it so cool and so natural,” says Stapleton. “And so they all got to try out weightlifting.”
Stapleton points out that weight training is important for girls as they develop muscle mass and bone density in their teenage years.
“When they get to age 30 or 40 and when they start hitting perimenopause and menopause, it makes such a difference,” she says.
Before they get there, teenagers need clarity on another chapter of their life: menstruation. “Normalise the discussion around periods to normalise the fact that taking part in sports on your period is okay,” says Stapleton. “It can actually be really good for you and it shouldn’t be something that you should be nervous about.”
Once it’s known that you can, it then becomes about how. Take swimming. Swim Ireland has Aqua Moves, a programme that introduces girls to artistic aerobics, previously known as synchronised swimming.
“When they first meet the girls, they give them a talk about periods,” says Stapleton. “They tell them: ‘If you have a period, that’s fine. Here’s what you can do: you can still swim – please don’t feel that you can’t.’ They even give them tampons and they encourage them to open them up and just have a look at them and the girls start showing one another how to use them and things like that if they’ve never used the tampon before.”
Swim Ireland also has rash vests and poolside ponchos for those who want to feel covered up from the changing room to the pool. Period swimwear is available in stores.
Sport Ireland has workshops for coaches in all sports, the aim of which is to explain how to foster a more welcoming environment. Topics covered include how to foster a sense of fun – which, of course, teenage girls crave – in a team environment, says Stapleton.
“The menstrual cycle is included too,” she adds. “We encourage coaches to have a period pack if they have kit bags. Coaches should tell the teenagers about the pack. Just say it loud so that it doesn’t become a big deal for them: ‘There’s a period pack in the kit bag; if you ever need anything from it, work away or come to one of us.’ You can’t beat that, where the girls feel at ease with it and that they’re never going to be stuck.”
It’s not just about finding a sport and then sticking with it. It’s about moving as you get older and interests change. The campaign also incorporates other elements of teenagers’ interests, including leadership programmes, with older students in a school helping younger ones; designing table-tennis tables for them to play on; surfing, with a beach clean-up afterwards.
“I’m trying to tell them [girls involved] that it’s about taking part,” says Stapleton. “It’s not that you have to take part and then you train and then you’re going to have to play a competition. It’s not like that. we’re saying it’s just about enjoying something and wanting to do that sport again.”
As the landscape for women and girls in sport changes for the better, the idea is that the teenager who faces doubts feels equipped and informed enough to take a leap of faith and dive right in. No matter how she moves.
