YSI girls in sport initiative

Our Young Social Innovators team has been working all year to promote women in sport. Our team wanted to focus on the huge inequalities that lie in the support available for women’s sport worldwide, and do what we can to help tackle this issue in our local area. The UNESCO Sport and Gender Equality Game Plan aims to address 3 huge issues:

1. Reducing Gender Based Violence in sport

2. Reducing teenage girls dropout from sport

3. More women needed in sports leadership roles

4. 
   

This plan serves as a roadmap for governments and sports organisations in reducing gender equality in sports. While all three goals are extremely important, we decided to focus on reducing teenage girls’ dropout from sport. According to this study, a massive 49% of girls drop out of sport during adolescence, which is six times higher than the drop out rate of adolescent boys. We believe that this is a massive problem.

To help tackle this problem, we have started a number of initiatives. From the beginning of the year, we have opened the sports hall in our school to female students of all ages on a Monday lunch, to encourage them to stay active during the school year. It has been a great success, and we believe it has been very successful in promoting girls sport within the school community. In November, we were very lucky to have RTÉ sports broadcaster and retired basketball and camogie star, Jacqui Hurley come in to speak with our first year girls. The event was a huge success, and all were inspired after her presentation. Two members of our team also put together an educational slideshow about the staggering inequalities that lie between support for men and women in sport. They delivered this slideshow to Junior SPHE classes. It was especially important to us to target the younger population of our school, as we hope to reduce the drop out rate that inevitably occurs in secondary school. 

In more recent months, we have focused on creating a book that gives much due credit to local sport stars. The book has come together beautifully, with artwork from art students throughout the school. We focused on eight Wicklow sportswomen, both retired and present. The book will be published in late spring, and we aim to distribute it among local primary schools and to the library. 

In the third week of January, we welcomed local 6th class girls into the school for a sports day followed by a Q&A session with local sports stars. Due to the unfortunate weather, we were stuck inside, but we still had a fantastic time. The girls were led through a few rotations of different sports, competition was high! Later on, Wicklow football captain Lucy Dunne of Wicklow town, and All-Ireland football champion Laurie Ahern from our very own Greystones very kindly came over for a Q&A and refreshments, provided by our own home ec committee and YSI group. The day was a huge success and also worked as a great way to welcome some incoming first year students.

It has been a busy year for us, but we hope to have encouraged even one girl to stay in sport. None of this would have been possible with the unwavering support from Ms Foynes, Ms Duggan, Mr Cummins, Ms Dempsey and Ms Nevin and the whole school community and principal Mr Carey. We are truly passionate about this issue, and are grateful for the opportunity to share this with others.

Reporter: Melanie Porter

Photographers: Alannah Smith, Conor Byrne and Sadhbh Doyle