TACKLING COACHING INEQUITIES: BREAKING BARRIERS
PLAYING IN A SYSTEM DESIGNED FOR MEN
Today, sports are still actively constructed, organized, and promoted as a man’s activity.
Despite the soaring numbers of women actively involved in sports, this dynamic continues. Because gender biases reduce the attention given to women’s sports, women’s sports are less visible at all levels of society. This directly — and negatively — impacts the opportunities girls and women have to participate at all.
There are many obstacles to tackle in the journey toward equity in the sports world, but adidas is taking the first step by identifying these systemic barriers and offering solutions for a better future. In the newly-released research paper, Empowering her Game: Exploring the Importance of Gender-Informed Coaching, the adidas Breaking Barriers Project explores the role the coaching structure plays in this gender gap in sports, specifically when it comes to girls’ disproportionate drop-out rates in adolescence.
EQUITABLE COACHING PRACTICES MATTER
Coaches are key influencers for adolescent players and their sustained involvement in sports. What adidas found, however, is that the current coaching system is designed to maintain gender barriers — not break them.
Women and girls face unique obstacles in sports that mirror cultural and structural inequities. While slow progress has been made, the system still fails to address inequitable gender dynamics around participation, leadership, and governance. The adidas Breaking Barriers team found that these inequities are pervasive in coaching — both in terms of who is coaching girls and how they are being coached.
After extensive research through interviews with experts in girls sports, focus groups, and online questionnaires, adidas deduced three root causes of coaching as a barrier to girls’ participation: institutionalized biases, existing pedagogies, and coach-athlete relationships.
THE RIPPLE EFFECT OF INSTITUTIONALIZED BIASES
The gendered institution of coaching and related barriers to women’s coaching pathways negatively impacts on-pitch experiences for girls, creating an aspiration gap.
There is limited prestige associated with coaching women’s teams. This lower valuation of women’s sports at a cultural level creates a range of structural barriers, including a lack of social incentive and financial backing, impacting the talent pipeline for coaching girls’ sports and consequently the quality of coaching that girls receive. The over-representation of men in coaching is maintained by the lack of stability and gender considerations in coaching opportunities for and by women.
When girls can’t see themselves playing certain sports, their participation is not normalized — for themselves or their society.
EXISTING TRAINING GAPS FOR COACHES
Girls have distinct needs that are not accounted for in the current coaching structures. This research underlines four key gaps in training that negatively affect girls’ success in sports: knowledge around girls’ physiology and well-being, gendered upbringing in regards to girls’ strength and conditioning, lack of accounting for and dialogues around menstruation, and outdated coaching references and communication practices.
These gaps ultimately impact how coaches are shaping girls’ on-pitch experiences, their confidence, and their likelihood of remaining in sports past adolescence.
THE INFLUENCE OF POSITIVE COACH-ATHLETE RELATIONSHIPS
Girls are highly attuned to social dynamics, making both their relationship with their coach and the ability of the coach to create a positive environment critically important for engagement and retention. Girls are highly vulnerable to peer influence and heavily influenced by the key stakeholders in their lives during adolescence — especially coaches.
Throughout the research, adidas found that women athletes who remained in their sport and shared positive coaching experiences emphasized the importance of coach-athlete relationships built on encouragement, being listened to, friendship, fairness, and knowledge of the sport.
The research also found that feeling safe is heavily intertwined with feeling connected. If coaches foster safer spaces for their athletes and focus on building relationships with their players, negative experiences both on and off the pitch may be reduced.
The adidas Breaking Barriers Project, 2023.
BREAKING THE CYCLE FOR WOMEN AND GIRLS
Overall, the adidas research paper touches on a serious problem: many of the negative elements of girls’ experiences in sports and coaching are based in cultural and gender stereotypes, which create negative feedback loops. It is difficult to break these cycles.
To combat this, adidas provides guidelines for improvement within the research paper, giving coaches and organizations a roadmap for the betterment of women and girls in sports.
Some of these changes include encouraging coaches to promote women in sports organizations, finding new ways to practice, creating policies and awareness for girls’ unique needs, and actively challenging gender norms on and off the field. By addressing these barriers, coaches have the ability to reverse these negative cycles and inspire a more positive future.
This change starts on your pitch. To dive further into the research and get started making a difference for girls, download Empowering Her Game: The Importance of Girl-Centered Coaching.
