photo credit: Ella Kirk
Women’s sports are cited as going back as far as the 1860s and recently have reached an all-time high. From Simone Biles dominating gymnastics at the Olympics to the WNBA seeing some of its highest watch numbers of the past 25 years, these milestones are staggering but are still far off from reaching gender equality in the sports world.
At the high school, female athletes are facing hardships within their sports because of their gender.
“At the driving range, I’ll have people stop and look at me because they are like ‘oh I bet she’s terrible’, but then they see I’m good and they’ll try and watch, which is just kind of twisted,” junior and varsity golfer Adeline Ricker said.
As Ricker shares her experiences in her sport, she makes apparent some of the prejudices rooted in a male-dominated sport such as golf.
“We used to be members at OSU, and people would literally ask to pass us, because we were young girls. But the thing was, I would beat them, I outdrove them and I beat them on the hole. But they saw that my sister and I were two young girls and they wanted to pass us because they thought we were slow,” Ricker said.
Although, experiences are not faced strictly within traditionally male dominated sports. Softball is an example in which women players tend to outnumber and be more popular than men in the same sport (according to Zippa).
Regardless of this, “I can only think of one woman coach, throughout my entire high school softball career. And then I went to coach at my old high school, and it was still just a bunch of men,” Social Studies Teacher and former softball coach Leslie Hosgood said.
This correlates with the NCAA Demographics Database finding that in 2022 and 2023 only 41 percent of women’s teams are coached by women coaches.
Furthermore, “In 2020, 95 percent of National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) men’s sports teams had head coaches identifying as men, according to the Department of Education’s Equity in Athletics data. By comparison, less than half of women’s teams had head coaches identifying as women,” according to USAfacts.com.
Experiences like this created the basis of the mission and goals of the Women’s Sports Foundation (WSF), established in 1974.
“Our mission is to enable all girls and women to reach their potential in sports and life. We provide financial furl to aspiring champion athletes. We fund groundbreaking research. We educate. We advocate. And we help communities get girls active,” according to WSFs website.
Therefore, The Courier is taking a small step to help this large mission, by hosting a “change war” event with all collected change going to WSF in order to further their cause.
“Sure, there’s a long way to go but we’re not going to stop until we get there,” WSFs website stated.
To learn more about women’s negative sports experiences and the ones working against them, visit the Women’s Sports Foundation website.
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