(Illustration by Eric Nyquist)
Play is innate and necessary for children. However, only one in five kids gets the physical activity necessary to thrive. The COVID-19 pandemic further reduced kids’ access to physical activity and sports, highlighting this growing problem. These trends have serious implications for kids’ overall development, health, and well-being.
This problem is even more pressing for girls, especially those from underserved and marginalized communities. Fewer girls participate in sports compared with boys, and the World Health Organization estimates that more than 75 percent of 11- to 17-year-old girls fail to get enough physical activity. Research further shows that girls enter sports later, drop out earlier, and leave at higher rates than boys.
To address this problem, Nike partnered with the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota (Tucker Center). After three years of working together, we created Coaching HER, a free, online, evidence-informed, global tool to train coaches on how best to support girls in sports. It is an industry-first coaching tool designed for any coach, in any sport, at any level. Informed by new data from coaches and girls around the world, Coaching HER is girl-focused, gender-responsive, and grounded in the recognition that girls experience the world differently, face additional barriers, and are treated differently than boys simply because they are girls.
Our experience working together taught us a lot about the potential and challenges of cross-sector partnerships in addressing social problems. Successful cocreation depends on bringing diverse and complementary groups of experts, industry leaders, and local communities together and leveraging their respective strengths. Our joint effort produced insights that can help organizations aspiring to pursue similar collaborations.
In the process of developing Coaching HER, we specifically identified five strategies from our successful collaboration, which may serve as a resource for other organizations looking to embark on a similar journey of cocreation.
First, pinpoint the problem and identify your greatest leverage point. | The patterns of girls’ physical activity and sports participation raised several pressing questions for us: Why are girls not as active? What are the systemic factors that lead to higher dropout rates for girls? And how can these be addressed?
Working Together
To tackle these questions, we delved deeply into the problem. In 2018, the Tucker Center produced a report, Developing Physically Active Girls: An Evidence-based Multidisciplinary Approach. The research pointed to numerous socio-ecological factors that affect girls’ relationships with and participation in sports through adolescence (11 to 17 years old). It looked at systemic barriers ranging from social beliefs to interpersonal interactions, including relationships with coaches, peers, and parents.
A trend emerged: Coaches are a primary and salient influence in a girl’s sport experience. Same-identity role models matter greatly, yet fewer than 24 percent of youth coaches in the United States are female-identifying. Girls need coaches to create welcoming, supportive, and safe environments to help them thrive, especially when they enter puberty. Unfortunately, coaches are often undertrained and lack confidence to address a host of issues, such as gender stereotypes, gender identities, and ways to support girls and their unique needs in sport.
Feedback from coaches indicated that boy athletes were the physical, social, and psychological standard and norm with which girls were often compared, judged, and evaluated.
Second, set clear goals together. | From the start, our overarching aim was to create systemic change for women and girls in sport, and we knew that each of us could not achieve that goal alone.
To determine how to better equip coaches to support girls in sport, we formulated three goals together that would guide our partnership. First, we would ground our work in the research, build on organizational contributions and strengths, and partner with organizations that were equally committed to creating impact. Second, we would develop evidence-based tools for coaches and girls to help reduce gender stereotypical beliefs and create a positive environment for girls in sport. Third, we would get the tools in the hands of coaches around the world to shift the environment not just for girls, but for coaches themselves.
Third, leverage the strengths of both sides. | A successful academic-industry partnership can ensure a rigorous process in development that leverages the strengths of both. Academics provide multidisciplinary and unique perspectives of an industry at large, along with access to a network of faculty, thought leaders, and social science researchers. Meanwhile, corporations can bring added resources, experience creating products and solutions for consumers, brand influence, and a deep knowledge of the market.
Cocreation and a culture of mutual learning is the backbone of Coaching HER. Nike’s global commitment to getting more girls to participate and remain active in sports combines with the Tucker Center’s ongoing research on girls and women in sports to create meaningful change. This unique partnership included research on coaching science, child development, psychology, gender studies, and sport sociology, as well as Nike’s experience in working with coaches around the world to test, learn, create, and distribute innovative coaching playbooks focused on a variety of key issues a kid might face. These playbooks provide coaches the tools they need to effectively coach girls, including modules addressing the importance of sports for girls and the actions that coaches can take to set girls up for success in sports. Social-impact leaders across industries should examine their own partnerships to ensure that they are collaborating with organizations that complement their strengths.
Fourth, be mindful of geographical differences. | Over three years, we gained insights directly from coaches and girls around the world. Too often, initiatives of this scale miss the mark because of a presumption of knowledge, which can lead to significant insights being ignored or not considered. Coaching HER includes the perspectives of girls around the world, so coaches can see sports through the eyes of the athletes they coach.
In March 2021, the Tucker Center conducted 21 workshops with girls and coaches across six different countries: France, Japan, India, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The girls and coaches were approached separately during the information-gathering stage to ensure that the feedback was honest and reflective of their lived experiences. Coaches were asked how they thought about, perceived, evaluated, and coached girls. Conversely, girls from diverse backgrounds were asked about their perceptions and experiences with their coaches.
Coaching HER’s entire programming was cocreated from the direct insights of these participants. Tucker Center researchers analyzed the survey results and interviews, and then the team designed learning modules to challenge biased assumptions of what it means to coach girls.
From coaches in India, we heard that girls don’t feel like they can play football (soccer), because they believe the boys are always much stronger. In Mexico, coaches told us that Mexican culture tends to create stereotypes that further promote machismo. All of the Coaching HER modules integrate these firsthand insights from around the world, so coaches can hear the voices of other coaches and girls.
In addition, global workshops revealed that coaches often made gender-blind statements, such as, “Treat girls the same way you would treat boys,” that ignored and erased gender-based considerations, power dynamics, and sociocultural circumstances. Coaching HER modules are purposefully gender responsive to address the unique needs of girls in sport.
Fifth, use data and insights to challenge assumptions. | Through the workshops, we discovered new insights that contradicted some of our original assumptions. For example, we came to this collaboration believing that coaches needed education and insights on coaching girls. But the reality was more nuanced and complex. Feedback from coaches indicated that boy athletes were the physical, social, and psychological standard and norm with which girls were often compared, judged, and evaluated. Girl athletes were described by coaches as different from, and deficient to, boys in confidence, aggression, competitiveness, voice, and physical skill.
We concluded from this data that we could generate the most impact by providing coaches a tool to help them evaluate, reorient, and change preexisting, often unconscious, and unintentionally gendered standards of athleticism. Our findings helped refine Coaching HER to become an interactive, engaging tool that provides guidance about gender assumptions and techniques that coaches of girls can easily implement.
The Long Game
While Coaching HER has been live for only a few months, we’ve been encouraged by the testing outcomes and fully intend to maintain our model of collaborative development as a way to advance institutional change. We have also received encouraging feedback from users.
“I wrestled boys all throughout high school and became a coach right around the time North Carolina sanctioned that women wrestlers could have their own division,” says a 20-year-old female wrestling coach from the state who uses Coaching HER. “So I am trying to make sure to deconstruct any coaching methods or words I use, since I grew up being coached and practicing with all males, and sometimes find myself embracing gender stereotypes because of how they were expressed commonly when I was in high school.”
Change takes time. It took three years to bring Coaching HER to life, and a combination of patience and urgent optimism is required to make the kind of generational shifts we seek. How we partner to encourage use of the tool and institutional adoption of these norms will be as important as our initial collaboration to build it in the first place. We believe that through the power of partnership and true collaboration, organizations have an opportunity to create solutions and lasting change.
Read more stories by Caitlin Morris & Nicole M. LaVoi.