inside excellent life
This Girl Can is a sassy celebration of active women everywhere and proves that whatever our size, ability or previous experience, sport can be a fun and enjoyable part of our lives.
It is a national campaign, developed by Sport England and delivered in partnership with a wide range of organisations, to the persistent gender gap which means that more men play sport than women at every age.
#IWillWhatIWant is not only a commercial that advertises a famous brand of sports but is part of a campaign of Under Armour to support the women empowerment. The protagonist of 1 minute video is Gisele Bündchen, during an hard training to pungiball. Another video has instead as a testimonial the dancer Misty Copeland. I think it’s a brilliant campaign, which is placed in a broader context of actions carried out by this company. The other campaign that promoted is called Protect This House. I WILL talking about the house of sport.
The third place of the Italian U-17 in the World Cup in April in Costa Rica has been a success. It has been a result unique in its kind since no national youth soccer had never before won a medal at the world championships. The word success clashes, however, with little resonance that the result has had. The world of female soccer players is an invisible world, which does not help the Italian football to fill sit greatest failure: the presence of girls playing football. The analysis of this failure goes through the wrong message that affects many girls who want to get closer to football:
Italian football is likely to persist in its absence at least until therewill be a change in language, but also the deep understanding that biological sex has little to do with the physical and psychological predispositions for the sport. In spite of this facts , however, the girls on the soccer field could show much of their passion, strength and desire for redemption as demonstrated by these portraits of the little footballers: women football
(by Daniela Sepio)
I publish with pleasure part of an article of Debbie Jevans, new CEO of England Rugby
“Women in sport is not rocket science. Women make up 50% of the population. Ignoring one half of the talent pool in this country does not make good business sense. Getting more women into senior positions in the sports industry is not a “female thing”. It is just common sense. The fact that our Rugby World Cup team is 50% female is great and is a result of interviewing widely and recruiting the best people – men and women – for the job. The barriers so often cited as reasons why women cannot progress in their careers, such as motherhood, are outdated. The workplace is changing. It is dynamic and flexible. In a modern world it needs to be. The leadership of any ambitious organisation has to be open-minded.
… UK Sport and Sport England set a target for all sports governing body boards to be made up of 25% female directors by 2017. For most of my life I have actively disagreed with targets and quotas for women but where a target can be helpful is that it shows ambition. And that is important.
Is 25% ambitious enough? I do not think so. Surely we have to be aiming at 50%, to reflect the population. I am absolutely not saying give women jobs for the sake of it. I would never advocate that. But I do think we need to create the opportunity for women to shine. And that is about sports organisations proactively encouraging women to join their workforce. Seeking out female talent when they are recruiting. The talent is out there, the problem is that too often the default position is to see jobs in sport as male. When you think of the many remarkable women working in British sport right now that attitude is misplaced. Just look at the talented women on this list.
… I believe that being an athlete has given me an essential skillset that translates into running an organisation. That is not just my view, a report published in America last year told a compelling story of women with sports backgrounds – from Hilary Clinton to Christine Lagarde – reaching senior positions in their industry.
I know absolutely that my own career as a tennis player has influenced the way I work today. As a player you could never go on court with anything left in doubt. If I hadn’t practised my backhand 200 times to take the ball earlier, I would be exposed in a match situation. The same thinking was applied in delivering the Olympic and Paralympic Games. We did not leave a stone unturned. And that is why I believe I have been successful in my career. I am always looking to learn and to improve – it is the athlete in me.”
For the first time in Italy it will be organized a free course concerning “The value of the difference in the management of sport” of 224 hours, including classroom training and internships, reserved for 18 participants organized in Rome by ‘Tor Vergata University in collaboration with Federculture and Sportlink.
The course aims to prepare future leaders and women leaders, through the transfer of knowledge and skills to enable the participants to enter the world of sport work with managerial responsibility in various areas of planning, organization, management and evaluation of services and facilities for physical activities and sports, from the recreational to professional. The course will address complex issues, such as strategic management, marketing and communication aspects, the notions of law, contract law and taxation, principles of management control, in addition to the optimization of planning and operating costs, by acting on the principles of energy saving and increasing revenue sources. At the same time, the course aims to create a professional and innovative, transferring specific skills in project management of sporting events in support of local authorities, especially of medium and small cities which do not have on their staff specific competences in the organization of sport events, in all their phases.
For furher information: impresasport.wordpress.com
Italian sport is increasingly dominated by women, tennis, fencing, swimming, athletics are an example. It ‘s a phenomenon that reflects what happens in society, in fact even at school the girls perform better than boys and at work is increasingly difficult to limit their success. It’s time that happened, finally 50% of the world is no longer excluded.
Today I watched a tennis match between two girls number 300 in the world ranking with the following score: 6/2, 0/6 and then at the 3rd set 0/3, 2/4, 4/4, 6/6 , 5/7. It’s a score common among women tennis players, showing the lack of emotional control of the two opposing, of how you can lose a set with ease without showing any form of reaction. Then who won the 2nd set to zero and after 9 games won did two errors from which she never recovered, allowing to the opponent of the equalizing and than to win the match. According to coaches and parents of women tennis players this emotional distress is a widespread difficulty while it is absolutely absent some form of mental coaching. The most common advice of the coaches is to tell the girls that, playing many tournaments, they will learn to manage themselves in a better way, if they don’t learn the coaches say “with you there’s nothing to do.” Certainly not all of them can become a champion, but I am convinced that most could improve if they were mentally coached . My advice is that coaches begin to work with sports psychologists in the construction of training programs that are intended to teach the tennis players to acquire a winning mentality. Today even more in football the coach does not work alone but while maintaining its leadership works with a team of experts. In tennis in most cases there is only the physical coch, a little for those who want to reach the excellence.
In Qatar, sport became more and more important not only for men bu also for women. Also in golf the ladies are finding their place. The golfer Yasmina al-Sharshani (26 years old), a young and dynamic Qatari lady with a great personality, graduated from the Sports Science Program at Qatar University, represents the State of Qatar in International Golf Tournaments and she is already training for the Rio Games in 2016. “The 2016 Olympics in Brazil is my ambition because the golf sport will be included after 112 years of absence. So I am preparing myself for the Olympics and I hope to have the chance to represent my country, Qatar,” she said.
Spring is a time of marathons. It began with that of Rome on previous Sunday and now there are London, Paris, Boston, Berlin, Prague to name just a few. It’s a sport which now gathers hundreds of thousands of practitioners and individual practice is certainly more prevalent among adults. What attracts people to run, probably the ease of access, have friends who already run and do it with them, the opportunity to run outdoors and inside parks, to run for as long as you want, alternating it with the walk and then stretch at pleasure the time, to choose when to do it depending on the free time. Another interesting aspect is that it is a sport, running, much practiced by women. It seems trivial to mention it but instead it was not always possible. In fact Kathrine Switzer (USA) was the first woman to run and finish a marathon (Boston, 1967), five years before the official acceptance of women. She participated in the race as K.V. Switzer, so the organizers could not discover that it was a woman. During the race, she managed to escape from the organizers’ attempt to eliminate it. She ran 35 marathons and won the New York Marathon in 1974.
Listen Switzer talk about her first marathon:
