Junior Girls’ Only Training

Later this year, 21/22 October, I am Course Director for a rather special weekend. I am running a Junior Girl’s Only training weekend for the Royal Yachting Association www.rya.org.uk. This weekend will be repeated every year for five years with the aim of creating a lasting attitude change towards performance equality. 55-60 girls age 8-15 will be in Weymouth for the weekend with all the coaches and support team being women.

While the main thrust of the weekend is becoming a better sailor, we are also running some sessions on raising awareness of on social issues that we think are holding the girls back in their performance. We can identify this because this age group sail mixed in the boys – one of the few sports to do so. We’re also decking out the Weymouth and Portland Sailing Academy with posters of sporting women, and holding a Sailors Forum on Saturday night to introduce the girls to some of the current top women in sailing, to introduce role models into their lives.

I’ve just been writing the workshop briefs. The subjects are ‘Leaving and Joining groups – making it easier’, ‘Friendships and Performance Teams – can you have both in one crew?’, ‘Similarities & Differences between sailing boys and girls – what are the best parts to take into racing?’ and ‘Assertiveness training’. The coaches themselves will decide how to make these issues into workshops. I am welcoming the parents to come and find out what we doing, since the issues our young women face are not isolated from society.

I am putting in various measurements through which I hope we can track changes in both attitude and performance over the 5 years – it is 22 years since I went to the Olympics and proved women are as good as men, and its about time that pioneering stops featuring in a top female sailor’s campaign.

The whole project is starting to gather steam now. I’m really looking forward to it.