As a regular reader of the She Kicks Magazine, I must say I have been impressed with the coverage of girls football in the last two copies.
For the legacy and the future of the female game, I think it is important that we do all we can to promote and shine a light on the girls’ game.
I was inspired to read the report on the growth of the girls’ game in Surrey. Our club in Liskeard grows every year but the county scene just continues to shrink and shrink every season. I have people that I speak to saying that this isn’t a problem restricted to Cornwall with other regions experiencing the same, which depresses me somewhat.
The thing that bugs me in Cornwall, when I talk to them about the current situation in girls’ football, they say girls’ football is becoming less popular across the board, which reading the reports like the one in She Kicks shows it just blatantly isn’t true. It is up to the people in the county to make it exciting and get girls enjoying playing the game and if they do that, the scene will grow in their area. It just requires some work and consultation with girls in the area to find out what they want.
The current way of working in our county, which has been keeping everything as flexible as possible isn’t working and is just driving lower commitment from clubs and players. If you make competitions, make rules and publicise them and stick to them you will get a higher commitment because the participants will know what to expect and value what they are doing.
Then you have all these crazy gimmicky type of competitions that are thrown out to girls just to be different to the boys, without asking if the girls actually want it, which just doesn’t work.
I think you need the people who have had success in counties developing girls’ football to be sent to counties that are struggling, to help them out and get them going again. There are people in this country that have great ability to develop girls’ football nationwide, we just need to utilise them a bit more and get them out on the road. To really grow the game we can’t just have pockets of success up and down the country, we need it in every town and every county.
SHE KICKS – the online community for women’s football
