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The Gendered Discourse On Female Athletes And Coaches

Decent Essays

“Man Up:” Understanding the Gendered Discourse on Female Athletes and Coaches
I once had a soccer coach who told me to “man up” when I came off the soccer field with a swollen, black eye. He asked me if I was going to “cry like a girl” or get back in my position on the field. Being a fourteen year old girl, I cried. But I returned to the field and continued playing. From recreation league to intercollegiate athletics, the one thing my coaches had in common was that they were male. I play on various teams: soccer, volleyball, rugby, cycling, and basketball, but never once did I have a female coach. Studies show that female athletes who did not have a female coach are less likely to go into the coaching profession (cite). Despite this statistic, I started coaching youth soccer, basketball, and swim teams when I was in college. I did not seek out a coaching positon and had little confidence in my abilities to guide a team, but a parent volunteer approached me and asked if I would volunteer as an assistant and be an athletic role model.
Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments Act prohibits discrimination based on sex in educational programs, but it had the greatest impact in increasing the opportunity for females in sports. The participation opportunities for females in sports are at its highest rate ever with 9,581 women’s intercollegiate teams in the NCAA in 2014, an increase of 307 since 2012 (Acosta & Carptenter, 2014). Despite the increased number of female

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