Is education the missing piece in the puzzling world of women’s sport?

If you’re strapped for time the answer’s yes. What society doesn’t know and doesn’t teach about the female body packs a punch from school gyms to elite sport and back again.

Sure, recent successes in football and netball – plus more fans, coverage, advertisers and investment – suggest it’s a new day. But I’d argue this momentum comes in spite of the system, not because of it.

In terms of education, we’re still forcing round pegs into square holes. Any success in women’s sport is testament to some tenacious and inspiring outlier athletes, not a boss education system.

Plus the looking good narrative doesn’t square with the facts and stats. Without a wholesale shift in how we teach the female body, sport’s recent momentum lacks the structure and scaffolding to be sustained.

As the saying goes: do what you always did and you’ll get what you always got.

What have we always done?

Pre-puberty, girls are just as capable of mastering the fundamentals of sport (throwing, jumping, catching) as boys, yet by age ten there’s a massive gulf between the sexes.

At this crossroads, social habits and stereotypes kick in. Why intervene? Boys play sport, girls play house, fish swim and birds fly. By the end of puberty two in every three girls (65 per cent) will have abandoned sport entirely.

By inertia, culture and design, girls and women are treated like tourists in sport and during puberty these chickens come home to roost. As period pains, volatile hormones, breast tenderness, self-esteem issues et al start to do their thing, she starts to opt out … and the dropout drift is underway.

Education is a key variable in clawing it back but teachers and coaches don’t know (so don’t teach) that exercise is one of nature’s best painkillers. They don’t know (so don’t teach) that lifestyle is medicine in managing period pain. They don’t know (so don’t teach) the importance of sports bras.

They don’t know (so don’t teach) that hormones regulate how women feel, move, think, sleep and react. They don’t know (so don’t teach) that mastering her hormones will set her up for life, or that in sport they’re akin to a performance-enhancing drug.

They don’t know it, so don’t teach it. And while it’s not difficult, it is different. Dare we actually teach female physiology in positive tones?

What have we always got?

Girls’ two-in-three dropout rate is double that of boys, but even worse is that most of the one in three left don’t even hit minimum fitness standards.

Oh and newsflash: we all lose out in this deal. The UK lets would-be athletes slip through the net and we continue churning out girls who are under-confident in their body and how to use it, in sport as well as in life.

That’s the worst part. We miss our window of opportunity to plant the seeds of body literacy. We rob girls of the physical, mental, social and community wellbeing benefits of sport and exercise that’d carry them through good times and bad.

Even the elite

Obviously some girls overcome the lack of education (and opportunity and funding) to pursue professional sport. But even there, pro sport ain’t the land of milk and honey.

One investigation revealed that nearly all members of the Lioness squad consumed insufficient fuel to cover their energy needs. Some female athletes persevere with a jumping technique that puts them at six times the risk of an ACL injury.

In certain sports, some 75 per cent of athletes leak urine. Yet we don’t ever teach pelvic health.

In track-and-field, some team doctors view the loss of the menstrual cycle as a positive yet this should be a big, bright, blaring alarm bell.

The point is that having money, resources and experts on-side doesn’t necessarily change things. The lack of education runs through women’s sport like a stick of Blackpool rock. Even where better practice is known, women are still women and that comes with certain expectations about how we look and ace. What we can and can’t talk about.

If nothing else, education would challenge some of these taboos and stereotypes that fester in the heart of women’s sport.

The missing piece

Women equal circa 50 per cent of the population yet our unique physiology commands, in some cases, one hour’s classroom learning over an entire three-year nutrition degree course. Still today just six per cent of sport science research is conducted exclusively on women.

So too right education is the missing piece. Under the current system, girls aren’t taught how they work. Hence they filter out of sport and the precious few who remain are trained by and judged against a standard that simply cannot apply.

Better education. It sounds so simple but it’s not. It’s fundamental. It’s a system change. Folks round our way call it a revolution.

Baz Moffat is the co-founder and CEO of The Well HQ. A former Team GB rower, Moffat retired from the sport to launch a successful international consulting and coaching business. A prominent voice in the women’s health movement, she specialises in the pelvic floor – a pivotal yet vastly under appreciated nucleus in the female body. To find out more about The Well HQ courses, visit thewell-hq.com.