Gender Equality

 

“It’s much easier to coach girls than boys!” claims one of the participants attending the first seminar on girl’s football in Bosnia Herzegovina.

Girls’ football coaches from the entire country were gathered on a fine October day in 2007 in the small town of Vogosca in the suburbs of Sarajevo to put focus on girl’s football together with students from the Faculty of Sports and Physical Education of the University of Sarajevo.
Cross Cultures organised the girl’s football network seminar inVogosca – its first in the Balkan region – to support the building of a national network of female players and football coaches. A strong and widespread network is considered instrumental in the strengthening of women’s football as well as grassroots football for young girls. A central subject discussed during the Vogosca seminar was how to create a favourable
training environment for girls.

 

 

Strong consensus was generated around the statement that significant differences exist between coaching girls and boys. For boys it is important to win. For girls it is also about skills training, having fun, be with your friends and be member of a group. “This you have to recognise as a football coach, it implies a differ-ent approach to coaching, otherwise the
girls quickly loose their commitment and stop playing. Girls also are better in taking responsibility and being a team member than boys, where the internal competition can be destructive to the group”, concluded one of the working groups.
 

Prejudices about girl’s football were eagerly discussed. Several stated that; “as a girls’ coach you don’t enjoy same respect as boys’ coaches and constantly we have to fight prejudices and patronising comments such as ‘girls don’t know how to play football’…and the like”. Clearly the
coaches were frustrated about the slow pace in building up girls’ football – “why are girls always allocated the worst training hours and the worst football pitches? Why are there no tournaments for girls?” The questions were many and the frustrations explicit, yet at the same time a dedicated drive to change the situation was maintained – to make the influential
people and decision-makers aware of the problems and to improve the circumstances for girls’ football.

 

All coaches are volunteers and despite the difficult conditions they are facing, still they put a lot of energy and commitment into their work, which was felt throughout the three hours long seminar. In relation to the seminar a fun football festival for 250 girls was organised and each and everyone got into the game with heart and soul.

 

The seminar concluded with a listing of the most central topics for further development with a view to promoting the growth and organisation of grassroots football for girls. Subsequently, Cross Cultures has distributed a ‘Blue Book directory’ among the people attending the seminar containing personal data and professional network preferences of all the coaches attending the event. On a later stage news letters are to be
produced on a regular basis to keep the coaches updated, eventually followed by a common communication platform introduced through the Internet.

 

Seminars similar to the one held in Vogosca are scheduled for 2008 in other countries both in the Balkan region and in Trans Caucasus starting with Belgrade and Skopje, where national seminars will be held in April 2008. Women’s football and grassroots football for young girls are
sectors within the world of football that in the past have been seriously neglected in the Balkan region and in Trans-Caucasus. But this is going to change!