Leadership and Resilience Through the Power of Sport

By: Maria Bobenrieth Elizabeth Tenety

April 15, 2015

Maria Bobenrieth, executive director of Women Win, says sports can help adolescent girls learn skills and gain confidence to achieve their rights. She discusses the challenges of working in religiously conservative communities and the strategies for getting young women involved in athletics around the world. 

Can you talk to me about the scope of your organization’s work?

What we do is really ridiculously simple. We are the only organization to focus on adolescent girls and leverage the power of sport to equip them to achieve their rights. We specifically focus on helping them to help themselves, to address gender-based violence, access their sexual health and reproductive rights, and achieve economic empowerment. 

Adolescent girls fall, often, in policy, laws, and every other practice between the child-centered approaches to development and the focus on women's rights. They fall right between and their needs are very unique. They are in a transition period that really will define not only their futures but the futures of their communities. 

We work on a range of issues. It depends, very much, contextually on where in the world the adolescent girls are. Our work can be addressing female genital mutilation, or it can be focusing on early forced marriage. The one pervasive thing we see without question is that at that age, adolescent girls are subjected to gender-based violence. They're becoming women. They're being noticed as women and it's a real big problem. 

I would argue that this isn't just happening in developing countries. If we look at gender-based violence and the culture of date rape in the United States and violence perpetuated against women by men in sports, our work is applicable equally in the North as in the South. 

How does focusing on sports empower girls? 

We are girl-centered in our approach. Our overriding theme is that one win leads to another, and that helps girls to build resilience. 

We believe that adolescent girls have leadership. It's not that we need to build leadership. They have it. They just don't get to practice it. 

In sports you learn to fall down, to get up. You learn to win, you learn to lose, you have a team, you have a role, and you learn sometimes to sit on the bench and get hurt. There are so many pieces about sport that help you practice and let your leadership emerge. 

One woman in particular’s story stands out: She’s a young woman who comes from a small village in Nepal who had a lack of access to education. Her family didn't value educating her, and she faced a forced, early marriage to her husband. 

She lives on the route of Annapurna and wanted to trek, but she was told that women weren't trekking guides. She found the organization we work with, which is called Three Sisters Trekking, and learned how to be a trekking guide and she was on the team of the first Nepalese women who climbed Annapurna. This has led her to get more educated. 

Could you tell me a little bit about the cultural and, potentially, religious context that prevent girls from becoming involved in athletics? 

I was going to start my story when I came to the United States when I was eight years old. My parents were not economic refugees. My father's a doctor, my mother's a nurse. They were liberation theologians, Catholics, and very socially active. My mother worked as a nurse in the worst neighborhoods in Santiago. But I came to the United States at eight years old. I did not speak English. The way that I actually found my voice in the United States was through the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO). 

I played CYO sports. Ironically, why I love the topic is because it was my first introduction to being included, to seeing opportunity. I never questioned for a minute that women shouldn't be leaders, in large part because CYO was such a positive experience for me. 

Now in our organization, we have worked in over 35 countries, with 1.25 million girls. Religion comes up a lot. People will say, "Listen, girls can't play sport because it challenges religious orthodoxy." But I don't believe that religion has anything to do with it. I don't think the Bible talks about sports, nor does the Qur'an, or any of the holy books. It comes down to, really, the need of cultures to restrict and have power over girls' and women's bodies. 

I really hesitate because most of the literature out there about religion in sport and women's rights will point to Islam right now because this is the easiest place to look at directly. But I have been in Hindu countries. I was in Myanmar where many of the girls were in Buddhist nunneries. I have been in Orthodox Christian and Orthodox Jewish places where often sport will just fall into a clump of restrictions on the lives of girls and women.

In fact, we have had huge success in many Muslim communities because if you make the right case with the religious leaders and they understand it from a health perspective, and if you show them how doing this will make girls better mothers and better wives, it’s more likely to be embraced.

“This will make them do their chores better. They'll be better housewives. They'll be better wives.” That’s not a perfect formulation but I'll take it. If they let the girls play, I'll take it. We have never run into anyone who has said, "It's against our religion." It's the cultural piece that's really challenging. 

What is it about sport that is so empowering to girls? 

It is just so fun to be able to feel your body and feel good about your body, and to have a team. There isn't a place in the world that you travel to that you don't see children. Just put a ball out there. A village comes out. For girls who have been excluded from public space and access to public space where they're supposed to protect their femininity, the minute you just open a space for them to kick a ball, learn skills, challenge themselves, and just be in their bodies is, I think, transformative. 

The other thing that I think is really special and magnificent about sport is that it works on your resilience muscles. It's not just the somatic, physical part. It's that you learn to fall down and get back up. And I think girls are often embedded with helplessness. With, "You don't have any control. There's nothing you can do. You should just submit." 

Sport builds resiliency along with life skills, so our program doesn’t just teach sports to girls, we also have a very good curriculum that teaches life skills. It teaches confidence. It teaches them how to use their voice. It teaches negotiation. It deals with health and hygiene. It's not just the sports part, but the sports part is actually pivotal in helping with other aspects. 

Then you see girls that, you throw a ball at them the first time and it hits them in the face because they have no coordination to catch the ball. It's not something they understand. And you see them a couple of weeks later and they're playing netball, which is a version of basketball that they play in the Commonwealth countries. There is a somatic, physical transformation of being in your body and feeling your body and really becoming a whole human being. 

I don't know how to describe it very poetically. There's this resiliency that just comes out of you that you go, "Gosh. That didn't feel good but I'm going to get up again and I'm going to do this." We also see girls renegotiating to want to come to the playing pitch. So they will learn how to negotiate. And if they can learn how to negotiate, how to show up and play sports, they'll negotiate better in family planning, being able to go to school, being able to stay in school, not being married early. It's just such an important lesson.

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