Cochrane High has long been a school that has led the charge in athletics and innovative projects.
The two were combined recently as the school became only one of two in Canada (the other being Charles P. Allen High school in Bedford, N.S.) to receive a Playtex Play On Canada Grant.
Teacher Esther Sieben, who is the girls varsity volleyball coach as well as one of the head track and field coaches, felt the girls’ locker room facilities at the school could be improved as a sign of support for girls athletics. In that vein, she applied to Playtex for the grant and was one of the lucky ones out of the 25 applicants.
“Playtex sends a sample package to every school and two of our administration secretaries read it and said to me, ‘this is you, this is your cause, everything we hear coming out of your mouth speaks to us in this grant opportunity,’” Sieben said.
Sieben is very vocal in actively engaging women in sport, and she felt this was the perfect opportunity to give something back to the girls. She wrote a letter to Playtex and they were impressed with her story, and asked her and the Cochrane High girls to be the poster children for the grants this year.
“Our program is about helping young girls in high school sports across Canada,” said Jill MacKinnon, brand manager at Playtex Sport. “We did some research and found out why girls don’t stay in sport and it comes to various things they face which cause them to drop out.”
Some of the more interesting statistics Playtex found when doing research was that 72 per cent of Canadian girls feel they are unable to participate to their full potential in high school sports, while 33 per cent said their school didn’t even offer their sport.
“We want to eliminate the barriers girls face,” MacKinnon said. “When Esther reached out to us she was very passionate about the project and said the boys had a lot more resources at Cochrane High and she felt the girls needed something to help them have pride in their school.
“She’s a great ambassador for Cochrane High.”
While school was out, the Playtex team went in and totally revamped the girls’ dressing room surprising the volleyball team when they returned this year. On top of that, Playtex brought out a film crew from Toronto to film their reactions.
“They had a professional crew come out and filmed us playing sports and interviewed us about the chances and opportunities girls have,” Sieben said. “Cochrane High does a phenomenal job of engaging females in sport, but we’re not quite there yet.
“There’s still room for improvement and we realize we’re still up against the old boys club.”
The remodelled dressing room is certainly a step in the right direction.
“All the girls on our volleyball teams and soccer team now have their own lockers and there’s beautiful, inspirational sayings on the walls,” Sieben said. “It’s a very inviting place from the barebones room it was before.
“There’s now benches, curtains on the shower, new mirrors and hooks to put our stuff on.”
The long-standing stigma that girls aren’t seen as equals to boys in sport is something Sieben believes is down to all the people involved at the high school and other levels.
“Everyone is to blame,” she said. “Whether it’s about stereotypes, stigmas, or policy makers. We’re not asking that we play baseball and football and everything else the guys do, it’s about equity and that has more to do with creating equal opportunities for everyone.”
Sieben goes on to state that if a boy can have opportunities to play the sport he loves while staying healthy and having the psycho-social dynamics of belonging to a team, why then can’t girls?
“Less than 17 per cent of national sport organizations and teams have women in the forefront and this includes women teams,” she said. ‘Why do we need to have male coaches?”
It’s a problem that also extends to our American neighbours, despite the fact every university in the United States is bound by Title Nine, which says that in order for a university to receive funding, they must offer the same amount of scholarship money to girls that they do for boys.
“Every university is struggling with that,” Sieben said. “We aren’t giving women the chance to develop. Why?”
Apart from the barriers of the so-called, “old boys club,” Sieben feels the biggest ones faced by female athletes are psychological.
“Things like limited confidence in their abilities and perceived low behavioural control are definitely big factors,” she said. “Lack of confidence and poor body image are also obstacles but it’s not all gender bias.
“It’s in male sport as well, but we need to show women how to overcome this. Having healthy women out in the world means 50 per cent of our population is healthier.”
