Keep It Fun!

This month’s article focuses on keeping sports fun for girls, but as you will see, many of these can apply to boys as well! 

The best way to accomplish this is to move in ways your body and personality type enjoy. You may envision yourself as a hard-core athlete, but have a mellow personality more suited to yoga. Overall, it is important to try to make every encounter that a girl has with activity a positive one. Here are some easy tips on keeping it fun:

1. Take her to girls’ and women’s sports events. Introduce her to a heroine! At the very least, she will see that girls who engage in sports and physical activity are applauded and admired. Look in the local papers, high school web sites, and community center bulletin boards.

2. Take advantage of the seasons. Each season try a weather-appropriate sport. For example, tackle snowboarding, showshoeing, or skiing in the winter; volleyball and swimming in the summer; softball and track in the spring; and soccer, cross-country, or basketball in the fall. This will also make certain sports feel routine and natural so that when next year rolls around, the girl equates the fall as soccer season and is anticipating signing up for a league. 

3. Rate the neighborhood! Pick a different walking route each time. What is the prettiest house, the best mailbox, the prettiest flowers? Include bouts of power walking (big steps, pumping your arms, going as fast as you can), go from phone pole to phone pole or hydrant to hydrant. And then slow down to laugh, rest and recover.

4. Vary the environment. Instead of running around a track or playing soccer on a soccer field, take your activities to the beach or a local park. Or take in a local arts festival and take a couple laps around it, checking out the booths and talent. Go to a different park every week. Discover the public walking trails. Hike and explore.

5. Get the scoop on women athletes. There are plenty of biographies and films on women sports heroes like Billie Jean King, Mia Hamm, and the Williams sisters. Check out the local bookstore or library and read these books together. Then discuss the obstacles these women had to overcome and how they did it. These inspirational stories will also show girls that even the most talented athletes had to start somewhere and learn from the bottom up.

6. Make a sports scrapbook. Collect pictures of females doing physical activities. Look for teen and women's magazines. Make sure she is signed up to be a GoGirlGo! Club member so she gets SportsTalk (it's free! - just pledge to get her active and request your girl activation kit!)

7. Give gifts of sports equipment and apparel. Look for cool stuff in teen magazines and give her the gift with a copy of the magazine page. Gifts of sports equipment can tell her that you think she can. 

8. Try an activity that you are not equipped for. Take advantage of local sports equipment rental outfits to help equip you for trying a new sport. Rent a canoe, skis, snowboards, or bicycles and discover a sport you never tried before. 

9. Support mandatory daily physical education classes. There is no better guarantee that a girl will be physically active every day than a mandatory daily physical education requirement in her school. School curriculum can be affected by the action of local school boards. Contact your school board and get others to do the same.

Source: From Tips to Get a Girl Active www.gogirlgo.com