WISE Start With Sports

We’re inviting girls in HK aged 8 – 12 to join us, together with your mothers for a fun sports day where you can learn to play 3 sports, make some new friends and enjoy being out and about! Come join us in our first ever, “WISE Start With Sports” on 2 July from 10am – 1230pm. In this session, our women coaches will be leading a short, dynamic, interactive warmup session that will also teach running mechanics, followed by three 30 minute sessions of field hockey, tag rugby and ultimate frisbee. Please register here to attend: goo.gl/hhyiF2. We are limited by field capacity, so please do register early! Event Background: “WISE Start With Sports,” is one of Women in Sports Empowered HK’s (“WISE HK”) campaigns to encourage our young girls and their mothers to participate in sports together to promote an active lifestyle. We believe that everyone can benefit from playing sports. We want everyone — not just men and boys, but women and girls — to play sports throughout their lives. Too often, our girls and women will play sports at primary and secondary school or in PE class and end up giving up sports — sometimes completely, and sometimes against their own will when faced with academic, family or work pressures. Regardless of how busy we are, what academic or work or family pressures we face, sports CAN BE a part of our daily lives. Ultimately, we envision a world were sports and fitness is part of our daily routine. In Hong Kong, encouraging our girls and women to play sports is especially crucial. The stifling academic pressure is well-known, and with the recent media coverage of the alarming increase in students with mental health issues (and which have led to student suicides), sports and exercise is one of the better ways to help students relieve stress. In fact, schoolchildren in Hong Kong are known to not spend enough time doing physical exercise, scoring low in overall physical activity levels and said to get even less outdoor time than prisoners. This is truly alarming and we need to change that. Moreover, in our own survey conducted in January 2017 to understand the attitudes of women and girls towards sports in Hong Kong, 19% of our respondents under 18 years old felt lack of role models was a challenge for women compared to for men. Mothers and women coaches can be important role models who young girls and daughters look up to. By engaging mothers and women coaches to participate in sports together with their daughters, we believe they can become role models for our girls and show their support and encouragement for our girls to become active throughout their lives.