Why Girls Stop Playing Sport – Jennifer Oaten
At our House Swimming Carnival a few weeks ago, it was the Year 12s who stayed with me.
They were in full costume, cheering at a volume that probably reached the carpark. It was their final swimming carnival as Santa Maria students, and they knew it. What struck me was not the noise. It was the complete absence of self-consciousness. They were giving everything, not for points, but for each other.
I was a netball, tennis and basketball player myself. Never a swimmer, even though Shane Gould, a former Olympian, taught me to swim! But I know what it looks like when a team is playing for something beyond the scoreboard.
It is also, I have come to realise, not something every girl gets to experience.
Because the research tells a different story to what I see on our pool deck. Research published last year by Flinders University, in the journal Sport in Society, found that approximately 60 per cent of Australian girls aged 15 and older drop out of organised sport. For boys, the figure is 42%. In most cases, the girls who stop at 15 do not come back.
A 2023 study conducted by Visa and youth platform Year13 looked at why. Nearly half the girls who stopped said they needed more time to study. Almost a third pointed to body image. Sixty per cent said they did not have a female sports star they looked up to.
What strikes me about those numbers is that girls are not leaving sport because they dislike it. They are leaving because other things are winning – study pressure, self-consciousness, and the sense that sport is somehow less legitimate for them than it is for their male peers.
That last one I think about a lot.
What is different here?
A major Australian study by The Australian Gender Equality Council, Hands Up for Gender Equality, surveyed 10,000 adolescent girls and boys and found that among the greatest contributors to confidence in young people were team sport and participation in leadership roles. Importantly, the study cited evidence that girls at co-educational schools opt out of sport due to the discomfort they experience performing in front of their male peers. A separate study of physical education classes found that same-sex environments lead to higher confidence, enjoyment and effort in sport, and that girls are more affected by class type than boys.
That barrier does not exist at Santa Maria.
Here, the team captain is a girl. The person making decisions under pressure, calling the shot, steadying her teammates is a young woman. That is not a small thing. When strength and leadership in sport are simply normal, rather than notable, something shifts in how a girl understands her own place in it.
I read a piece published earlier this year by the International Coalition of Girls’ Schools that put this well. The author described watching a girls’ high school basketball game and being struck not just by the quality of play, but by something harder to name. In an all-girls environment, he wrote, girls are not performing for an outside audience. They are not managing how they appear while they compete. They are just there, fully. He described it as the difference between auditioning and becoming.
That resonated with me.
What sport actually builds
I think we sometimes reduce sport to fitness. What I see, and what the research supports, is that it builds something much harder to teach in a classroom.
When a girl competes as part of a team, she is practising resilience in real time. She is learning to regulate emotion under pressure, to read a situation quickly, to adapt when things do not go to plan. She is developing the kind of confidence that does not come from being told she is capable, but from discovering it herself.
The research on girls and sport does not surprise me, because I see the same thing across everything we do. The students who are most connected to their own sense of self are rarely the ones who only show up for lessons. They are in teams, the first to put their hand up on camp, showing up for service, or in the water on at Friday morning swim training.
Sport, done well, builds the attributes we most want our students to carry into adulthood. Self-awareness. Emotional intelligence. The capacity to collaborate and to lead under pressure.
There is also growing evidence that regular physical activity has a direct protective effect on adolescent mental health, reducing anxiety and depression and strengthening the sense of belonging that so many young people draw on when things get hard.
That is not a small thing to walk away from at age 15.
Why choice matters
Research published in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport found that girls are significantly more likely to stay in sport when they have variety and choice, more so than boys. It is one of the reasons I believe access to a broad range of sports across the school years matters, not just for participation rates, but for helping a girl find the sport that fits for her.
This Friday, our girls are competing at the IGSSA swimming carnival and I will be thinking about exactly that.
What happens at home matters too
The same research that tells us about the drop-out rate also tells us that parents are the second most influential factor in whether a girl stays in sport, behind only her friends. Almost two thirds of Australian girls say their family rarely or never watches women’s sport. Nearly 70 per cent have no parents who currently play sport.
Those figures are not meant as an accusation. They point to something parents can genuinely influence, without it costing much at all.
The conversation on the way home from a carnival matters. Whether it centres on the result or on what she enjoyed, whether she seems keen to go again or is starting to talk about giving it up, is worth paying attention to. The message she receives at home, about whether sport is worth her time, may matter more than we realise.
- adolescent mental health, confidence through sport, Featured, Girls in Sport, Girls School Sport, girls sport participation, parent support in sport, Santa Maria College, Student Wellbeing, team sport for girls, teenage girls and sport
Author: Santa Maria College
Santa Maria College is a vibrant girls school with a growing local presence and reputation. Our Mission is to educate young Mercy women who act with courage and compassion to enrich our world. Santa Maria College is located in Attadale in Western Australia, 16 km from the Perth CBD. We offer a Catholic education for girls in Years 5 – 12 and have 1300 students, including 152 boarders.
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