Eimear Ryan: Sport enriches our lives and it's not only for the young
INCLUSION: Aghadrumsee St Macartans of Tyrone during the warm-up before the Sports Direct Gaelic4Mothers&Others National Blitz day, hosted by the Naomh Mearnóg & St Sylvester’s GAA clubs in Dublin. Pic: Piaras Ó Mídheach/Sportsfile
Last month, the ran a striking and moving photo essay about a women’s soccer tournament held in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Adult Soccer Fest, as it’s called, caters for multiple age groups, with teams ranging from 30+ to 70+. One of the photos shows two women with lined faces and silver ponytails contesting for the ball: not your typical soccer players, but kinetic and competitive all the same.
But these players aren’t trying to relive their glory days: in many cases they’re playing for the first time, having been denied the opportunity to play team sport when they were young.
They grew up in a world before Title IX, the landmark gender equality legislation passed in 1972, that prohibited gender-based discrimination in schools or any other body that received funding from the US government. Title IX is a line in the sand for women’s sport in America: after its passage, schools that had previously ignored girls’ sport were now obligated to put funding and facilities towards it.
Its effect on women’s access to sport was immediate and profound, but women now in their sixties and seventies would have missed out on its benefits. Adult Soccer Fest gives them a chance to finally experience the joy of team sport while being cheered on by their children and grandkids from the sidelines.
"You can’t go back in time," said one player, Monica Vasquez. "Even though my body is 61, my mental age is like – I feel like I am 16 again or 20 again."
With women’s sport currently booming – as recent heroics by Ciara Mageean, Leona Maguire, Rhasidat Adeleke and our national soccer team have illustrated – it’s easy to forget how very recent much of this progress is. England’s Lionesses won the Euros this year, but have only existed as an international team since 1972, in large part because of the FA’s notorious 50-year ban on women’s soccer. In 1921, the FA declared that the sport was ‘unsuitable for females’, and banned women from playing at any of its affiliated grounds.
Notably, women’s soccer was extremely popular at the time. During World War I, with most of the country’s young men fighting at the front, women’s soccer briefly became the nation’s favourite spectator sport. The year before the ban, 53,000 supporters turned up at Goodson Park to watch St Helen’s Ladies play Dick Kerr Ladies FC in a Stephen’s Day fixture; less than a year later, the same teams were locked out of any FA-affiliated grounds.
Was the FA really concerned about protecting the delicate constitutions of women, or did they simply not want any competition for the men’s code? Whatever the reason, this ban put women’s soccer on the back burner for decades. Even today, only 40% of England’s secondary schools offer girls the same access to soccer as boys, suggesting that the UK is in need of a Title IX of its own.
While it is heartening to see these women finally get to make up for lost time, it also serves as a timely reminder that it’s never a good idea to exclude certain groups from sport, no matter what the reasoning.
In the United States, it now seems that there are more state laws against transgender athletes than there are trans athletes competing in the first place; similarly, the IRFU recently changed its policy to exclude trans players from playing, noting – with some degree of sheepishness, one hopes – that there are only two registered trans players in Ireland. Whether it’s rooted in race, age, or gender, exclusion in sport is never looked on kindly by history.
Perhaps we lack imagination, in some respects. On a visit to New York over the summer I watched lots of different sports, both professional and amateur, and the amateur sports in particular were a lesson in inclusion, which is after all one of the best things about being part of a squad.
In Central Park, I watched a tightly contested softball game: one of the pitchers was a silver-haired man in his seventies who could still throw a fastball and struck out a batter half his age. A friend invited me to watch a game in which her co-ed ice hockey team was playing; men and women cheerfully slammed each other across the ice and into the walls, and shook hands and laughed about it afterwards.
She also introduced me to the concept of beer leagues: amateur, recreational sports for adults, often mixed, and usually capped off with a pint after the game. As I stare down my last couple of years of competitive club camogie, this is the kind of safety net I would love to have once I hang up the boots.
We have versions of it here – five-a-side, tag rugby, and ‘social hurling’, which gained some traction over Covid – but it would be wonderful to see it more widespread and accessible. The Irish Cancer Society’s superb Hurling for Cancer fundraiser seems to capture this spirit brilliantly: hurlers of all ages and genders playing a competitive game, but with the emphasis firmly on craic. Is this something we could organise on a larger scale?
In Brian O’Driscoll’s forthcoming documentary about retired sportspeople and mental health, he reveals that he went to see a psychiatrist a handful of times to prepare for retirement. These visits helped him to accept that "it’s normal to feel loss and a little envy towards those still playing". He’s right: the FOMO is real. And while, as 61-year-old soccer player Monica Vasquez put it, you can’t go back in time, it’s important to be able to check in and engage with the sport you love, even after retirement.
Sport isn’t only for the young, no more than it’s only for professionals, or only for men. It’s not a childish thing that we must put away once we come of age. Sport is something that sustains, challenges, and enriches us all our lives. The more of us playing, and the more diverse our teams, the better.
