Nike just released a powerful commercial featuring some of the best female athletes of our generation. Clips of Sha’Carri Richardson, Caitlin Clark, Jordan Chiles, and Aryna Sabalenka to name a few, played in the background while they spoke about how society sets women in sport up to fail. Female athletes can’t be emotional. We can’t be relentless. And we definitely can’t be aggressive. I’ve been involved in competitive sports all my life. I was a gymnast for eleven years. I played golf competitively for six. And I have been a competitive tennis player for sixteen years. Yet I am not someone who considers myself competitive whatsoever—it’s just not in my nature. But upon watching this commercial, is being competitive something that’s just not in my nature? Or is being competitive something I’ve been taught not to be?
Being a competitive gymnast was a difficult experience. I wasn’t in your traditional gymnastics with bar, beam and floor—I was in a program called ACRO. We did floor, but subbed the beam and bar for trampoline and handstand tricks. We performed at various shows and the top team even went as far as traveling cross-country to perform at NBA games. All of the intense training for our performances hoping to eventually make the top team made for a lifetime of chronic back pain and joint issues. It also fostered my lack of competitiveness. While we were being pushed to our physical limits, time off the floor was focused on our manners. We were not punished when we failed to land a flip. We were punished when we went to our shows and forgot to hold a door, or say please or thank you—it made us ‘look bad’.
These lessons in gymnastics taught me how to have perfect manners—something I’ve been complimented on from a young age. But growing up in gymnastics, especially on a performance team, caused problems when I began to compete in other sports. I remember my first competitive golf tournament when I was just entering middle school. I was playing against a girl who was technically much better than I was, and when I started to beat her, I didn’t feel pride—I felt guilt. In all my years of gymnastics, my manners were perfected rather than my competitive nature. This submissiveness, ingrained in my head from age three, never allowed me to step into my true potential as a competitive athlete. One of my worst memories in high school was when I had to play a tennis match against my best friend. Every time a ball was out within a foot of the line, I gave her the point. Our society has taught women that being kind and passive is always the right choice. Which in sports, unfortunately for us, often translates to ‘don’t be competitive’. And this is not just my story – I think this is one shared by many female athletes.
Even while playing on my university’s tennis team at a competitive level, my ability to feel competitive has stayed in the front of my mind. I’ve gotten much more competitive since coming to uni. It’s much easier to play people you don’t know, let alone people you’ll never see again, and be the competitive player you’ve always wanted to be. Close call, but I know it’s out? No shame. Shouting out of excitement, or anger? Love to do it! It’s all fun and games, until you’re set to a different standard than the men—that’s when I realized that maybe I wasn’t to blame for my lack of competitiveness. Maybe it was society telling me not to be competitive.
As a 21 year old woman, I’m now capable of seeing the difference in treatment between women and men at the competitive sport level. I remember I was at training (on a Monday morning at 7:30am, mind you), and I was playing horribly. I let out a quick string of curse words, and immediately got shot a look by my coach. At the end of practice, he rounded the women up (even though only I swore), allowing the men to go home, and said that if he saw such behaviour again, us girls would be in big trouble. Behaviour like that “is not only a bad look for you, but for the club.” Yet the men in our club are allowed to swear. Heck, they can smash their racquets and throw them across the court without getting a warning. It’s only when they verbally abuse their opponents that they’d get this kind of talking to.
While I’m not blaming anyone in particular for this inequity, I do blame society. Women are taught to be kind and submissive from a young age. I was taught the value of manners and a nice smile over the satisfaction of competitiveness and grit at age 3. Women are not set up for success when it comes to competitiveness. Women who are competitive are considered pricks. Society tells us that if we are competitive, we will upset others. Yet if we aren’t competitive, we will upset ourselves. Sometimes it feels like no matter the outcome of the game, female athletes can’t seem to win. Society may tell us we must pick: either be a polite and proper woman or exert our competitiveness and strength and be labeled overly aggressive. But I encourage you to do exactly as Nike’s new commercial says because “There’s one guarantee in sport: You’ll be told you can’t do it. So do it anyway.”