What do you want to be when you grow up? Surely, you, reader, heard this question dozens of times during childhood. At seven, eight or ten years old, this questioning sounds almost like an invitation to dream. It doesn’t have to be reasonable, much less “doable,” but the answer there represents a child’s most genuine desire.
I would venture to say that the majority of men reading this text have, at some point, answered: “football player”. And, in the same way, I would bet that the vast majority of women readers of this column (if not 100%) have never responded in the same way. In my case, even though I have always been passionate about football, played a lot of futsal at school, something like that never crossed my mind. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”. “Soccer player”. It was unthinkable.
A phrase said by the legendary American tennis player Billie Jean King can explain this logic. “You have to see it to want to be.” It is inevitable and unconscious. When you don’t see people like you occupying certain spaces, exercising certain professions, the automatic message to your brain is: this place is not for you. It’s as if even dreaming is impossible.
Still in the game of placing bets, I would say that most of you, readers, already have a daughter, a granddaughter, a niece who plays soccer. Or a daughter/granddaughter/niece of an acquaintance who asked her parents to start school, or who wanted a ball or a cleat as a gift.
It is no accident that the scenario is changing. Who turned on the TV on Saturday (14), saw Cristiane, the iconic player of the Brazilian team, score another goal for Santos and establish herself in the top scorer of the Brazilian Women’s Championship. Who called on Sunday (15), saw Tamires, a Corinthians player, complete 100 games with the white shirt. On Monday, there is also women’s football on TV. And it’s been happening all week.
It is this visibility that allows girls to dream of this in the future. Today, many of them already respond that they want to be “football players” when they grow up. Or skaters, like Fadinha, Rayssa Leal, silver medalist at the Tokyo Olympics. Or gymnasts, Olympic champions, like Rebeca Andrade, who won the first Olympic gold in women’s artistic gymnastics for Brazil. The future in the sport became a possible dream for them.
The numbers don’t lie. Since Brazil stopped to applaud sports phenomena such as Fadinha and Rebeca, the demand for these modalities among children has skyrocketed. Even among girls. Brasil Skate Camp, in São Paulo, saw a 50% increase in demand for classes after Rayssa Leal’s achievement. And the new vacancies were filled mainly by girls (who represented 90% of new students).
If before they heard that “skating was dangerous”, today they are out there dropping and learning tricks.
The same scenario was repeated in other capitals with gymnastics. In Belo Horizonte, the CT Amigos do Esporte school had a number of enrollments between July and September 2021 (Olympic Games period) three times higher than what used to be registered in the period —98% of the new students were girls, very inspired for the success of Rebeca Andrade.
You have to see it to want to be. Girls now have the opportunity to see women playing football, doing skateboard tricks, doing pirouettes in gymnastics, winning trophies, medals, occupying a leading role in the sport that was previously denied to them. What do they want when they grow up? Living in a world where gender does not impose limits on dreams.
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