Entertainment · Outdoors · Sport

Golf Boom of 2020 Still Going Strong

Golf Boom of 2020 Still Going Strong
Photo by Soheb Zaidi on Unsplash

Golf has always been an incredibly popular sport, but over the course of the pandemic in 2020, golf saw an unprecedented increase in popularity.

In 2019 across the UK, there were an estimated 3.7 million on-course adult golfers. During 2020, we saw an incredible increase of over 50% to 5.7 million!

During the 2020 pandemic, lock down and the social distancing restrictions left people feeling trapped in their own homes. Golf was one of the few sports you could play safely without violating the social distancing restrictions, so over 2 million Britons picked up a club and learnt to play golf.

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Kids · Sport

Top 5 Sport Activities Kids Can Benefit From

Top 5 Sport Activities Kids Can Benefit From

Kids typically have a lot of energy. They’re always super active and cannot sit still for long. There are many ways to channel this energy so they remain active and learn new things while at it. Thus, many parents prefer organizing different activities for their kids. It will help them release stress and keep them occupied for a long period. 

It is known that sport activities help in burning calories, keeping the body toned, and building muscles at the same time. Moreover, these activities also facilitate hand-eye coordination, social interaction, and problem-solving skills, among other things. If you’re looking for something that can help your child grow as a wholesome individual, you can organize one of these sport activities for them:

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Family · Fitness · Football · Kids · Sport

Soccer for Children: A Guide to Getting Started at Different Ages

One of the very best things about soccer for kids is that they really can start at any age. It’s a very inclusive sport and is suitable for anyone regardless of height, strength or speed. Soccer is a relatively easy sport to learn when you’re just starting out, and it involves a lot of continuous action and running, which means it’s a great way for kids to exercise. Communication and cooperation are key skills on the field, which makes it a really nice way for kids to learn about teamwork (for more resources on teamwork and becoming a great footballer, take a look at Soccer Gap)

In fact, soccer is officially the most played sport in Australia, so they’ll always have friends to play with. According to a survey conducted by the Australian Sports Commission, 1,104,815 Australians participated in soccer in 2016. That’s over 400,000 more participants than AFL, and four times that of Rugby League.

There’s no ‘right’ age to start soccer, but here you’ll find some of the basics in terms of what you can expect in each age bracket, from 5 years old to 12 years old. Take a look…

5 – 7 Year-Olds

It’s really all about getting out and having fun at this age. Teams will be smaller, with usually only four players on the field, and each half of a game will only go for around 15 minutes. They also probably won’t have a goalkeeper. While they’ll start to learn the rules, they probably won’t be very strictly enforced – it’s more about getting familiar with the basics and giving them a chance to develop a love of playing.

Starting at this age can set up a great foundation for building skills and understanding the fun that can come from exercise. It also gives them an opportunity to develop strong friendships across their years of playing.

8 – 9 year-olds

By this age, there’ll be more players on the field, and there’ll be a goalkeeper too. The length of each half will probably be more like 20-25 minutes. Of course, it’s still mainly about having fun, but with more of an emphasis on preparing them for higher levels of the sport. Additional rules will be introduced, and some of that earlier leniency with enforcing them will start to reduce, giving them a chance to fully understand the details of the game. Some experts believe that 8 years old is the ideal age for kids to start playing soccer in a competitive team environment.

10-12 Year-Olds

This is when coaches will really start to focus on skills in order to provide them with a solid foundation of technical competence. At this age, children are ready for a more structured approach to training too. The number of players allowed on the field increases to 9 a side (at 10 years old) and then to 11 a side (at 12 years old). The length of the game also increases, with 12-year-olds playing full 30 minute halves.

While things are more focussed at this stage, the emphasis will still be on having fun and building positive experiences.

All children are different and it’s hard to say whether there is an ideal age to start soccer. But, whatever their age, there are many benefits of choosing soccer. It is a contact sport, but it’s not a collision sport, which means its relatively safe compared to a lot of other team sports (especially other forms of football).

Beyond that, it’s well known that there are a lot of benefits for kids who play sport – it contributes positively to their physical health, can give them a great range of social experiences and can give them a great sense of achievement as they build their skills. If your child is interested in sports, soccer may well be a great place to start. You could also get involved and help out the team once you’ve got some basic disclosure from CRB Direct.

A sports camp can be a great entry point and there are many soccer school holiday programs in Sydney or your local surrounding area that your kids can get involved with.

Sport

Making Sports More Inclusive

Inclusive SportsWhen you ask a child what they want to be when they grow up, chances are you’re going to get the reply footballer, dancer, race car driver – basically a lot of sport.

Sports personalities are seen as role models in society, you’d be shocked if someone claimed not to have heard of David Beckham or Serena Williams.

Getting the kids involved in sport is an important part of having a healthy lifestyle, and it should be encouraged wherever you are! Not only can taking part in sport boost physical health, but it can help develop useful skills for other areas of life, like teamwork and communication.

But, what happens when you or your children can’t take part in traditional sports? According to The World Bank, 10% of the world’s population has a disability. That’s more than 600 million people. If you take into account the families of people with disabilities, then at least 25% of the population are affected by disability. So how do we make sure the fun we’re having playing sport is inclusive?

Inclusive sport can cover a lot of ground and a lot of different courts. In a nutshell, it’s all about getting everyone feeling involved and included in sports, this could mean supplying equipment like Quest 88’s Inclusive sports equipment for a child with orthopedic issues in a dance class, to designing an exercise class that are safe for those with certain medical conditions.

Parasports, sport for those with disabilities, is on the rise. Over the past few years, a number of sporting organisations and some very popular competition circuits for individuals with specific disabilities have been cropping up across the country. It’s not just the Paralympics that are showcasing athletes with disabilities these days.

So, how can you get your family involved in inclusive sport? First roll out the welcome mat, friends, family, strangers who’ve seen you playing sitting volleyball down the local park, let anyone join in with your fun. After all, it is inclusive!

You’re not going to know what sports are out there if you don’t ask. The same goes with asking what sports everyone’s interested in! If you can’t pull your child away from the box when the football’s on, then maybe an adaptive form of football is the road to go down. Also, testing different sports could be beneficial, find a few that best suit you and your family.

Having the right equipment is beneficial whatever you’re doing. However, this isn’t just the usual balls, rackets, nets etc. whilst having those things will come in handy when setting up to play, the equipment you’ll need is more along the lines of specialist equipment or technology that is designed to help people with physical limitations to take part and enjoy sport.

The variety of adaptive equipment out there is very wide, so doing some research before diving straight in and buying the first brake levers you find could be a smart idea! Many clubs in sports that have more expensive equipment requirements, such as some wheelchair sports, will actually have chairs and other equipment which belong to the club which members can use rather than shelling out yourself.

Just make inclusive sports the new norm! Don’t name it alternative or different sports, just get stuck in and enjoy yourself with some wheelchair basketball or power football.

Feminism · Fitness · Lifestyle · Opinion · Sport

Is it Time for an Intersex Olympics?

Intersex” is a general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male.

(I apologise in advance if I use any incorrect terminology, my aim here is not to offend anyone, only to start a conversation)

If you’ve been anywhere near the news in the past few days, you can’t fail to have missed the furore surrounding South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya and the questions over her gender. In case you have missed it, here’s a TL:DR of the situation: Caster, born in 1991, won a gold medal in Rio in the womens’ Olympics, however there have been complaints from other athletes because she has high levels of testosterone, which they claim gives her an advantage.

Caster Semenya

When I first started reading about this, I came across an article where they said that it had become common practice for Semenya to go into the bathrooms before a race to show one of her competitors her genitals to “prove” her femininity, which sounds absolutely appalling and like a gross invasion of her privacy and I was genuinely shocked to read that she had to go to such lengths to confirm her eligibility to race.

However, the controversy takes a slightly different slant when you consider her internal physiology. You see, according to official reports, Semenya has high levels of testosterone which is produced by internal testes and she also lacks a uterus and ovaries. The officials who deal with eligibility to race have stated that there’s insignificant evidence to suggest that testosterone gives her a significant advantage over the other athletes, however, several other athletes with the same physical attributes as Semenya took steps to change this, as reported in the New York Times:

At the London Olympics, four female athletes, all 18 to 21 years old and from rural areas of developing countries, were flagged for high levels of natural testosterone. Each of them subsequently had surgery to remove internal testes, which produce testosterone, as well as procedures that were not required for resuming competition: feminizing vaginoplasty, estrogen replacement therapy and a reduction in the size of the clitoris.

One could argue that many athletes have physical attributes which make them “unusual” in the grand scheme of things, but which give them an advantage when it comes to sporting prowess. Take Miguel Indurain, for instance. He’s a Spanish cyclist who won FIVE consecutive Tour de France in the early to mid-Nineties and is considered cycling royalty to this day. However, he has a huge physical advantage; his blood took almost double the oxygen of a normal person and his cardiac output was 50 litres a minute; a fit amateur cyclist’s is about 25 litres. No-one suggested that his physiology was an unfair advantage, just a happy anomaly which, ultimately, made him a legend.

So, if the issue isn’t physiological, then is it a gender issue? Well, Semenya identifies as a woman and has spent her entire life living as a woman; from what I can gather there’s never been any suggestion in her life of any sort of gender dysphoria or questions over how she identifies, which makes it clear cut, right? Maybe not.

Fallon Fox Tamikka Brents

Fallon Fox in white, before her fight with Tamikka Brents (pink bottoms)

Another similar case in sport was that of MMA fighter Fallon Fox. Featherweight champion Fallon underwent gender reassignment surgery back in 2006 and entered the MMA as a female fighter. Not only has she had her male reproductive organs removed but she has been on hormone therapy for many years, however she’s faced massive opposition and controversy within the MMA community because people feel that her physicality gives her an advantage, not least of all when she fought Tamikka Brents, and “Brents suffered a concussion, an orbital bone fracture, and seven staples to the head. After her loss, Brents took to social media to convey her thoughts on the experience of fighting Fox: “I’ve fought a lot of women and have never felt the strength that I felt in a fight as I did that night. I can’t answer whether it’s because she was born a man or not because I’m not a doctor. I can only say, I’ve never felt so overpowered ever in my life and I am an abnormally strong female in my own right,” she stated. “Her grip was different, I could usually move around in the clinch against other females but couldn’t move at all in Fox’s clinch…””

Fox argues that her hormone therapy probably means that she actually has LESS testosterone than her competitors, but this doesn’t alter the fact that testosterone played a part on how she developed physically in the first place, until her reassignment surgery.

It’s all such a grey area. Traditionally speaking, men and women have never competed against one another because of the clear physical differences, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no middle ground. Obviously, it’s rare to see a woman who’s the size of say, Mike Tyson, with the same bone structure and heavy musculature, but there are plenty of female fighters who probably make Conor McGregor look like a leprechaun with his featherweight frame. But does size equal strength? No, definitely not.

All of this is leading to a point…honestly!

While I’m not suggesting that being intersex or hormonally different is a disability (quite the opposite, in fact), is it time that we offered an Olympics for competitors where gender isn’t clear-cut, in the same way that we have a Paralympics for differently abled athletes? This way there can’t be any suggestion that they’re somehow exploiting a physical advantage. Issues of gender have become far less taboo in recent years, allowing people to live exactly as they wish to without the previous levels of prejudice, which is great, although there is still a long way to go. Should be we accommodating people for whom gender/sex isn’t black and white? A ‘third-sex’ Olympics? It would certainly level the playing field, but is it getting into dangerous levels of classification and potential prejudice from different angles? Is submitting to hormone tests before being allowed to enter a step too far, or is it no different to submitting to a drugs test to ensure that performance-enhancing drugs aren’t used? Is it all just sour grapes from the losing athletes?

I’d love to know your thoughts on this, so please do leave me a comment below!