Sport, adventure, movement, activity, play… What do we call moving our bodies, and what does it mean when we do? Similarly, what do we call girls and young women who engage in any of these? Not everyone identifies as as athlete, and even if we believe that anyone who rides a bike (or insert your other form of movement here) is an athlete, that doesn’t mean the term speaks to everyone. I know for me it didn’t.
It’s easy to see how words like exercise feel different than training, or diet feels different than fueling, even if we’re talking about the exact same thing. Words matter. And they get tossed around very casually.
I’ve been struggling with this concept for a while, as I work on the business end of Strong Girl Publishing. When I only had the Shred Girls series, it was easy to talk about how cycling was empowering and I wanted every girl to get on a bike. Then, we broadened out to other sports, and the language got more challenging as I tried to make sure everyone felt invited to read our books. And as we talk about bringing more kids into sport (or whatever we want to call it), we need to think about how we’re phrasing our invitations.
Here’s just a brief example of how our phrasing matters:
- Sport: Sounds like you have to be on a team or playing at a certain level
- Exercise: Sounds like something you do out of obligation, not for fun
- Movement, activity: Sounds vague, hard for kids to imagine what we mean
- Training: Sounds competitive
- Adventure, play: Sounds fun, but very unstructured
None of these are bad. But when we make invitations to come out and join a team or a riding group, we need to make sure that our language is as clear and inviting as possible.
I recently helped start a local run club. Our first criticism of our website? We weren’t clear enough about what the weekly run was. Was it competitive or casual? How technical was it? How long, both time and distance-wise? People had questions that we, as longtime runners, simply didn’t think were a big deal.
For a kid who’s never participated in an organized sport, words are everything.
