A plethora of pink congregated at the Glen View Elementary
School playground as dozens of little girls lunged, relay raced and
hula hooped their way to a healthier lifestyle.
A plethora of pink congregated at the Glen View Elementary School playground as dozens of little girls lunged, relay raced and hula hooped their way to a healthier lifestyle.
The Bay Area Women’s Sports Initiative, a nonprofit organization founded in 2005 by Olympic and World Cup soccer stars Brandi Chastain and Julie Foudy and former general manager of the San Jose CyberRays women’s professional soccer team, Marlene Bjornsrud, recently infiltrated two of Gilroy’s elementary schools – Glen View and Eliot – and gained a loyal following of enthusiastic girls ready to work up a sweat.
Once a week, more than 100 third, fourth and fifth grade girls at Glen View grab jump ropes, kickballs and jerseys and spend 75 minutes of their afternoon doing what children do best: expend energy.
BAWSI activities are designed with girls in mind, Bjornsrud said.
“They’re very girl-specific,” she said. “What we know about young girls is that relationships and being social are very important. We don’t emphasize competition. They’re part of a team and a team always encourages each other.”
The girls and their parents agreed that boys play differently than girls. And when boys become too competitive, many girls drop out, said Perla Villegas, 9.
“I don’t really like playing with the boys because they can get aggressive,” she said.
She and her friends took a quick breather from a rousing game of ‘Sharks and Minnows’, a spin-off of tag, to talk about their favorite activities.
“It’s fun and you get to do a lot of cool stuff,” said Elysia Hill, 8, hands stuffed in her pockets. “I’m good at hula hooping.”
“C’mon, you can be good too,” she nudged her friend Mitzi Sanchez, 8, when Sanchez said she was no good.
Hula hooping, yoga and hopscotch are just a few examples of the activities geared toward girls.
“My favorite part is yoga,” Villegas said. “You get to relax and it feels really good.”
“There’s too much learning,” she said of her stressful school day.
Each girl was armed with a diary and a pedometer to measure and record the number of steps taken daily, Villegas said, raising her shirt to show off the meter strapped to her belt buckle. Glen View Principal Scott Otteson’s goal for the girls is to take 10,000 steps a day, or roughly five miles, he said. Gilroy is known for having one of the highest rates of childhood obesity in the county, topping out at 31.3 percent in 2004, according to kidsdata.org, a Web site maintained by the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health.
“This program is about becoming life-long athletes and fitness enthusiasts,” Otteson said. “It’s about getting out there and being active.”
Not only are the girls exposed to fitness, they’re led by a group of enthusiastic role models. The Gavilan College softball team led by head coach Nikki Dequin volunteered to run the program at Glen View. A parallel program called Salud por Vida also targets mothers at the two school sites so that little girls see them engaging in the same types of physical activity. The free program is funded by a partnership between Kaiser Permanente and the YMCA, Bjornsrud said.
“It’s about getting them out and moving and feeling powerful and strong and building self-esteem through movement,” Dequin said. At the end of the session, she gathered the girls in a huddle and led them in a round of cheering and high fives.
“We’re not making the next round of gold medalists,” Bjornsrud said. “We want every little girl to come through the program finding some form of physical activity they’re comfortable with.”
