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[stereotypesclass1teachercarmen]

Stereotypes impact on the development and success of athletes

By Pedro Borges

Do you know how much stereotypes impact sports? Stereotypes are part of our most common debates nowadays. Many people judge this issue in a really positive way affirming that stereotypes don’t impact in any way on sports, just the ability of players that matters. This is a wrong idea, stereotypes impact on the development and success of athletes.

Firstly, there are many more white tennis players than black ones. This comes only as an example. According to this article elaborated by the website Zipa, among the tennis practitioners in the USA, 66.5% are white while only 8.9% are black. Even though this data represents only that country, around 23.6 million people practice the sport only in the United States, according to the website Usta in this article. This segregation is not random, it has its origins in the core of the sport. It was an aristocracy’s activity, so black people didn’t commonly played tennis. This is a clear example of classification and segregation, processes that occur because of heuristics, our brain’s shortcuts. Essentially, they are our heads trying to find patterns in things, classifying them. When heuristics classify unequal and diverse beings, like humans, many wrong suppositions may happen. This generates stereotypes, which leads to segregation like this one in tennis.

Stereotypes also impact on the development and success of women tennists. Take the UK as an example. According to this text from the website Wtcatennis, the UK is struggling to get enough girls into tennis, but even when they do it is difficult to keep them. Further, girls are outnumbered by boys at all junior age groups by at least 3:1, and are twice as likely to drop out around puberty. Only 23% of the UK’s coaches are female, and at more advanced qualifications this difference gets even wider. The same website also shows that this is not just a British problem, and governing bodies around the world are at various stages of recognition and action, trying to tackle their nation’s “female problem”. It is one more example of how this structural stereotype acts in sports.

Beyond that, stereotypes can also buffer the performance of athletes. A work shown on this document from the website Pubmed explores a research that consists in discovering the effects of anxiety in sports. It was investigated whether the activation of a positive social identity buffers performance from the anxiety associated with a negative stereotype. One of the experiments shows that the simultaneous activation of a positive and a negative social identity led to better performance than the activation of only a negative social identity for female soccer players. This fact proves that the warrant presented at the beginning of this paragraph is true.

In conclusion, among many reasons, stereotypes impact on the development and success of athletes because they may muddle the success of women in tennis; Even further, not only may it disturb the performance of athletes, but also there are much more white tennis players than black ones, a clear effect of structural racism and stereotypes. Considering those proven facts, there is no doubt that this thesis is incontestable. Now, seeing this hidden problem, how may we proceed to change the structure of sports, improving it into one free of stereotypes?

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@belindabencic in #perth getting ready for the @hopmancup ️🇦🇺 Slow mo forehand ...

@belindabencic in #perth getting ready for the @hopmancup ️🇦🇺 Slow mo forehand …

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