When girls play, the whole world wins

From the first time a girl steps onto a rink, field, court, or track, she is learning something far bigger than the rules of a game. She is learning to take up space.

Canada’s spring economic update included a significant new investment in sport, committing $660-million over five years, including $110-million ongoing, to expand participation among children and youth, particularly in underrepresented communities.

But if we only see this as a Canadian sport announcement, we are missing the bigger picture.

Sport is one of the most practical leadership schools we have. For girls especially, it can challenge the messages they receive far too early: be smaller, be quieter, know your limits. A good sport environment teaches girls to test those limits, and to recognize their bodies as a source of power and possibility.

One of us learned that lesson on the ice and has carried it into medicine. The other sees it through the lens of global health, where a girl’s ability to make informed health decisions and participate fully in society can shift the trajectory of an entire community. From both perspectives, the same idea holds: sport is not just building athletes, it is also shaping how girls understand their place in the world.

In Canada, we often talk about the barriers that keep girls out of sport: cost, transportation, safety, a lack of female coaches, uneven access to facilities, and the quiet but powerful discomfort that comes with puberty. Those barriers are real. They push girls out at exactly the age when sport may be doing some of its most important work.

We see a similar pattern play out around the world. In many parts of the Global South, the barriers that keep a girl from sport also keep her from school and all the opportunities that follow. Lack of access to period products, proper nutrition, safe facilities, or comprehensive sexual education does more than disrupt a day. It shapes a girl’s sense of what is possible for her life. 

A girl in Canada who drops out of sport because she feels embarrassed or unsure of her changing body is not navigating the same realities as a girl elsewhere who is kept from school because she lacks basic supplies. But both are part of a larger story about what happens when girls are taught to manage their bodies in silence rather than understand them as sources of strength.

Sport can help change that.

When girls stay in environments that support their well-being, they are empowered to understand their bodies, ask questions, and make informed decisions about their health. That confidence carries outward. A girl who learns to trust herself is better prepared to recognize unfairness, speak up for teammates, and persist in systems that were not built with her in mind.

This is why youth sport should be understood as more than recreation. It is infrastructure for a stronger society. Girls who play learn early that they are part of something larger than themselves.

That lesson is also deeply Canadian. Our influence has never come from size alone, but from what we choose to build with others: systems, partnerships, and solutions that do not stop at our border. That includes global health, where Canada has long contributed to building systems that advance women’s and girls’ health and rights. 

Investing in girls’ participation in sport is part of that same tradition. By cultivating leadership at home, we’re shaping a generation ready to engage with the world. That matters for a country whose future depends not only on how young people see themselves, but on how clearly they see their responsibility to others, within Canada and beyond.

This is where the Government of Canada’s investment in sport can serve a larger purpose. How we invest at home can also strengthen how we show up globally. Girls who play are learning to connect their own experience to a wider truth: every girl deserves the chance to move through the world with dignity, health, and possibility.

The goal is not to produce exceptional girls who beat the odds. It is to build a world where fewer girls have to.

Dr. Hayley Wickenheiser is a four-time Olympic gold medallist, assistant general manager of player development to the Toronto Maple Leafs, and a practicing family and emergency medicine physician. Caitlin Goggin is the CEO of the Canadian Partnership for Women and Children’s Health (CanWaCH). 

The Hill Times