The below piece was written by an Up2Us Sports coach serving in Los Angeles. For LGBTQ+ Pride Month, we asked coaches how to ensure an inclusive and supportive team culture for LGBTQ+ athletes and to explain the importance of having representation in sports for the younger generation of LGBTQ+ athletes. A coach who wished to remain anonymous wrote the below beautifully articulated response.

As a queer person who grew up playing on mostly girls' sports teams, I try to make a concerted effort to allow space for growth, transformation, and self-actualization. I think one of the most important things when working with youth is to acknowledge that they are in an existing world, internally and externally, of constant change and self-realization. Just because something is one way doesn’t mean it’s going to stay that way, and it can be so harmful to force children and young people into boxes and prevent this kind of fluidity and difference from emerging. Obviously, it is far too much pressure to put on oneself to be able to foresee these changes and differences in real-time, and mistakes are going to be made, but the key is always insisting on being open and aware that change and transformation may arise at again given moment, and to allow yourself to learn and grow from these unforeseen circumstances. 

Growing up, it seemed to me that there was a clear distinction between the kids who were celebrated in sports versus those who were torn down and their roles diminished. Being gay or queer in the way one is in a relationship with other people or in the way that one identifies and exists in the world always felt like an automatic disqualification for being impressive in terms of physical ability or athletic skill. This is especially true for young boys and those assigned male at birth, as being queer is automatically seen as a sign of weakness and inadequacy, which is the antithesis of the ideal masculinity and toughness associated with most athletic activities. For young girls and those assigned female at birth, though, it is a bit different. Even though there is a certain stereotype of queer women gravitating toward the athletic sphere, particularly women’s sports like soccer, rugby, and softball, being deemed universally gay by some, this does not feel like a way of uplifting queer women in sporting spaces, rather it feels like a pattern of diminishing their womanhood and fabricating a reason to look down on the way they have seemingly abandoned their femininity and role as a submissive and weak woman, a role which heteronormative patriarchal society constantly is forcing upon women of all ages. 

I recently had an experience while coaching that made me stop and consider whether I was truly stepping up to the plate as a coach of young girls. Among my friends and my age demographic to a certain extent, there is an unspoken understanding that “guy” is gender-neutral in today’s lingo. The sensitivity around calling groups of young kids “guys” that arose while people my age were growing up, is generally considered to be blown a bit out of proportion and not the be-all and end-all of tackling sexism and harmful gender norms. But recently, I was helping one of the girls on my t-ball team, who is 5 years old, tie her shoes. I knelt to help her, and she excitedly exclaimed how well she had performed at practice, saying something along the lines of, “I hit it all the way to the grass and barely even tried!” I replied by saying, “Pretty impressive for just a little guy,” to which she retorted quickly and in a slightly irritated tone of voice, “I’m a girl!!” 

Of course, I apologized and corrected myself right away, but this moment stuck with me. I hadn’t even stopped to consider that saying “guys” as a general reference to a group of kids is very different from saying “guy” about a little girl who is just coming to an understanding of who she is and what it means to be a boy versus a girl. My intention was never to infer that guys are somehow more important or noteworthy than girls, but how was she meant to know that? And even if she grows up to have a nuanced understanding of the subject that can understand my point of view, how are we to be sure that that experience and others like it don’t have some kind of unconscious internal bias around gender and how girls and women are valued versus how men and boys are? All of this is to say that creating a safe and inclusive space for LGBTQ+ athletes allows for necessary representation and visibility. Ensuring this kind of environment is a constant process of learning, listening, and staying open.

This coach has served as an Up2Us Sports coach in Los Angeles, CA since Spring 2024 thanks to support from AmeriCorps.