Women’s Squash Week is an international campaign that aims to celebrate and raise the profile of female squash.
The PSA Foundation are proud to champion this key awareness week, and a core part of our work is empowering women and girls to participate in squash.
We speak with World Number 6 Gina Kennedy about the importance of creating spaces for women and girls to thrive in our sport, the importance of female presence in our game and more.
“I think it’s really important to get women involved in every sport and especially squash which is probably a sport that you know can be quite daunting as it’s extremely physical and you would kind of traditionally think of it as quite like a male dominated sport.”
I think having female role models at the top of the game in squash is so important to see like what can be achieved in the game and increasing the amount of kids we get playing at that grassroots level will just like accelerate the sport and accelerate the level.
It’s like you see it in Egypt where every week I feel like there’s a new Egyptian phenomenon coming through whether that be male or female and that’s just because they have so many kids playing at that grassroots level so hopefully if we can get that tradition throughout the whole of the world then the level is just going to keep continuing to increase.
Any kid when they’re younger who is sporty and athletic you know dreams of going to the Olympics and becoming an Olympian because that’s kind of like the epitome of sport, isn’t it? So I think now that it’s in the Olympics and there’s a chance for a kid to become an Olympian and win that gold medal is going to be really important for increasing grassroots level of the game,
But also just continuing to showcase our sport as much as possible, continuing to like push it and show off the incredible athleticism of people and of the squash players. And in that way is also like a massive.
It’s important for the kind of men to understand the challenges that women go through as well so that they can understand how women play and the way the game is, if that makes sense. There’s still the gender stereotypes aren’t there.
Men are the sporty ones and women aren’t, like even when I was growing up I was naturally very sporty and I was involved in all the sports and I was always encouraged to do so but I was one of very few females who was doing that and I definitely went through some times when I was younger where I felt very insecure about being maybe more muscley than the other girls or maybe everyone else was doing something and I was the only one playing sport whereas for men that’s normalised.
It’s very good that they’re doing that and all their friends will support that whereas for women it’s more unique and hopefully we can get to a point where it isn’t like that anymore and women playing sport is equally as common as men playing sports.
It’s definitely changing but I think the main barrier is when you get to a certain age your peer group is what determines your lifestyle choices and at that point when you don’t listen to your parents as much that’s when you need your peers to also be doing the same things that you do and if you feel like you’re the only one playing sport then it can be a big barrier and a big challenge.
Maybe if I didn’t have friends who were so encouraging maybe those doubts would have been enough to make me like not want to play sport just because of humiliation and embarrassment and I know a few of my friends who maybe weren’t at that top level but just playing for fun definitely like stopped playing because it wasn’t like normal for girls to do.
I’ve always been coached by men my whole life and like it’s been amazing for me but having more female coaches is an incredible way to get more girls involved in the game and just to you know get that respect that I was alluding to before.
If there’s no kind of female presence in a squash club then it’s unlikely that there’s going to be girls rising up because you need you need people like yourself not only to feel comfortable in the environment but to also learn and like grow.
I think we’re very lucky with like the level of the women’s game at the moment is so impressive.
Perhaps there’s always a tendency in in a lot of sports to think I’m not gonna watch the women’s because it’s terrible compared to the men’s but I don’t I genuinely don’t think that we have that in squash.
There are innate differences between men and women so our sport is just as worthy as to watch as the men’s sport.
And no one even questions it anymore. No one would think, “Why should we get paid the same as men?” Because that’s just the way it is, which is so important for parity and respect.
