“Campaign” is almost the Word of the Year in women’s sport. New initiatives are springing up in every quarter. It’s almost as if nobody had shown any adventurousness in the past; yet there’s been plenty.
These initiatives can adopt different names: “programme” is very popular, then we find “launch”, “mission” and “development”. Here are a few examples, plucked from these pages over the past few weeks:
021224 The Queen’s Club, West Kensington, has its highly successful Outreach programme (squash)
061224 The FA announces new Coaching Excellence initiative (football)
1911244 Footballco launches women’s football brand in Italy, an Italian edition of INDIVISA
(football)
191124 100% Cricket introduces ‘successful coaches’ initiative (cricket)
181124 Leicester Tigers launch their Board to Ball campaign (rugby)
151124 Chelsea Foundation launches Inspire Her – a five-year mission to drive girls’ participation in football, building ambition and passion for the game in the next generation. (football)
111124 Student Performance Sport Breakthrough Programme will provide more than 160 University of Bath student-athletes across 25 different sports with bespoke support (multi-sport)
061124 Warner Bros Discovery Access and TNT Sports Launch: Reframe the Game (multi-sport)
011124 Royal London announces the first winners of its annual Championing Women and Girls’
Rugby Award (rugby)
011124 The FA Launches Female Coaching Club Programme (football)
311024 ICC announces line-up of mentees for Future Leaders Programme (cricket)
311024 World Rugby and ChildFund Rugby announce next phase of Grassroots to Global (rugby)
311024 Introducing the FA’s Women’s & Girls’ Strategy 2024-28 (football)
291024 RFU: Applications still open for our Women Leadership Development Programmes
(rugby)
251024 Basketball England seeks a Participation Programme Manager (basketball)
171024 The RFU’s new Player Development Group (PDG) centres for the Under-18 Development Phase have been named after nine influential former Red Roses (rugby)
171024 Harlequins and Capgemini launch Leadership Programme (rugby)
031024 World Rugby launches Rugby Rising Play (rugby)
These follow earlier examples such as:
From an individual campaign to a giant. In 2024 Adidas developed a campaign entitled: You Got This (multi-sport)
And going aback a bit:
2015 Sport England’s This Girl Can (multi-sport)
