“Pretty Amazing” Winner Uses Soccer to Empower Young Women!!!

 

“Pretty Amazing” Winner Uses Soccer to Empower Young Women.

For many young American girls, appearing on the cover of Seventeen magazine would be a dream come true. But for Notre Dame senior and former soccer player Lindsay Brown, winning Seventeen Magazine’s “Pretty Amazing” award signifies something else — helping girls around the world achieve their own dreams.

Brown founded the SEGway project, which stands for Soccer Empowering Girls Worldwide and You, a program seeking to involve female American athletes in developing athletic skills and confidence for young girls in developing nations. The project currently serves girls in Nepal, Cambodia and Kenya, and Brown said particularly in these countries, soccer gives girls a confidence in other facets of their lives which they may not have had otherwise.

“The idea is that helping on the soccer field is an extension of the classroom, so girls can gain leadership skills necessary to make an impact on the community,” she said. “The interesting thing is that boys are starting to respect the girls a lot more in the classroom when they see them on the soccer field. We’re helping them segue into the community as leaders, because what good is an education if the boys don’t respect their opinion?”



A summer trip to Nepal was the first step on Brown’s journey towards starting the SEGway project. She founded a girls’ soccer team at Kopila Valley Primary School in Surkhet, Nepal, which Brown said led to far more challenges than just teaching the girls how to play.

“It was way harder than I thought going into the trip,” she said. “It wasn’t just that the girls didn’t have a coach before, it was that it’s a patriarchal society, so they weren’t playing, not because they didn’t want to, but because their parents wouldn’t let them and because they thought it would be disgraceful. They thought it wasn’t the way they were supposed to act as these obedient, beautiful, young girls. That was more or less the barrier. It didn’t matter that the girls were hand-balling or anything like that — it was more or less getting them allowed to be out on the field to even do that.”

Another challenge Brown faced was convincing the girls’ parents to allow them to play. She walked over an hour back from school to the neighborhood where all the girls lived and spoke with each of their parents individually. She said the parents were very receptive, but many asked the then 20-year-old Brown why she wasn’t married, and concluded that her soccer career had kept her single. The fathers were particularly hesitant to allow their daughters to play, Brown said, but eventually they came around.

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