You can't be what you can't see. That rule does not stop at eighteen.

Every conversation about role models in women's sport is, by default, a conversation about girls. Get more girls watching the Lionesses. Get more girls trying football after the World Cup. Get more girls seeing women on television so they believe sport is for them too.

All of this is right and important. None of it explains what happens to the woman after she turns eighteen.

Researchers studying elite ice hockey players who became mothers identified three core challenges facing women trying to remain in their sport — financial precarity, uncertainty about whether their body and identity would still belong in the sport, and a third, quietly devastating theme the researchers named directly: you can't be what you can't see (Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 2025). Without visible mother-athletes ahead of them, the players in the study could not picture a version of themselves that combined motherhood with continued participation. So most did not try.

That finding was about elite athletes. But the mechanism it describes is not exclusive to elite sport. It is universal. And it applies just as forcefully to the woman in her thirties or forties who has not played anything competitively in over a decade, who would quietly love to, and who has absolutely no model in front of her for what that would even look like.

The life stage nobody is targeting

The UK Parliament's Women and Equalities Committee inquiry into health barriers for girls and women in sport was explicit that the goal must be a coordinated, sector-wide approach across a woman's entire life path — from early years, through puberty and motherhood, to midlife and beyond (Women and Equalities Committee, 2024). In practice, almost every visible campaign, sponsorship pound, and piece of media coverage concentrates at the two ends of that path: girls, and elite professionals. The enormous middle — adult women living ordinary lives — is where the visible role models almost entirely disappear.

Research into motherhood and sport participation found that women who do remain active after having children often have to renegotiate which kind of activity they do entirely — frequently shifting from team sport, which requires fixed commitment to set times and dates, toward individual activity that is easier to fit around caring responsibilities (Open University, 2022). This is not necessarily what these women want. It is what the absence of visible, flexible, welcoming team options leaves them with.

And the women who do successfully return to team sport after a break consistently describe the same thing as the deciding factor: seeing someone else do it first. Elite athletes returning to sport after pregnancy reported that observing other female athletes make the same transition provided real encouragement — alongside support from their immediate sporting community (Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, 2025). If that is true for funded professional athletes with structured support around them, it is at least as true for a woman with no support structure at all, deciding alone whether to turn up to a club for the first time in fifteen years.

Why local visibility does something elite visibility cannot

Research from London Sport and AudienceNet into what shapes women's relationship with physical activity found that while elite figures like Jessica Ennis-Hill and Serena Williams were genuinely admired, the role models women actually spoke about with the most warmth were closer to home — friends, family, and crucially, other women in similar life stages, including new mothers' groups (London Sport and AudienceNet, 2021). The research found that local organisations working in partnership could become exactly this kind of influence at a community level.

This is the same mechanism explored in Nettie's previous piece on role models and children — proximity beats prestige. But for adult women specifically, the stakes of that proximity are different. A child has years ahead of her to find sport again if she misses it now. A woman who quietly stops believing she has a place in sport at thirty-five may never test that belief again, because nothing in her daily life ever challenges it. No women her age, doing what she might do, anywhere she can see them.

A grassroots women's club that has been playing every Sunday for ten years, made up of women aged twenty-two to fifty-eight, is already disproving the idea that sport has an age limit or a life-stage limit. It always has been. The problem has never been that this does not exist. The problem is that almost nobody outside the club itself knows that it does.

What this means in practice

Making adult women's sport visible is not a campaign problem. National campaigns are expensive, broad, and structurally unable to tell a thirty-eight-year-old in a specific postcode that there is a women's team training four streets from her that would welcome her exactly as she is, however long it has been.

It is a discovery problem. The team already exists. The welcome already exists. What does not exist, in almost every case, is a reliable way for that woman to find it — to see, concretely and locally, a version of an active life that includes someone like her.

You can't be what you can't see was written about elite mother-athletes deciding whether their careers were over. It applies with equal force to every woman who has simply lost sight of the fact that sport was ever an option for someone her age, in her body, with her life. Making that visible — not nationally, not abstractly, but on her own street — is the role models conversation that has been missing all along.