The most powerful role model is the one you can walk to.

Schedule: Post Wednesday 4th June — four to five days after Article 5

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I have spent twelve years working in NHS roles across clinical, innovation, health tech uptake and commissioning. I also play rugby at Championship 2 level. And I have thought a great deal about role models — about which ones actually change behaviour and which ones inspire without translating into anything real.

England won the Women's Euros in 2022 and retained the title in 2025. The Women's Rugby World Cup came home in 2025. The viewing figures were extraordinary. The media coverage was unprecedented. The national conversation about women's sport shifted in ways that would have been unimaginable a decade ago.

And yet. Girls aged eleven to eighteen still spend an average of 1.4 hours less per week playing sport than boys of the same age. Scaled for the adolescent population, that is a 280 million hour participation gap every year — the equivalent of a football match less every single week (Sky and Public First, 2025). The Lionesses lifted the trophy. The gap did not close.

The role model that changes a girl's relationship with sport is not the one on the television. It is the one in the same postcode.

Why elite role models are not enough

The case for elite women's sport as a catalyst for grassroots participation is intuitive and widely made. If girls can see women winning at the highest level, surely they will be inspired to play. The logic is appealing. The evidence is more complicated.

Research on girls' participation in sport from the House of Lords Library (2026) found that despite significant professional success in women's sport since 2022, girls continue to play less sport than boys at both school and grassroots level. The government's own women's sport taskforce, announced in September 2025, identified visible role models as one of five priorities for action — alongside equal access, facilities, professionalisation, and a pipeline of major events. Role models are necessary. They are not sufficient.

Women in Sport research on reframing sport for teenage girls found that while elite athletes provided inspiration, the barriers girls actually experienced were practical and local: body image concerns, lack of female peers playing sport, absence of welcoming environments, and critically, a lack of women and girls nearby doing the activity (Women in Sport, 2024). Inspiration from afar is real. But it does not overcome a local absence.

A girl who has never seen a woman play sport in her own community will not be inspired into sport by a television screen. She needs to see it happening near her.

What local visibility actually changes

The mechanism through which role models change behaviour is proximity and familiarity. Research into women's and girls' participation in sport in Scotland found that the most significant barriers included lack of role models — and that the most effective solutions involved women in planning and delivery roles at the local community level, ensuring activities were visible, relevant, and accessible (sportscotland, 2024).

London Sport and AudienceNet research found that inspirational female role models play a key part in engaging more women to participate in physical activity — and that this effect was strongest at the local community level, where women could see that people like them were already participating (London Sport and AudienceNet, 2021). The research identified that collaboration between local organisations was key to making role models visible at the community level.

The distinction matters enormously. A girl who watches the Lionesses on television sees elite athletes who are physically exceptional, professionally supported, and operating in a world that feels distant from a wet Sunday morning on a local pitch. A girl who walks past a women's football match in her community every Sunday, who sees women her mother's age playing and enjoying themselves, who scans in at the gate and hears the crowd — that girl is receiving a completely different message. Women play sport here. In this postcode. In this community. People like us do this.

The participation gap that persists

The women's sport participation gap is not a new problem. Sport England's Active Lives data has shown that girls aged five to eighteen are consistently less active than boys of the same age, with the gap standing at six percentage points in the most recent survey (Sport England, 2025). Boys aged eleven to eighteen spend significantly more time in sport than girls in the same range — a gap that has remained stubbornly consistent despite investment in elite women's sport, school sport programmes, and national campaigns.

The government has responded with investment and policy. The £400 million grassroots facilities commitment included a specific pledge that girls would have equal access to any facility funded. The FA, the RFU, England Netball, and the ECB all have participation strategies for women and girls. Sport England runs the This Girl Can campaign. The Parliamentary Women and Equalities Committee has recommended a new phase of This Girl Can specifically for women in midlife.

All of this is valuable. And yet the gap persists. Because the campaigns reach the people who already have some relationship with sport. The 280 million hour participation gap is concentrated among girls who have no relationship with sport at all — for whom sport does not feel like something that exists in their world.

Those girls do not need a national campaign. They need a local club that is visible, active, and nearby.

What grassroots women's sport does that nothing else can

A women's grassroots sport club in a local community is not trying to be a role model. It is just playing the game it has always played. But in doing so, it creates something that no campaign, no elite achievement, and no school programme can manufacture: a normal, repeated, visible example of women being active in a community setting.

The girl who grows up in a neighbourhood where women's football happens every Sunday does not experience women's sport as exceptional. She experiences it as normal. And that normalisation — the quiet, consistent visibility of women playing sport near her — is the most powerful force for long-term behaviour change that the participation sector has ever identified.

Research on community sport and engagement found that the most effective pathways for girls into sport combined visibility of women in sport with accessible, non-judgmental environments and peer participation (Casey et al., 2022). The grassroots club provides all three simultaneously. The visibility is the match itself. The accessible environment is the free entry at the gate. The peer participation is every girl who comes and brings a friend.

What Nettie makes possible

Nettie does not create grassroots women's sport. It makes it visible. And visibility — the simple, verified, discoverable fact that women are playing sport in this community, every week, and people are showing up to watch — is the prerequisite for everything else.

A link worker looking for a social prescribing referral for a teenage girl who has disengaged from activity cannot currently find the women's rugby club that meets every Sunday afternoon two miles from the girl's home. The club is not on their list. Its attendance is not verified. Its community is not visible to the health system.

Nettie changes that. The club is listed. The attendance is verified. Forty-three people came last Sunday. The link worker can send the referral with confidence. The girl arrives and sees women of all ages playing a sport she has never seen played near her before. She comes back the following week. She brings a friend.

That is not a grand intervention. It is just visibility. But it is the visibility that was always missing.

Elite sport inspires. Local sport transforms. The most powerful role model is the one who plays on the same patch of grass you walk past every day.

If you work in women's sport, participation development, social prescribing, or community health — and you think there is a conversation worth having here — I would love to talk.

Nic Vovk Founder, Nettie nettie.online