February 5th is National Girls and Women in Sports Day! Started in 1986, this day was founded to inspire girls and women of all ages to play and be active, to realize their full power and potential. Here at Underdog, we've got a bunch of strong women in all three areas of our facility. The confidence, strength and character gained through sports participation are the very tools girls and women need to become strong leaders in sports and life.Whether it's lifting weights or doing pull-ups, locking in arm bars or tightening chokes, throwing punches or bobbing and weaving, the ladies at Underdog show what it means to be strong every single day. We are happy to take any opportunity to celebrate them.
On a personal note (Coach Durrett here) I started training the martial arts when I was about six years old. At the first school I went to, there was one girl. There were zero at the second and zero at the third. When I started here at Underdog back in 2010, there were two women training here. Both of them were great martial artists and tough as nails. When I started helping out at the gym coaching some of the strength and conditioning classes, we saw a little bump in the number of girls, and slowly but surely, they found their way onto the other side of the mats. I remember when we had three, and then four, and then ten. For whatever reason, and I'm no sociologist to explain it, the martial arts space is changing. The population is getting more diverse, in more ways than one. Sport has always been a space that has the tremendous power of unification, because sport is bigger than all of us. Our love for training and our love for the arts brings us together in a more powerful way than anything that may separate us can drive us apart.