How Nike Is Championing Community for Young Girls in Japan

Courtesy of Nike (Edited)

"Our philosophy at Nike for coaching is what we call the six Cs: confidence, connection, clear, concise, celebration, and choice," explains Vanessa Garcia-Brito, the brand's VP of Chief Impact Officers. We are seated in a private room in the breakfast café of the Hotel Toranomon Hills in Tokyo's Minato ward, getting ready for the fifth and final day of the Coach The Dream summit. For the past five days, girls and coaches from around Japan and the world have flocked to the Japanese capital to attend a series of seminars and activations set up by Nike and its partners to promote and advocate for the equity of girls in sports.

"Coach The Dream is part of the world we want to see; we're all kids. All youth have the opportunity and choice to be whoever they want to be. And that's especially true for girls," Garcia-Brito continues.

If you've paid attention to Nike's past events, you might already be familiar with Coach The Dream. Earlier this year, during the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the brand held another summit, christened the Future of Youth Sport summit, as part of the initiative in the French capital, also putting emphasis on inclusive youth sport and coaching.

Having already provided tools to girls and coaches Europeside, the decision to hold Nike's summit in Japan was not arbitrary. For one, according to the Global Gender Gap Report 2024, Japan currently ranks 118th out of 146 countries in terms of gender parity.

"Japan is a really meaningful place for us at Nike. We have had a relationship with this country for over 50 years, and a lot has changed since then. In that time, there has been tremendous progress in the world of sport, and there has been great progress for women in sport," Garcia-Brito shared during a seminar hosted one day before our interview. "We're really encouraged by all the change that we see. However, we're not seeing that progress have an impact on kids. This means that physically inactive girls will not experience the benefits that sports bring to them. And this can lead to gender inequalities on the playing field, at school, at work, and in society."

During the presentation, Nike shared that they have found girls, on average, participate 20% less in sports. The company also shared data from the Women's Sports Foundation which finds that girls drop out of sports at two times the rate of boys by age 14 because of lack of access, security issues, social stigma, and the lack of role model representation, among other things.

These are the gaps Nike is trying to fill with the Coach The Dream project, envisioning a future for sports without gender bias. For Garcia-Brito and the Nike team, that problem has a simple solution: dedicate resources to coaching to create safe spaces for young girls to feel safe partaking in sports in a judgment-free zone.

"Coach to Dream is part of our overall commitment to helping girls get active and moving and to bring sport into their lives," Garcia-Brito explains. “We know sport is such a powerful force for all kids, for all youth, but we know that, especially for girls, it brings up some really important benefits.”

"The statistics for all kids in the world are terrible, right? Globally, only one in five kids get the activity that they need, and girls the least. There are so many ways to change that, but we know that a key part of that is the role of a coach," she continues. "For us, Coach to Dream is a way to help bring people together, share with them why the role of a coach is super important, and also help give them a way to convene and connect and share the stories around how they can achieve this movement further." Garcia-Brito adds that it's “part of [Nike's] overall approach to creating the future of youth sport.”

“We've heard it a thousand times: ‘A good coach can change the game, but a great coach can change a life.’”

For Nike, the priority is making sports fun, inclusive, and enjoyable for girls. In Japan alone, Nike has teamed up with over 100 organizations to provide this for young girls, including Monkey Magic and Play Academy with Naomi Osaka.

Play Academy was launched by the all-star tennis player in Tokyo in partnership with Nike and Laureus Sport for Good before expanding to three other cities — Osaka, Haiti, and Los Angeles — around the world. In a full circle moment, Play Acadamy celebrated its fifth anniversary during day four of the Coach The Dream summit, and to celebrate, they invited around 40 girls from local communities in the Japanese capital to join coaches from the project's current four citites for an evening of fun.

The celebration couldn't have come at a better time, as Naomi Osaka had also celebrated her own 27th birthday just days prior and decided to join the girls playing sports and doing a small Q&A alongside Laureus Sport for Good board member and five-time Olympic swimmer Missy Franklin Johnson.

"I am such a person who looks into the future [so] I get frustrated sometimes when my goals aren't achieved quickly," Osaka, after the curtain call, tells Teen Vogue onsite when asked about the biggest challenges and lessons she's learned since launching the project. "[Play Academy] has kind of forced me to, well, not forced, but I have had to learn to live in the moment a lot more, and I think that that's really grounded me."

Not only has the initiative satiated her anxious nature, but it's also given her something to look forward to with Play Academy. "Whenever I come to events like these, I see so many smiles, and I always want to multiply those smiles. So, we are just taking it one step at a time," she adds. Essentially, initiatives like this are adding another C to the sports giant's core six: Community.

Days before the screeching of sneakers, the bouncing of picket balls, and the cacophonous laughter and joyful screams of the 40 girls invited to play bounced off the walls of The British School's gym; it was coaches who filled the space.

To kick off the summit, 15 coaches from Nike's community partner organizations from around the world (namely Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Indonesia for this event) wrapped up one month-long training on trauma-informed coaching following a program created by Megan Bartlett's Center for Healing and Justice through Sport (CHJS).

The "Master Trainers" that completed the course then applied what they had learned to train 50 other local trainers from Japan during the final day of the summit. Nike and Laureus also unveiled a Coaching Guide for Girls during the summit, which is specifically designed for other coaches in Japan to keep the momentum going and ensure safe sports experiences for girls long after the event.

"We talk a lot about how sports can be something that helps us develop skills like working with other people, communicating better, and bouncing back from challenges. But I think the most important thing that sport does is that it actually changes our brains, and it has the ability to change our brain in a way that helps us recover from not just the challenges that we might face every day in sports but from really overwhelming challenges or significant adversity or trauma," Bartlett said during day three's seminar.

"Sports does that in three ways," she continued. "The first is that if we do sport right, there's an adult who cares about a young person and makes them feel safe. A young person doesn't have to feel on guard. They can be comfortable with who they are and ready to learn. Sports also allow us to move our bodies, which we know is good physically, but it's also so good for our brains. It releases the right chemicals that help us learn better, but also help us feel more calm and are good for our nervous system. [Then] we add this third thing, which is having the right kinds of challenges. When we talk about significant adversity or overwhelming stress or trauma, that's the wrong kind of challenge. That's too much challenge. That's something that actually affects us in a negative way. But the opposite of overwhelming stress is not no stress; it's the right dose of stress. It's being able to practice being good at handling stress, which is what sport is. Every time we learn a new skill, we're practicing getting good at stress."

Bartlett believes that trauma-informed coaching, which the trainers have been mastering through the summit, is the key to making all three elements come together in the perfect puzzle to make sports a healing experience, which is a rare case in sports nowadays, especially for girls.

Much like Garcia-Brito, Bartlett said it all goes back to the coaches “and making sure that they have the skills they need in order to create those environments.”

She added: "We often talk about how important it is for coaches to create environments where girls get to be brave and not perfect and how hard it is for girls to sort of shape the expectation that when they're doing something, they have to do it perfectly just from the start. If coaches have the tools to create the right environments, then instead of focusing on perfection, we're focusing on risk-taking. We're focusing on learning. We're focusing on trying new things. That's what growing and learning is, and I think that's really an unlock in terms of how we change the experience more broadly."

Aside from training, getting the right coaches is also a key factor. "[Girls] need to see coaches who look like them, that represent them, that they feel a connection with, but that also are listening to them, seeing them and giving them a safe place where they can express themselves," Garcia-Brito tells Teen Vogue. “I think that is the future of coaching. I think that's the today of coaching in some areas; we just want to make sure that it is for everyone.”

Throughout the summit sessions, coaching was the key element mentioned but the second one was definitely confidence. Experts talked about the importance of empowering girls to feel confident enough to never fear sports but that m.o. is crucial not just in the development stages but in life. Women who don't move because they feel out of shape or don't want to go to the gym because they don't want to be judged can apply the sample principles to erase anxiety and feel more comfortable in allowing their bodies to just be and have fun.

"One of the things that sport offers you, above all the things that happen on the outside, is everything that's happening on the inside," says Garcia-Brito. "Having that conversation with yourself is one of the most important things. It's great to have a team that supports you, but you've got to be that team for yourself. So change that voice in your head that is like, 'Oh, I'm not sure if I want to do it' or 'what are they going to say' into 'I can do it.'"

For Nike, that's more than a statement: Just do it. And Franklin Johnson agrees. "Sports was something that gave me confidence in who I was and what my body was capable of doing. It showed me my own strength in a way that nothing else did. And, again, to have that in my formative years of understanding who I was and what I was capable of doing was so important because that confidence translated into every other area of my life. It gave me confidence in the classroom. It gave me the confidence to be a good daughter, to be a good friend. I was so thankful that it was something that I loved, which was swimming, that was also teaching me these incredible lessons and helping develop me into the person that I am today," she said in the seminar.

"Having those safe opportunities where we're able to challenge ourselves and push ourselves, I think it's so important for this next generation," Franklin Johnson added. “I now have a three-year-old daughter, so especially being a mom of a little girl, one of the most important things I want her to know is she can do hard things. Because life can be hard, and there are going to be challenges and mistakes and failures, and sport is one of the most beautiful places where you can learn to have those mistakes and get that strength so you can apply it in other areas of your life.”

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue

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