A solitary pre-season coaching run at her native soccer membership was the final place that Sarah Perkins anticipated to be sledged.
Perkins was doing interval working in preparation for one more AFLW season when an older man abruptly stopped her.
“He just made the comment, ‘Why are you running like that?’” Perkins mentioned.
“He said something along the lines of, ‘You’re too big for that, you are wasting your time’. I was really taken aback by it and found it quite offensive.
“I tried to be as polite as I could at the time but just told him that was not okay and I hoped he was ashamed to make those comments. Thankfully he left the area really quickly and I could continue my session, but I was pretty hurt and upset by it.”
It wasn’t the primary – or final – time that Perkins had been trolled about her physique picture as a feminine athlete slightly than her sporting talents.
Last March, she hit again at a pair of on-line trolls who physique shamed her after she was pictured in a photograph posted on Twitter by the Gold Coast Suns.
One nameless person replied to the picture by saying “Peak athleticism”, earlier than one other adopted up by writing “I think she should go for a jog”.
“I’ve called it out a couple of times on social media and made it public that it’s not okay,” Perkins mentioned.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re female or male, there’s plenty of trolls out there that are going to let you know that they don’t like the way that you look. We’ve got to remember that everyone’s built differently.
“It did affect my mental health for a fair while. My father had passed away so I was probably already a little bit cut and grieving.
“I like to think I’ve got thick skin but I’m a big teddy bear on the inside, which I try to hide.”
Body shaming is a matter confronted by feminine athletes not simply throughout the AFLW but additionally throughout the broader sporting panorama.
Sydney Swans AFLW normal supervisor Kate Mahoney has beforehand held high-level sports activities science and physiotherapy positions with the Australian ladies’s cricket group and the Women’s Tennis Association and mentioned a shift of considering was required.
“To perform in all different sports requires all different body compositions and sometimes people judge women far too quickly and really unfairly on how they look rather than how they perform,” Mahoney mentioned.
“Players are focusing on performance. They’re measuring themselves on things like power or speed or endurance or whatever they need for their sport.”
Mahoney mentioned it needed to be remembered that some gamers coming into the fledgling AFLW competitors lately had not had remotely comparable expertise pathways to their male counterparts.
“The pathways in the female game have only been established in the past five years or so where they have access to strength and conditioning coaches and running coaches and really good football coaches,” Mahoney mentioned.
“Bodies take time to adjust and adapt and we’re seeing the results of that now with some really fantastic athletes out on the field.”
An Adelaide premiership participant in 2017, Perkins is now with Hawthorn and has been probably the most watchable and celebrated gamers within the AFLW throughout its seven seasons.
Her message to the trolls is straightforward.
“Just think before you speak and you never know what’s going on in someone else’s mind or the troubles that they are having,” Perkins mentioned.
“Just be kind to one another and let’s start bringing people up rather than trying to tear them down for the way that they are or who they are as a person.”
Originally printed as Sledged at coaching: AFLW star Sarah Perkins fat-shamed in a secure house
Source: www.news.com.au
