Community and sport go hand in hand
It’s Mental Health Awareness Week 2025 and this year’s focus is on community. Community is essential to mental health as social isolation can have a really negative effect, sometimes leading to depression, anxiety and a feeling of loneliness.
Here are ten reasons on how and why sport will help you build a healthy and positive community around yourself.
Image by Jeffrey Lin from Unsplash
To find a community in sport doesn’t mean that you have to play a team sport. You could be a runner or a swimmer and still be part of a club.
But, your community doesn’t have to be a formal organisation or group. It could just be a group of friends who meet to have a laugh and move their bodies, like playing frisbee in the park, a weekly walk or shooting hoops on the local MUGA.
Through sport you’ll meet a wide variety of people such as teammates or peers, sporting opponents, coaches, teachers, supporters, and ‘backroom staff’ - people who work at the venue where you train or help you achieve your goals. Strong communities are usually made up like this, of people from a variety of backgrounds, of different ages and abilities and having different roles or skill sets. A positive community should allow you to lean on others when you need help and call upon their expertise when you have a particular problem.
Community comes through building connections. Sport is an obvious hobby for building a community as you all have something in common! It’s easy to build connections with like-minded people or people with a similar interest.
Give and take is a big part of community. Over time, you should begin to feel confident lending a hand and getting involved, asking for help or assisting others. There’ll be certain people that you feel more comfortable with than others and that’s normal.
A feeling of belonging can help with finding a sense of community. It can take time to belong but people recognise when you keep showing up, rain or shine, and putting in the effort and soon they’ll be saying hi and remembering your name, asking how you’re doing. These little touches can make you feel as though you belong.
Communities create opportunities for personal development: you might be a coach to less experienced people or you might be put in charge of running something like warm-up drills. These cement your place in the community, helps with that sense of belonging which in turn helps you build bonds with others.
In sport, you build sporting skills, but you can also build soft skills. Teamwork is a huge part of community and is an essential skill in most sports; even if it’s an individual sport, you probably have a team around you. And for teamwork to be effective, you need great communication skills. These skills alongside leadership, delegation and resilience help you build a great sporting community.
Sport is often a big part of the community where you live. Sport brings people together. Embrace that and get involved.
Remember that if you feel safe and secure in your sporting community, be it as a player, coach or spectator, someone else may not. Use these points to consider how they might be feeling and how you might be able to welcome them in.
Let us know if these resonate! You can email us with your experiences of community and sport and you never know, we might feature you in a post - hello@wearegirlsinsport.com