Coaching Young Female Athletes: What the Evidence Tells Us to Pay Attention To

Coaching young female athletes well is not a matter of softer language or different motivational posters. It is a matter of understanding the specific physiological, psychological, and cultural pressures that shape how girls and young women experience sport, and then designing coaching environments that take those pressures seriously.

For too long, coaching frameworks have been built on research conducted predominantly with male athletes and applied to female athletes with minor adjustments. The evidence base has shifted considerably in the last decade. There are now things we know about coaching young female athletes that should change practice, and yet often have not.

This blog pulls together some of those considerations for coaches, parents, and organisations who want to do this well.

Puberty Is Not a Performance Problem to Solve

One of the most consequential issues in girls' sport is the impact of puberty on participation, performance, and confidence, and how often it is mishandled by coaches and clubs.

Research consistently shows a sharp drop-off in girls' sport participation around the ages of 11–14, coinciding with puberty (Eime et al., 2016; Women in Sport, 2022). The reasons are well-documented: changes in body shape and self-consciousness, menstruation and lack of support around it, kit and uniforms that feel inappropriate or uncomfortable, and a sporting culture that often treats puberty as something that gets in the way of training rather than a developmental phase to be supported through.

Coaches who handle this well do a few things. They normalise conversations about menstruation and how it interacts with training and performance. They adjust expectations during periods of rapid growth, recognising that coordination, confidence, and energy are all in flux. They address uniform issues directly rather than assuming athletes will raise them. And they understand that performance dips during puberty are common and rarely permanent, over-correcting through extra training or pressure tends to drive athletes out of sport rather than through the dip.

If you are a male, coaching young female athletes, I understand there can be an awkwardness around these topics. My advice here would be to openly discuss these topics, and offer an alternative person within your club or organisation your athletes can speak to. This way you're demonstrating normalising the conversation while also providing additional support

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RED-S and the Female Athlete: A Risk That Is Not Optional to Understand

Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S), the syndrome resulting from chronic low energy availability, affects athletes of all genders, but female athletes are particularly vulnerable, and the consequences are particularly serious. The 2023 IOC consensus statement on REDs identifies risks including impaired bone health, hormonal disruption, immune dysfunction, cardiovascular effects, and impaired performance (Mountjoy et al., 2023).

Coaches working with young female athletes need a working understanding of this. Loss of menstruation in a young female athlete is not a sign of training success or fitness. It is a signal that energy availability is too low, and it requires action, not normalisation. The same applies to repeated stress fractures, persistent fatigue, recurrent illness, and unexplained performance plateaus.

Education at the coach and parent level is one of the most protective factors. Athletes whose support network understands RED-S and talks about it openly are more likely to seek help early. Athletes whose support network treats fuelling as the athlete's individual responsibility, or worse, praises restriction and leanness, are at significantly higher risk.

Here is a previous blog where we deep dive RED-S a little further!

https://www.surgepw.com/post/understanding-red-s-relative-energy-deficiency-in-sport

Confidence, Feedback, and the Gendered Patterns We Know About

Research on confidence in sport has consistently identified gendered patterns, not because girls and young women are inherently less confident, but because the environments they train in often shape confidence differently. Female athletes are more likely to attribute success to luck and failure to ability, to underestimate their performance relative to objective measures, and to interpret coach feedback through a more self-critical lens (Vealey & Chase, 2008).

This has practical implications. Generic feedback ("good job," "well done") tends to be less effective than specific, technical feedback that tells the athlete exactly what they did well. Public correction in front of the team tends to land harder than coaches anticipate. And the language coaches use about athletes' bodies, even casually, even positively, has been shown in research to influence body image, eating behaviours, and confidence in sport (Greenleaf et al., 2009).

The most effective coaches of young female athletes I have worked with tend to be specific, technical, and explicit in their feedback. They name what is going well in detail. They critique the action, not the person. They understand that "I'm not impressed" lands very differently from "let's adjust this part of the technique." None of this is exclusive to female athletes, but the gap between the two approaches tends to matter more here.

Self-Compassion as a Performance Skill

One of the most useful bodies of research for coaches of young female athletes is the work on self-compassion in sport, particularly Mosewich and colleagues' research showing that self-compassion interventions in young female athletes reduce self-criticism, rumination, and concern over mistakes, and improve sport-specific outcomes (Mosewich et al., 2013, 2019).

Self-compassion is not "being soft on yourself." It is the capacity to respond to setbacks the way you would respond to a teammate's setback, with honesty, perspective, and warmth. For female athletes, who often score higher on perfectionism and self-criticism, this is a measurable performance skill. Coaches can model it. They can challenge harsh self-talk in the way they would challenge poor technique. They can reinforce the message that one bad performance does not erase effort or competence.

Body Image and the Coaching Environment

Female athletes face significant body image pressures from sources outside sport, but the sport environment itself is one of the most influential factors. Research consistently shows that coach comments about weight or body shape, body composition testing without rationale, public weigh-ins, and team cultures that praise leanness all increase eating disorder risk (Sundgot-Borgen & Torstveit, 2010).

Coaches who do this well rarely comment on athletes' bodies at all. They talk about performance, capability, recovery, and fuelling. They keep body composition assessment, where it is genuinely necessary, private and clinically supervised by dietitians and/or psychologists. They notice when team culture starts to drift toward eating and body talk and intervene early with the help of professionals.

What Organisations Can Do

Coaching young female athletes well is hard if the organisation around the coach is not aligned. Practical structural commitments matter: female-specific coach education; access to female sports doctors, physios, psychologists, and dietitians; menstrual health education built into programming; appropriate kit and changing arrangements; and clear policies on body composition assessment, weighing, and feedback about appearance (if necessary).

Organisations that get this right see athletes stay in sport for longer, develop more fully, and report better experiences, not as a softer alternative to high performance but as the conditions that make high performance possible.

What This Looks Like in Practice

The most striking thing about coaches who do this well is how undramatic their approach is. They take physiology seriously. They communicate clearly. They build environments where athletes can be honest about how they are doing. They notice when something is not right and act early. They keep their language about bodies limited and their feedback about technique specific. They expect athletes to improve, and they respect them enough to tell them the truth when they are not.

None of this is a softening of standards. It is what high standards look like when applied to the actual humans being coached.

References

• Eime, R. M., Harvey, J. T., Charity, M. J., & Payne, W. R. (2016). Population levels of sport participation: implications for sport policy. BMC Public Health, 16, 752.

• Greenleaf, C., Petrie, T. A., Carter, J., & Reel, J. J. (2009). Female collegiate athletes: Prevalence of eating disorders and disordered eating behaviours. Journal of American College Health, 57(5), 489–495.

• Mosewich, A. D., Crocker, P. R. E., Kowalski, K. C., & DeLongis, A. (2013). Applying self-compassion in sport: An intervention with women athletes. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 35(5), 514–524.

• Mosewich, A. D., Sabiston, C. M., Kowalski, K. C., Gaudreau, P., & Crocker, P. R. E. (2019). Self-compassion in the stress process in women athletes. The Sport Psychologist, 33(1), 23–34.

• Mountjoy, M., Sundgot-Borgen, J., Burke, L., et al. (2023). 2023 IOC consensus statement on Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (REDs). British Journal of Sports Medicine, 57, 1073–1097.

• Sundgot-Borgen, J., & Torstveit, M. K. (2010). Aspects of disordered eating continuum in elite high-intensity sports. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 20(s2), 112–121.

• Vealey, R. S., & Chase, M. A. (2008). Self-confidence in sport. In T. S. Horn (Ed.), Advances in Sport Psychology (pp. 65–97). Human Kinetics.

• Women in Sport (2022). Reframing Sport for Teenage Girls. https://womeninsport.org