Playing football broadens girls’ horizons

At the gate of Sanhe Primary School, a large football sculpture, a statue of a championship trophy and the slogan: “Football brings you wisdom, an exciting life and promising future” on the wall tell the story of how this sport has changed the destiny of rural children deep in the mountains of Southwest China.

Ten years ago, Sun Xiaoming, then headmaster of Sanhe, founded a 20-member girls’ football team at the school in Chongqing’s Shizhu Tujia autonomous county, which was impoverished at the time.

Of the 20 original players, 19 were later admitted to Chinese universities thanks to their outstanding skills on the pitch.

Last year, in 2022, eight former Sanhe players were admitted into universities based on their athletic abilities. This year, 11 more followed the same path.

One of the 11 attends Beijing Sport University, two are students at the Shanghai University of Sport, and another managed to get into the prestigious Tongji University.

On 1 September, the first day of the new school year, some former Sanhe football players who have enrolled in colleges returned to the primary school and participated in the opening ceremony of the school year, sharing their stories and coaching the school team.

“In our time, our training conditions were very bad, but we really cherished the opportunity to play football,” said Qin Furong, one of the original team members, as she shared her story at the opening ceremony. She became a student at Donghua University in Shanghai this year.

She recalled that when she joined the team, the players trained with rubber balls instead of a real football. “We played on cement, and every fall really hurt,” she said. “With bruises all over our bodies, we held back tears and kept on training.”

Besides serving as a gateway to a good education, the sport has also given some of the players a chance to see the world.

In 2018, Ma Qinglin visited the United Kingdom on a football exchange programme. Now a student at the Shanghai University of Sport, she has joined the Shanghai Shenhua SUS Women’s Football Team of the Chinese Football Association League.

At the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup held in France, Tan Siqi was one of the flag bearers at the opening match of the Chinese team.

“If they had not chosen to play football, they probably would have never had the opportunity to get a higher education,” Sun said. “Football opens a new window for these girls in the remote mountains and changes their lives.”

In 2013, Sun, a physical education teacher for 20 years, became headmaster of the Sanhe school. Situated deep in the mountains, the school had limited teaching resources, and most of its students were left-behind children who remained in their rural hometowns while their parents went to work in urban areas. Girls faced even more barriers to receive education because of traditional ideas held by rural families that women should look after the family first.

To help more girls pursue an education, Sun decided to create a football team so that girls could have a chance to enter good schools based on their athletic prowess. He picked 20 girls from the fourth and fifth grades and offered them free training, clothing, meals and dorms at school.

With the team lacking professional guidance, the headmaster tried his best to recruit football coaches from the county sports bureau and middle schools to coach the team part time.

The Sanhe school has received much support from the government and the public to improve its training facilities.

“Every student at our school has a football lesson once a week,” Sun said. “We have a school league, and every class has its own team.”

In the past decade, Sanhe has trained about 200 female players, and one-third of them were selected to attend middle schools in Chongqing.