In 2024, tennis legend Billie Jean King sat down with philanthropist Melinda French Gates for French Gates' YouTube series, Moments That Make Us, made to mark French Gates turning 60.⁴ Their conversation touched on King's 1973 "Battle of the Sexes" match and, per the episode's own summary, why King is passionate about girls playing sport and how it helps them build leadership skills.⁴

That last point is the reason we're writing this post: why King has spent over 50 years pushing to get more girls into sport. Not for medals. Not for scholarships. Because of what sport quietly teaches girls that almost nothing else does.

It Was Never About Being the Best

King's own message, echoed across decades of interviews, is consistent: sport's real value for girls has very little to do with winning.^4,5 It's the chance to keep showing up, keep playing, and keep finding out what her body and her mind can do under pressure.

That's the part of sport we think gets lost in translation for a lot of parents. "Get your daughter into sport" often gets heard as "chase talent, trophies, or a scholarship." But talent and trophies aren't the point.

It's in the small, repeated moments: deciding to take the shot, learning to lose in front of people and get back up, trusting a teammate, speaking up in a huddle. These aren't just sports skills. They're leadership skills, and girls who get to practise them early carry them into every room they walk into later in life.

The Problem: Girls Are Leaving Before They Get the Chance

Here's what makes this urgent. An estimated 60% of Australian girls aged 15 and over have dropped out of organised sport, according to a 2024 Flinders University research review (the underlying participation data dates back to 2016, which is itself part of the problem: there's very little recent research on why girls leave).¹ Not because they've lost interest. Because the barriers stack up quietly.

Every girl who leaves early is a leader we don't get to meet yet. The world needs more women who know how to back themselves under pressure, and sport is one of the few places that consistently builds that from a young age.

What We're Doing About It

We can't fix every reason girls drop out of sport. But we can fix one of them. Hero Athletica exists to remove the barrier of kit that doesn't fit right, doesn't move right, or makes a girl more self-conscious than confident on the field.

Because when the kit isn't the problem, she can focus on the actual game: the pass, the shot, the decision. And every one of those small decisions is training for something bigger than sport.