Girls soccer in Brazil, changing gender norms

In Brazil, December marks the end of the school year, the festive Christmas season and the start of the long summer holidays that go through to the end of January and with this we came to the end of our first semester of this project by which time, we were giving classes in 4 different state elementary schools and on 2 public hard courts reaching a total of 184 girls.

We are very proud of the effort put in and results achieved by our coaches Julie and Alline which are beautifully illustrated by the comment made by Luciene, headteacher at José Martins Elementary School, who said "thank you very much for the activity that you carried out with the girls here at school, for many this activity was very important to participate in, especially for the 5th grade student Maria (name changed for privacy reasons) who used to fight a lot, used to swear all the time and did not obey the teachers, she greatly improved her behavior and also her attitudes, we are very grateful to you from ACER BRASIL and Coach Julie for the beautiful work." 

As this was a world cup year (even though for the men) all the girls soccer players were in high fever to see the stars on the world stage in Qatar and so we organised a world cup competition for the girls from different schools and had ample participation from their parents. The girls were all proud medal winners and had a whale of a time as can bee seen from the photos. We are all looking forward to starting up the project again when the school year starts again in February.