Girls Do Sport, the culmination of several months of collaborative work between Scottish Women in Sport and The University of West of Scotland was launched this week. It was exciting but hard work bringing together 9 sports for a photo-call on Tuesday, but thanks to a lot of very helpful partners we made it through. The first programme will be posted on social media today, fingers crossed and not being superstitious at all, (Friday 13th!) Have a look on our website scottishwomenisport.co.uk for #Girls Do Sport.

We met on Tuesday at the Emirates and moved over to London Road where Forrest Media had kindly agreed to display our new branding on their state of the art LED boards. Imagine the scene, a Gymnast, Hockey goalkeeper, Basketball Player, Boxer, Squash player, Sailor, Tennis player all fully kitted out along with a Roller Derby jammer and a track athlete walking over from emirates to London Road, we caused a few heads to turn.

It is a good feeling to be able to rely on your partners and Brand Oath, who created the amazing look of Girls Do Sport and also rebranded Scottish Women in Sport, definitely fall into that category. They spent many hours over the visuals to ensure that we had the right colours and graphics that would appeal to women and girls – in fact I believe it is a bit of a science and the end result, everyone agreed, was amazing.

The students at the University are totally behind this project and it’s interesting to note that the project team are a mix of twelve males and two females. This doesn’t make any difference to the programme as the guys are just as interested in the Girls Do Sport project and I think it is a positive step that they have all embraced the project with total enthusiasm. This augers will for the future of sport as our trainee journalists, presenters, videographers, I believe, will view and report women in sport with the same passion and commitment that we currently see reserved, most of the time, for the male side of sport.

However it does raise the question about how we can get more young women interested in sports journalism? What are the barriers that prevent young women from applying for these roles and what can we do to encourage them to get involved?

It’s a very professional set-up at the Ayr Campus, with a fully equipped studio and a control room which was under the expert eye of Annie McGuire on Wednesday. Focussing on our first two programmes, Tennis and Sailing, the students have already been out filming events as well as having carried out a full studio interview, with an invited audience.

We also had our own mini Alison Walker in the shape of 10 year old Erin Partridge an Everactiv Ambassador who posed her questions to our first guests which included Colin Fleming from Tennis Scotland and Gillian McElroy from Prestwick Tennis Club. Erin then moved onto her second interview of the day and our second programme’s guests from sailing, Nikki Stewart, Emma Fowler and Laura Cammidge, silver medallist in the Class B event in the Blind Sailing World and International Championships in 2015.

There is no doubt this has been a challenge bringing all the disparate parts together, and was only made possible through a grant of £10,000 from Investing in Ideas, The Big Lottery. We can only look on in envy at This Girl Can, brainchild of Sport England, who had a reported 25 million invested into their campaign. But as always, we canny Scots can make a little go a long way.

It is my ambition to put ourselves in a strong position to extend this coverage to all sports in the future. Realistically though to continue with this project and cover every sport, we will need to find an investment partner.

So Girls Do sport is now live, pressure is on to deliver, but working with Elizabeth McLauchlin, a Senior Lecturer in Journalism/Sports Journalism and also a Programme Leader at UWS, and who is the driving force behind the students, I don’t have any concerns as I know it will work. Would love to hear your thoughts on the project, please have a peek, and let us know.