I READ a really powerful piece this week from Breanna Stewart an American professional basketball player for Seattle Storm part of the Women’s National Basketball Association.

Her story forms part of #metoo, a formidable social media campaign that is currently sweeping across the globe. Sharing her story with the world must have been extremely difficult, and for me it was a heart-breaking read about the years of abuse she suffered in silence and one of the most heart-breaking facts of this is that it is still happening and we need to find ways to stop it now.

Let’s not kid ourselves that it won’t touch Scotland and it won’t touch sport, it will.

Whilst Breana’s abuser was not part of her sporting life, we cannot be complacent and close our eyes to the possibilities.

We have to work together to create an environment that enables our young women, and men, to speak up and be believed when something of this nature happens.

It makes no difference if the allegation is against the most successful coach, the hardest working administrator, the chief executive; no matter the position held, these allegations must be challenged, investigated and dealt with as a matter of urgency.

The impact that this has on the individual will stay with them for the rest of their life.

Whilst participation in sport itself does help to empower young women, we are still losing too many because of their own misguided concerns surrounding body image.

The wrong messages is still being sent out from many different sources and this puts young women in conflict and in many cases their choice is to leave sport.

Empowering young women to speak out should be a priority and creating a culture of belief and support needs to go hand in hand. It can be too easy at times to influence young people when you are held in a position of esteem.

So let’s look further than completing a disclosure form, let’s look at the many ways we can empower young people and use this within the sporting community. I have to say that it may only be one bad apple in a basket of many, but one is one too many!

OVER on the other side of the coin, the passion of people involved in sport should be bottled and sold. Many of them hold down full-time jobs and work hard in their spare-time to help out at their local sports club in a variety of roles. To be fair I am not sure where we would be without then.

Last week it was the Female Festival of Sport an event that is in its second year and is hosted by the Scottish and North Irish Infantry at Redford Barracks in Edinburgh.

This event is aimed at women who are in the services who are interested in sport or just perhaps want to try out some new sports.

It was so good to see so many representatives s from the various governing bodies attend this and support the event, many of whom are volunteers and had given up their Saturday to help.

From Cricket, to Volleyball, Rugby and Swimming these were just a few of the sports packed into the two day event, which was rounded of on Saturday morning with the Wolfs Challenge!

It was great to see Steph Inglis there as a guest for the evening event. I never get tired of hearing her speak about her time in Vietnam and the wonderful positive outlook she has on life after an absolutely horrendous experience.

Looking at Steph now, you would never be able to guess the trauma she has gone through. Looking fit, well and happy, she is a great advert for the resilience you get through participating in sport.

FINALLY have you tuned into Girls Do Sport and last week’s programme, Girls Do Sailing? What are you waiting for? What a wonderful advert sailing is for Scotland as it showcases our amazing scenery. You can find this and Girls Do Tennis on SWiS TV – over on YouTube.

Have a look and help make this project a success, we might be able to encourage further investment to enable us to continue with this!