Starting from scratch: The importance of looking back to move forward

For as long as I can remember, I have been surrounded by sports. Now, we technically could go all the way back to when I was a kid, turning up to whatever sports club my parents were forcing me into that week (I tried and failed miserably at too many to count). Or, it could be when I watched my parents start to shift their own lifestyles to revolve around different endurance sports when I started to get older.

From the age of 13, my parents managed to get me into their local gym, which introduced me to the world of circuit classes and some questionable weightlifting attempts. Fast forward to when I was 17, and I started to dip into the world of Powerlifting… I guess at that point I was hooked.

While my obsession only took me through to when I was 20, and the pandemic hit, I had spent the previous 3 years working with several trainers and embedding myself into the fitness world however I could (including the creation of a very questionable fitness account that is no longer available to the public eye, thankfully). It was during this time that I started working at my local gym, primarily doing sales, but also having the chance to run their social media page and teach circuit classes (notice the full circle moment here from 13-year-old Emma?).

None of this really matters in the grand scheme of things, but what it did shift was the direction of my first dissertation. I was at university studying a business degree with no real direction for what I wanted to do with life. At this point, it might feel that the obvious choice would’ve been for me to study weight-training sports, but I didn’t realise that was even an option. So, I decided to look into the world my parents had stepped into… endurance sports.

For the next year of my life, I worked on a study focused on “why participants engage in extreme endurance events, and how does this affect marketing communications?” While I had always HATED any form of endurance sports, this research opened me up to the realisation that women are incredibly underrepresented in the endurance world, and additional effort was being made daily to make them more inclusive.

From here, I jumped into my master's degree in sports marketing, where I completed my research on “turning objectification into empowerment: how the male gaze has impacted the perspective of women in sports marketing”. To support my research, I started a new social media account under the name Undetermined Marketing, where I started looking deeper into the world of women in sports and built connections with others in the industry looking into similar topics.

I am hoping that from this ‘blogging experience’ I can reintroduce myself to the world of sports and learn more about what has been happening over the past 4 years since I stepped away and joined the tech world and all things AI and cloud.

While I still think that topics such as objectification take a front seat in conversations surrounding women's sports, I want to take this time to dive deeper into areas such as female coaching, pay gaps, and mental health, and put my thoughts forward on topics we’re seeing in the industry today.

Here’s to starting fresh.