From our experience, a lot of girls struggle with how to properly combine sports and wearing hijab. Some even might think it doesn’t fit together, even though that’s absolutely not the case. There are a lot of girls who are absolutely talented, but afraid to perform or show their best side. Reasons for that are, for example, that they don’t feel comfortable enough in the athletic clothing and they don’t exactly know where and how to actually start doing sports, so they just quit it when they start wearing the hijab.
Growing up, there weren’t any kind of role models – women who wore hijab and did sports, so it eventually was something unknown. In some cultures, it was and still is very common to tell girls how to behave or how to move, so being sporty doesn’t really fit into the ideal picture of a woman. Lots of girls have taken this attitude into the world and it is pretty hard to get rid of it. But these days more and more women aren’t afraid anymore, they fulfil their passion for sport and they are changing the game and being role models for the younger generation.
For us, who used to play sports for over 10 years when we were younger, now it became harder. We are constantly struggling with finding enough confidence and motivation to go out there to do some sports. The funny thing is that now there are hijabs actually created for sports and knowing that helps to change the mindset and the way we carry ourselves, especially against the stereotypes.
We hope that our generation is the last one that was struggling with finding the right fit in the world of sport. Now we want to focus on finding more and more motivation and inner strength to level up, get out there and become the best version of ourselves.
