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Confidence Games
At Girls on the Run, Everyone Has a Winning Time
BY JOSEPH BEDNAR
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Alison Berman recalls a girl who finished her first 5K with Girls on the Run last year.
“This was a girl who had never even walked three miles, which is true for many of our kids. And it took her two hours. I mean, everything was being packed up, and when she finished, it was the most moving thing when she came across that finish line. Her aunt was crying. It was just ... something that she never thought that she could possibly do.”
That, in a nutshell, is why Girls on the Run (GOTR) really isn’t about running — at least, not in the sense that competitive runners think about a 5K.
“You have the kid who can do it in 20 minutes and the kid who can do it in two hours,” said Berman, council director of Girls on the Run Western Massachusetts. “It’s not timed. They keep their own goals.”
So, if running isn’t the main focus, what is Girls on the Run
about?
In a nutshell, it’s a physical activity-based, positive youth-develop-
ment program that uses running games and dynamic discussions to teach life skills to girls in grades 3-8. During the 10-week program each semester, girls participate in lessons that foster confidence, build peer connections, and encourage community service while they prepare for a celebratory, end-of-season 5K event.
Berman explained that each session features a social-emotional life-skills lesson drawn from a nationally distributed curriculum. “There are lessons on how to stand up for yourself, lessons on choosing friends, lessons on identifying and expressing emotions, on stopping to take a breather, empathy, gratitude.”
Meanwhile, each team — there are 75 of them in the Western Mass. council — tackles a community-impact project to give back to their community, Berman explained.
“They could write letters to children’s hospitals, or they can make things for animal shelters. We have one school in Chicopee that did a project in their girls’ bathroom because it was so gross; they made all these amazing signs for it.
“And then, all the while, they’re also training to run a 5K,” she went on. “But running is really secondary to the social-emotional part of it. They can run, they can walk, but the goal, really, is for them to increase their confidence and be able to achieve something they haven’t achieved before.”
The Western Mass. council of GOTR launched in 2015 with
90 girls on six teams. Now, the chapter boasts 75 different teams — 1,030 girls in all — and 285 volunteer coaches. Molly Hoyt, the nonprofit’s program director, started out as a coach herself and can speak to why these women — about half of them teachers by trade
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