Sailor Brinkley Cook Endorses Nike’s Initiative to Empower Girls Through Sports

The brand is creating tools to make young women feel more confident and hiring coaches to inspire.

Sailor Brinkley Cook / Nathan Congleton/Getty Images

When it comes to youth sports, statistics show “that girls are dropping out ... at twice the rate as boys,” according to Nike’s chief impact officer, Vanessa Garcia-Brito. Plus, “they’re also not coming back to sport at the same rate.”

For young girls, the barriers for getting into—and continuing—sports are much higher than their male counterparts. American model Sailor Brinkley Cook knows that firsthand. Following a visit to the Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Ore., last week, she took to Instagram to reflect on her experience as a young girl in sports, which pushed her to endorse the company’s latest empowering initiative.

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Because Brinkley Cook was once a young girl “scared to try out certain sports because of the way she looked in the uniform… this message & mission is so important to me,” she wrote in her caption. “I so badly wish I could go back in time and tell that little girl just how powerful she is and just how much she’s capable of.”

“Body confidence,” according to Garcia-Brito, “is one of the key reasons [young girls] drop out” of sports, she explained in the video. Thus, Nike’s mission is to create tools and the conditions for young girls to feel more confident as they embrace sports. Part of that mission involves “bringing in more representative coaches,” in whom girls can see themselves reflected.

For Brinkley Cook, a good coach is “whoever comes into our lives with a love-fueled mission to make us better and believe in ourselves,” she said. “Let’s fill the world with more of those people so that the next generation feels confident to do anything they put their mind to.“