00:00Women's football has never been as big as it is now in Wales.
00:04On the back of a first major tournament earlier on this summer,
00:07women and girls are getting involved in football more than ever.
00:10Football Association of Wales has a number of schemes and projects
00:13aimed at getting people involved in football, regardless of their gender,
00:17including Bee Cymru, a mentorship programme aimed at young women,
00:21giving them a chance to take up careers in football.
00:23Absolutely so. The programme started back in 2021,
00:27so we're into our fourth year now, which is unbelievable.
00:29We've seen over 40, we're now in sort of 50, 60 mentees,
00:3360 mentors throughout those years now.
00:36And as part of the programme, you know, we created it as kind of a coffee conversation,
00:40as one of those things of maybe we should do it.
00:43How do we do it? We don't know. We'll just go with it.
00:45We'll see how it works.
00:46And I think it's more of a passion project for everyone involved
00:49rather than something that we have to do. We really want to do it.
00:52It's really empowering to be able to sit in a room full of talented women
00:57who are basically, you know, are looking for some support to take the next stage in their career,
01:01whatever that might be, and actually watch them put the skills they've been taught in the practice
01:05to take that next step is really invaluable and it's quite a special project we're part of.
01:10I played football for like my whole childhood and got involved in lots of other sports and things like that.
01:14But I feel like I've never really known how to be involved in like a career aspect.
01:18So I've worked multiple jobs and things like that, but never found kind of my passion was the best way to describe it.
01:24And football and kind of sport has always been my passion.
01:26So having this sort of kind of programme has really been made it possible for me to get involved in sports as a career
01:33and kind of develop myself then as a professional.
01:36Of course, it's hard to talk about women's football without mentioning the national side making it to Euro 2025.
01:42And despite maybe not the strongest showing on the pitch, just being there was a massive achievement.
01:47And there's plenty of optimism that it'll spur on more women and girls to get involved.
01:51I think the FAW would be the first to hold their hands up much like any other organisation
01:55and say that women's football was let down for a really long time in this country.
01:59But now we're in a position where we can change that narrative.
02:02And I think we're really lucky that we've got a brilliant group of women on that national team that have led the way
02:07to make sure that, you know, that for us, for them, for her, that tagline has not just been a tagline.
02:12It's very much been that there has been a path paved by women that were never given anything and never supported.
02:17But they still took the initiative. They knew they belonged in that space.
02:20I think it's a really huge kind of way of kind of showing women in sports or women in football,
02:26especially seeing these kind of inspirational women who have kind of broken down the barriers to work and play football is massive.
02:36So influencing young people, whether that's men or women, to kind of want to do that thing and realise that it is possible.
02:43When they put on a fantastic spectacle to, you know, to inspire the next generation of young girls
02:49to go and realise that, you know, there is a career for them in professional football as a player,
02:54but also the FAW's role is to showcase that there's opportunities beyond just the football pitch too.
02:59If you look for them only in particular, they show me quite a bit of direction about this and theWE
03:02face like film lagging in the kinda field stuff today.
03:03But there's more that's the timing.
03:04If you want to make a film wizard, all the Balls & Evaluate Toothel team in in ,
03:06they're going to have a change in the style and have a bit of a substantial balance and you
03:07want to make a trouble.
03:09I mean, you sit there exactly as a personality chapbook specie across that every single gap
03:10as well.
03:11You've got a skill hookBook and the player, absolutely right.
03:12A bit this split between them, totally fine, and because of course is a difficulty setting.
Comments