A Hodge Podge of Sport-Related Stuff

This will be a random blog post and as I can’t find a common link except to apply a critical lens to each issue. Here are five interesting pieces to check out:

1. A parody Got No Game with Paul Mecurio: Race in Sports (HBO) brings to life race  and gender ideologies which operate largely unassailed in sport contexts. It particularly highlights race logic--the idea that athletic achievement can be determined by race even though determining such things by skin color is an arbitrary social construct.

2. Last week Baylor freshman Britney Griner punched an opposing player in the face during a women’s basketball game. You could sense the outrage and horror was coming, much like it did when Elizabeth Lambert was caught on tape doing similar behaviors in a soccer match last fall. Inside Higher Ed published an article titled “The Decline of Sportswomanship?” that points out the double standard we expect female athletes to uphold. In this article is a great quote from Carrie L. Lukas, vice president for policy and economics for the Independent Women’s Forum “Girls are either a goody-two-shoes or a total bad-ass. We need to give them space to just be girls.”

3. Dave Zirin of The Edge of Sports, one of my fave journalists, wrote a great piece this week titled “How Sports Attacks Public Education” which summarizes how students are fed up with rising tuition that puts them into debt and faculty are fed up with no pay increases and in some cases furloughs that puts them behind cost of living increases, while men’s “revenue” sport coaches get huge salary packages and brand new stadiums.

4. The Girl Scout Research Institute released a new report, Good Intentions: The Beliefs and Values of Teens and Tweens Today. The report is a national study conducted by the GSRI in partnership with Harris Interactive explores what youth today value and how they go about making decisions, based on research conducted with 3,263 3rd to 12th-graders from around the country.

5. Marilyn Morgan,  a manuscript cataloger in the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute is examining the cultural history of women’s bathing suits, and what it reveals about American society.  She is writing a book about the topic titled “Beauty at the Beach: Marathon Swimmers, the Media, and Gender Roles in American Culture, 1900-1940,” which I can’t wait to read!

…and to conclude a great quote from Kay Yow, NC State Women’s Basketball Coach (RIP) “When life kicks you make sure you are kicked forward!”