Author: nmlavoi

An expert, scholar and advocate of girls & women in sport, youth sport, and coach & sport parent education. Currently I teach sport psychology and sociology in the School of Kinesiology at the University of Minnesota where I am also the Director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport. This blog reflects my critical perspective and voice on all things sport.
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Latest “Women in Intercollegiate Sport” Report Now Available

The most recent version of Acosta & Carpenter’s longitudinal (33 years!) research on Women in Intercollegiate Sport is now available on their website. Some good news highlights:

  • 42.6% of women’s teams are coached by a female head coach, a number that has remained stable over the last four years
  • HIGHEST EVER number of paid assistant coaches of women’s teams, 57.6% which are female
  • HIGHEST EVER number (n= 12,702) of females employed in intercollegiate athletics

Given that basketball is the most popular collegiate sport acording to Acosta & Carpenter, and it is March Madness, you can also download the most recent Academic Progress/Graduation Success Rate Study of Division I NCAA Women’s and Men’s Basketball Tournament Teams

Director of The Institute of Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES), Richard Lapchick states in the report, “Nineteen women’s tournament teams had a 100 percent graduation rate for their teams. Women do much better academically than men. Furthermore, the academic success gap between African‐American and white women’s basketball student‐athletes is smaller, although still significant, than between African‐American and white men’s basketball student‐athletes.”

Keeping it real with some data during March Madness…

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Are Female Athletes Becoming More Aggressive?

With the start of the March Madness and stories of “aggressive female athletes” making national headlines (i.e., Elizabeth Lambert, Brittney Griner), a question I have heard asked and debated a lot lately is–“Are females athletes becoming more aggressive?”

I don’t have the answer. The best I can say is a cautious–“maybe?” I don’t think there are any data to prove or disprove this question, but the fact the incidents are caught on video and replayed makes it seem like it is more frequent.  I am hesitant to say overly aggressive acts of female athletes is on the rise at the risk of reifying outdated gendered stereotypes and double standards. The New York Times journalist Jere Longman, wrote a balanced piece which contained perspectives of some of the best critical thinkers and brightest sport sociologists. The story titled “Pushing Back Stereotypes” featured a particular quote from colleague and director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota Mary Jo Kane, which I thought was spot on.  She stated,

“Only time will tell if this is an aberration, but what I think is a clear trend, as the stakes get higher in women’s sports, you see more pressure to win….This could be a natural progression to women entering into big-time college sports. You take the bad with the good; you take sold-out arenas with academic scandals. For us to think that women would enter the big time and have it be pristine and without controversy is naïve.”

What do you think about this issue? I wonder if the NCAA Women’s Tourney will conclude without any such incidents and ensuing media coverage.

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Join Our NCAA Women’s Bracket!!

If you’d like to join our bracket group, fill out your picks before the first tip-off tomorrow!

All are welcome and feel free to pass it along!

If you want to join our bracket group, here is the info.

Get in the action now:
http://games.espn.go.com/tcwomen/en/group?groupID=1729

Group: School of Kinesiology
Password: kinesiology

Once you create an individual account and fill out your bracket, there is a button to “Join a Group”. Click on that button and then enter the info above. It is really simple and very fun!

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One Boy’s Perspective About Youth Sports

A colleague sent me this video of a young Canadian hockey player describing his “magic hockey helmet”. I thought I’d pass it along…enjoy!

Speaking of helmets…. stay tuned to this blog for upcoming information on the first-ever Mayo Clinic Ice Hockey Concussion Summit, to be held October 19-20, 2010 in Rochester, MN. I’m on the planning committee and I can tell you the program is excellent!

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The (Men’s) Bracket

In my last blog, I surmised that when the bracket for the Men’s NCAA basketball tournament was released, it would not be labeled as “The Men’s” NCAA Tournament Bracket 2010, unlike the women’s bracket.  Sure enough…I was right. To see “the bracket” click here.

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(Women’s) ESPN Basketball Bracket Shows

It’s time for March Madness! I love this time of year! I just watched the ESPN selection and the ESPN-U follow up show for the women. Here is the bracket in case you want to download it. I have some cheers and jeers.

Cheers!

  • I was excited the online ESPN bracket didn’t have the qualifying “Women’s” in front of  NCAA Tournament Bracket 2010.
  • ESPN did a great feature on Baylor’s Brittney Griner, that focused primarily on her SKILLS, numerous ways she can dunk, and how her ability and talent are setting a new standards of excellence for women’s basketball.
  • I loved the fact there were four very qualified women–Doris Burke, Rebecca Lobo, Kara Lawson, and Carolyn Peck--hosting the shows, along with Trey Wingo.

Jeers!

  • The .pdf version of the ESPN bracket however, was labeled as the “Women’s”. I will bet my 2010-11 pay cut that when the men’s bracket is complete, there will be no “Men’s” label on any bracket. Why? Because the men’s bracket is the real bracket, and the women’s bracket must be defined and qualified as the lesser bracket by labeling it the “women’s”. This is a common pattern of marginalizing women’s sports documented over time by sport media scholars. Another example is the NBA and WNBA.
  • The presence of the female sport commentators was undermined both at the very beginning and end of the ESPN-U show by the following comments:

a. At the opening of the follow-up show on ESPN U, after Trey Wingo (seated in the middle, with 2 women on each side) introduced each of his four co-hosts, Carolyn Peck made a comment that the ensemble was like Charlie’s Angels. To that end Wingo asked if that made him “Charlie”, and the banter went on for another 20 seconds with the women confirming that his wan indeed Charlie and they were the Angels.

b. At the end of the follow-up show on ESPN U, as Trey Wingo was signing off and repeated all the names of his female co-hosts, his very last comment was “Look at Doris’ shoes, she went shopping!” and then the camera cut out.

Why is this problematic? Because both comments undermine the credibility of highly qualified and experienced female sport media journalists by focusing on highly feminine roles and symbols of femininity.  Given these four women are clear statistical minorities in their field, they are under a constant barrage of scrutiny their male colleagues do not have to endure. They also have to look feminine enough so they do not feed the flame of enduring homophobia in women’s basketball.

Stay tuned for more March Madness!

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A Female Head High School Football Coach!

Yeah! Natalie Randolph was named the head high school football coach for the Coolidge High School in Northwest Washington DC. Randolph comes to the position as an accomplished athlete with a great deal of “athletic capital”. She was a sprinter at the University of Virginia, and went on to play for the Divas of the Independent Women’s Professional League from 2004 to 2008.

This appointment is historic! While it would be hard to track down the exact statistics on the number of female head football coaches over time, I’m fairly sure the number would be very small. The data we do have shows that females comprise about 2% of coaches for boys’ teams, and when women do coach boys they are most often coaches of “non-revenue” sports such as swimming, track & field, or tennis.  Additionally, when women coach boys must possess a high degree of athletic capital. While men are assumed to be competent coaches even if they have never really played the sport, female coaches must continually prove themselves competent. A woman who never played football would never be hired to coach, but there are many men who have been hired to coach a sport they never played or didn’t play at a high level.

So helmets off to Natalie Randolph! I would love to see more and more women play and coach football. Many women love the game just as much as men, but given they aren’t allowed to play when they want to, the pathway to coaching the game they love is blocked with insurmountable barriers. Congrats to Randolph for breaking some tackles and clearing the running route a little bit for those women who desire to coach football.

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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!”

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Reebok on the Rebound?

So I’ve been offline for a few days and I come down off the slopes from boarding in the Tahoe area to an email from a blog fan (you know who you are!) with a few links to Reebok’s new ad campaign and product line. Please click on these links, but the short story on the marketing tag line for Reebok’s new EasyTone sneakers is “better legs and a better butt with every step”. What? 

According to Reebok, American sales rose 4 percent—its largest increase in four years—on the strength of that launch and the goal of the campaign was to get consumers to “reethink” their perceptions of sports “and remember why they play, sweat and cheer—because it’s fun.” I find this statistic a bit troubling.

My question is this—if Reebok’s target market is women who want to buy ‘performance gear’, how does this commerical appeal to women? With this ad, who are they really trying to get to “rethink their perceptions of [women’s] sports”?

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Effective Behaviors for Coaches Regardless of Athlete Gender

Is coaching boys and girls different?

I’m putting together a presentation on “Differences Coaching Boys and Girls: The Facts and the Myths”. Given my position as the Associate Director in The Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport, without fail every time I give a coach or parent workshop, this question is raised– “What are the differences in coaching girls?”

I can’t summarize an entire hour presentation here, but I will tell you there are a set of evidence-based coaching behaviors every coach should employ regardless of the gender of the athlete.   Here are a few of those strategies:

•Develop skills
•Provide rationale for tasks & limits
•Inquire about & acknowledge feelings
•Allow as much choice as possible within limits

To learn more about this workshop or to schedule one for your organization, contact me via email at nmlavoi@gmail.com