One Sport Voice

As my blog and website have grown (along with my meager Web skills), I wanted a little different look and presence on the Web.  What do you think of this new “skin”? I’d love your feedback.

This example comes from Fox Soccer.com titled Soccer Wives and Girlfriends. Why this is on a sport website is interesting food for thought. I looked for “Soccer Husbands  and Boyfriends” on the WPS website but (thankfully) did not find any. It is picture essays like this that relegate women to the sidelines. Not to mention only including pictures of male soccer player’s female partners and companions is not very inclusive.

Does anyone else find it ironic that WNBA player  Diana Taurasi of the Phoenix Mercury went from DUI in July to 2009 WNBA MVP in  September and WNBA Champion in October? Perhaps more interesting is that the DUI was rarely  mentioned at all in the last few weeks of the WNBA playoffs. What are your thoughts on this? I’m mixed. I’d love to hear what you’re thinking.

On the eve of the final WNBA playoff game, I just watched a fantastic video made by a WNBA Intern, that I saw due to a Tweet by Minnesota Lynx player Candice Wiggins (@candicwiggins). In the video, clips featuring similar plays from the NBA and WNBA are shown back-to-back or simultaneously.  What this sets up is that WNBA players are as athletic as, and do exactly the same exciting plays as their NBA counterparts. Female athletes are depicted in action, on the court, in uniform doing what they do best (in contrast to passive, off the court, and NOT in *cough* uniform Serena Williams). Brilliant! Usually when female athletes are compared to male athletes, the male version of the game is constructed as “better than”, more exciting, or the real version. Not in this video!

Advice to the WNBA: HIRE THIS INTERN. Whomever you are Intern, NICE WORK! This is exactly the kind of marketing and fresh thinking the WNBA needs to sustain the league.

Update: I’ve been advised that credit may be due to more than one intern. In that case, hire them all!

I’m not a big fan of ESPN The Magazine, as I’ve written about their cover photos and coverage of women’s sport in a previous blog….or should I say LACK of coverage that focuses on athleticism, rather than being feminine and sexy.

Their latest series of 6 covers for the October 19, 2009  “The Body Issue” has Serena Williams posing naked (thanks for the head’s up EH). It seems to me a recent pattern has emerged.

Here is the pattern:

1) A Black female athlete performs well and dominates opponents,

2) During the course of competition she acts outside prescribed gender norms (i.e., looks like a man, yells and argues with a referee),

3) Subsequently she is grilled and sanctioned by the public and the media,

4) Therefore she has to recover by performing versions of the female athlete apologetic by literally apologizing like S. Williams, and/or highlighting heterosexy femininity on the cover of  magazines. I’m talking about first, Caster Semenya and now Serena Williams (see picture here).

Underlying sport media portrayals of highly talented Black female athletes are racism and sexism. I suppose my blog title should really read…A Pattern Has REemerged.

NOTE: If you want to see the making of The Body Issue and gain insight to the ‘issue’ (and see a whole lot naked) click here.

I came across this ad for the TV show Nip & Tuck this weekend. It was so offensive I had to rip it out and share it with you. Although it has nothing to do with sport, it is related to other themes in this blog I frequently write about.

There is nothing good about this ad. Evidently this show has a history of offensive ads. Awesome! This is another example of the picture says it all. No commentary needed.

While most media attention focuses on the negative and angry behaviors of sport parents on youth sport sidelines–not all sport parents are angry and yelling. I have an ongoing research line on the emotional experiences of youth sport parents with some colleagues and students. Last summer we looked at what made sport parents happy; it was a nice change of pace from examining background anger in youth sports.

Kelli Blankenship, a member of the University of Minnesota Women’s Hockey Team and 2009 McNair Scholar, helped us  analyze the happy parent data. You can see a nice story about her on the U of MN website. We found that child-athlete performances and experiences more frequently made sport parents happy, than did athlete development.  You can see the full results of our poster by clicking on it. We’ll be analyzing the full data set soon, but this will give you a taste of what is to come.

Some and colleagues and I are working on research pertaining to what is known (and mostly not known) about the role of youth sports in obesity prevention. Last week Toben Nelson, University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health, presented some of our work at the monthly Tucker Table. You can view his PowerPoint and see a small video clip. This work has made me think critically about how youth sports may not be the healthiest places for some children–including the ubiquitous presence of unhealthy snacks which I wrote about in an earlier blog. While physical activity and active living may help prevent childhood obesity, healthy eating is the other half of the equation. To highlight the relationship between physical activity and the presence of unhealthy food, this Village Voice post and picture showing how NYC playgrounds house soda machines says it all (via AN).

I had to put together a little quiz on girls and women in sport, so I thought I’d post it here. Take this 5 questions quiz WITHOUT Googling and I’ll post the answers tomorrow.

Women & Girls Sport Quiz

1. In what year was the federal law Title IX passed that required gender equity in every educational program that receives federal funding?
2. Who is the greatest female golfer from Minnesota who co-founded and was the first president of the
LPGA?
3. Which governing body of college sport was the largest in the late 1970s?
4. She defeated Bobby Riggs (a former men’s Wimbledon champion) in a tennis match and founded the Women’s Sport Foundation.
5. Which female Olympian in the summer games has the most gold medals?

ANSWERS: 1) 1972, 2) Patty Berg, 3) AIAW has >100 more members than the NCAA, 4) Billie Jean King, 5) Jenny Thompson has 8 gold medals.

Relational expertise for coaches is the capacity to create meaningful, close connections with others that leads to mutual growth and development. My work in this area has been greatly influenced by the Relational-Cultural Theory (RCT) developed by Jean Baker Miller and colleagues at the Wellesley Centers for Women (WCW) at Wellesley College. I was introduced to WCW and RCT when I has the head tennis coach at Wellesley from 1994-1998.

Relational-Cultural Theory (RCT) suggests that growth-fostering relationships are a central human necessity and disconnections are the source of psychological problems. According to RCT a close relationship is defined by four qualities: (a) authenticity (the process of acquiring knowledge of self and the other, feeling free to be genuine in the context of the relationship in an ongoing effort to represent one’s true self while assessing one’s own risk and gauging the impact of certain truths on the other and respecting the needs of the relationship), (b) engagement (perceived involvement, commitment, responsiveness and emotional availability), (c) empowerment/zest (the experience of feeling personally strengthened, encouraged and inspired to take action through connection in a relationship), and, (d) the ability to deal with difference and conflict (the process of expressing, working through and accepting differences in background, perspective and feeling leading to enlargement of the relationship, rather than disconnection)

We rarely and explicitly train coaches to become relational experts.

I wrote a guest column this month for the Minnesota Women’s Press LeaderVoice on my experiences and thoughts on the Relational Coach. I also have a published article in the International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching titled Expanding the Interpersonal Dimension: Closeness in the Coach-Athlete Relationship

picture from the401kconnection.com