After Atalanta

Good news, my local NPR affiliate did mention the women's tournament, specifically the semifinal games that were played last night in Indiana, this morning. But that's likely because I live near the Connecticut border and thus Husky fans are in the listening area. In other words, it's local news. But I was surprised that the little blip on the nationally syndicated Morning Edition about what is happening tonight (the men's final: UConn versus Butler) didn't lead into something about the two amazing games that happened last night. Le sigh. At least Christine Brennan tweeted, during the games, about the perpetuation of the Lady nickname, even though no Lady teams were present. I'm kind of stream of consciousing here but I'm almost done. I really have enjoyed getting to "know" Gary Blair, Texas A&M's head coach. What I have heard about and from him I like. The keeping calm technique during time outs. His demeanor during practices seems very c...

Well it came from a lady. Gloria Ray. She was the first female athletic director of women's sports at the University of Tennessee; a position she took over in 1977 after coaching women's tennis at UT. Here is what she said about creating the Lady Vols brand: "It was fun being in on the very beginning and coming up with the name, 'Lady Vols' which at that time was controversial. I came up with a bumper sticker that said, 'Lady Vols, too.' There was a fear that a women's team would hurt the football team, so we wanted to put out the message that it's Lady Vols, too, in addition to the men, not in place of the men." Still controversial--well maybe just among the people I hang with--but for different reasons of course. Then it was the mere existence of women's sports that was controversial, today it's having to differentiate them arguably in a way the makes them seem inferior. And as we all know now--nothing has hurt big-time football, cert...

This is my week of incredulity, clearly. And it has been topped off by Dave Zirin, whose work I usually admire. Whose books I actually assign in my class. But his piece in The Nation really ticked me off. And what ticks me off more is that he's making a great point. A point that I have made in various ways for a while now. Basically that Geno Auriemma is an egomaniac, slightly off, and a grandstander who is taking away from his players. Unfortunately he keeps calling the UConn team the Lady Huskies. As I have mentioned previously, the UConn team actually does not use the term Lady to refer to its women's teams. (It's one of the few things that doesn't irk me about them.) Also, as I have mentioned previously, we shouldn't be using the term lady even when the teams themselves do so because it just reinforces all the negative stereotypes about women playing sports. A few years ago, Zirin spoke at the annual meeting of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sp...

So it's over. We can all get back to our lives now that March Madness has ended. But before I put an end to blog posts about collegiate women's basketball, I have a few things to say about...yes, feminism. I will start with what I am sure many would call the nitpicky: an article in the NYT about last night's championship game, the Big East, and the surprising appearance of Louisville. The men's team at Louisville, of course, did not make it to their Final Four as expected and so that meant, according to one player, that star Angel McCoughtry had become "the man"--a term she had no problem with because, as the writer notes, she's no "raging feminist." And she understands that men's basketball gets more attention, though she believes it's because men's basketball "has been around since the Stone Age." I don't mean to pick on McCoughtry here. My point is that a smidge of feminist leanings, or heck just a little bit of women...

So the elimination of "lady" from the nickname of the University of Arkansas is being presented as a smart and logical marketing choice. Who cares what the reason is (okay, I care and I will talk about that in a second)? It's gone. The Lady Razorbacks (ridiculous sounding of course, though I have heard worse) are no more. The University of Arkansas is merging its men's and women's athletic departments (not surprisingly the woman who was athletic director of the women's athletic department has been demoted and is now answering to the former men's athletic director--a subject for another post. Of course this woman also thought the lady prefix "made sense" when the departments were separate). And to create a stronger brand they decided to just all be one happy athletic department full of Razorbacks. And no one seems to mind. Yeah! Though no one is really presenting this as the right thing to do for equity. The praise they will get from feminists an...

Some Louisiana institutions of higher education are sticking to "tradition" and retaining the lady part of the sports teams' nicknames--the women's teams, of course. I feel like I have addressed this issue enough and I don't think I have anything really new and/or profound to add to the discussion. Helen over at Women's Hoops Blog talks about it smartly and succinctly when she employs her gender reverse test and replaces ladies with gentlemen and women with men. I wonder if such play with language would convince some of those women who want to be treated like ladies that this so-called tradition isn't really in their best interest. They cite history and tradition, but do they know what it really means--historically, traditionally--to be treated like a lady? Sure lady has a class (and race) connotation that would seem to suggest that women who qualified as ladies (versus working class women and many women of color) had a better life; were somehow less oppr...