After Atalanta

 Last weekend, BYU fans directed racial slurs against several Black women on the Duke volleyball team. It seems that Rachel Richardson experienced the brunt of it including a threat from a white man in which she was told to "watch her back" on her way to the bus. She is the athlete who has spoken up about the violence.  BYU responded late and poorly, but this was an all-around failure by all coaches and officials.  It has been pointed out t hat BYU's response reflects their ignorance. Others have thrown up their hands in a "it's BYU--what do you expect?" kind of way.  ALL institutions should already be doing this work. That Heather Olmstead, BYU coach, said that after talking to Richardson (and others) that she now "understand(s) areas where we can do better" is offensive. Stop asking Black people to educate you about racism. AND ALSO how do you not understand that yelling racial slurs is a problem? This is not an area to be worked on--this is an ...

We all have teams/schools that we do not like. That we like, in fact, to dislike. I, for example, as a loyal UNH alum and hockey fan dislike Maine. And Boston College. Oh, and Boston University (sorry, Dad!). It's just my duty. And I enjoy such school-specific cheers as "U-R-I, U-R-I, U-R-I-N-E--flush!" when University of Rhode Island comes to town. (Clever, eh?) But I was never on board with saying, at men's hockey games, "you suck" (or at least not after my naive undergraduate mind was enlightened a little) and its derivatives like "Hey goalie, your boyfriend called and he says..." You get the idea. But what's happening at Duke (another school I am not fond of but for different reasons--recall that whole lacrosse fiasco a couple of years ago) is getting extreme. Haters of Duke men's basketball are launching all sorts of homophobic words, chants, videos and even Wikipedia entries at players. Seriously, people go into players' Wikipedia...

LSU announced a couple of weeks ago now that they had found a new head coach for the women's basketball team. They hired Van Chancellor, a former WNBA, Olympic, and intercollegiate coach. I did not blog about it then because all I had to say about it was this: I am certainly not surprised LSU went with a male coach.* I am pleased that at least it is a coach who has substantial experience coaching women's basketball but I think LSU could have made a strong statement by hiring a woman and I worry about the repercussions the Chatman incident will have on other hiring decisions. But I had nothing else of substance to say about the decision. The New York Times, however, has delved a little deeper . The article examines the decline of female head coaches and cites the big names in the sport sociology/sport management field who all, not surprisingly, agree that the fear of predatory lesbians is a huge factor in the lack of women head coaches in intercollegiate athletics. This is still...