After Atalanta

How did the end of the week come so quickly? And how did all these things build up? It's not so much that I missed the following news/events, it's more that I haven't found a good moment to mention them. On Tuesday night the Texas A&M Aggies beat Notre Dame in the championships of the Women's Final Four Tournament. Thankfully the score and the quality of play was indeed better than the men's game the night before. Or else I would still be blushing sheepishly and hanging my head. Erin Whiteside at the Sports, Media, and Society blog (out of Penn State's Curley Center) notes the problematic way Twitter users were comparing the men's game (as it was ongoing and immediately afterwards) to the women's game. As in, even the women can do better than this kind of sentiments. I tried, in my own post about this issue, to note that the complaints about women's basketball never ever being able to be as interesting as men's basketball are false generaliza...

(I'm not really sure exactly how that title is going to fit with the rest of the post, but I liked the way it sounded, so I am going with it.) So, in case you didn't know, men's intercollegiate basketball has its own tournament. It culminated last night in a final game between University of Connecticut and Butler University. Sure UConn has won the title three previous times, but this year they were only a #3 seed and Butler was a #8. The numerous upsets caused much disturbance in fans' brackets this year, so I can't imagine many people tuned in to watch this final game, which unfortunately aired at 9:30 on the east coast (which everyone knows is the bestest time zone!). And frankly, they didn't miss much. I think it's time we talk seriously about the inferiority of the men's game. Does the dunk and fancy schmancy above the rim play really compensate for lack of shooting skills so evident in last night's game? I mean, the score at the half was 22-19 (...

I received an email a little while ago announcing a new partnership between Texas A&M and the NCAA through the former's Laboratory for Diversity in Sport. I am pleased the NCAA is doing more than speaking about its commitment to diversity (a la Myles Brand's state of the association speech the other day) by putting some dollars behind it. But I find the announcement (linked above) so very strange. Perhaps it is because I come from a humanities background and not the social sciences (despite my attempts to "pass"), but I just find it so odd that we're going to study diversity in a laboratory. What does that look like exactly? Lab, to me, implies testing of subjects. In a kinesiology department (which the Laboratory for Diversity in Sport is associated with), I picture athletes on treadmills or other such human subject experiments based around performance. But when we are looking at how to increase diversity in intercollegiate athletics, how do you test for that...