After Atalanta

Here's a bold move in this era of big-time sports: Spelman College is eliminating its intercollegiate athletics program at the end of the year. The all-female HBCU, lead by President Beverly Daniel Tatum, will take the $1 million annual budget for athletics and use to establish fitness programs to be available to the entire 2,000-women student body. Spelman will keep its PE requirement but will expand opportunities for activities  like yoga and aerobics. The emphasis, according to Tatum, will be placed on life-long health: “We want them to live long and healthy lives so they can get the return on that investment they’ve made in higher education…. We really see this as a life-saving activity that we are engaging in.” The emphasis on mind and body is refreshing especially in light of the population. Black women are at greater risk for heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and various cancers than their white peers--even when accounting for economic status and education. ...

At the NCAA conference this past week in San Antonio some interesting new data was revealed. It appears that student-athletes don't trust their coaches a whole lot. And apparently the coaches of women's basketball are the worst--according to their players. Only 39 percent of respondents said they trusted their coaches. The same percentage said their coaches "defined success by not only winning, but winning fairly." Just over a third said they wanted to spend less time with their coaches. This is compared to 21 percent of female student-athletes in other sports. The Women's Basketball Coaches Association is responding to the findings by establishing an ethics committee that will examine the compliance rules around coaches' behaviors and players' experiences. Isn't this kind of exactly what female physical educators and administrators were worrying about in the 70s and 80s when women's sports were being brought into the NCAA model? Not an especially ...

More good news this week about positive trends in sports. Some colleges have dropped the "Lady" from their nicknames of women's teams, and now, it seems, young athletes are coming out as gay in high school and college and not getting the crap beat out of them. The LA Times features the stories of a handful of young athletes who chose not to hide their homosexual identity and to continue to play sports. The article is not especially well-written, jumping from one athlete's story to the next with little transition, but it is important in that it showcases athletes who are challenging the norms set by sport and society about sexuality, gender, and athletic ability. I actually disagreed with a GLADD rep, a former football player himself, who said that he thinks a superstar will come out eventually (I guess he thinks of superstars as men given that Martina Navratilova, Billie Jean King, Amelie Mauresmo, and Sheryl Swoopes all came out during their playing careers and have...

As previously noted, as part of their week-long celebration of women's sports and commemoration of Title IX, CSTV will be airing the Collegiate Women Sports Awards. The five finalists for Women Athlete of the Year were announced recently. The five were taken from a larger list that is comprised of an outstanding athlete in each sport. Oddly I did not see a representative from ice hockey. Not sure what sports get counted. There was no bowling or water polo either. Tennessee has two of the five finalists in b-baller Candace Parker and softball pitcher Monica Abbott. The winner will be announced June 25.

Frank Deford, who I go hot and cold on (he's on NPR Morning Edition once a week), published this editorial at Sports Illustrated online on the recent increase in attention to coaching salaries. The gist of it: stop pretending revenue-generating collegiate sports such as men's basketball and football have anything at all to do with education. Like professional sports, Deford argues, these are for entertainment value and the market should determine coaching salaries. I have a healthy amount of skepticism about being able to reform any patriarchal, capitalist system from within and this applies to intercollegiate athletics as well. But Deford's "solution" about separating them out of athletic departments and creating a "department of entertainment" is not the kind of radical system overhaul that I can really get behind. It is a facetious one I realize, but one that just allows Deford to say "stop whining about these salaries" without proffering an...