After Atalanta

Women's intercollegiate basketball is not that far away, my friends. And given my current status as a resident of western Massachusetts, I hear about the progress of the UMass-Amherst Minutewomen all the time. And I cringe every time. Because what exactly is a Minutewoman?? Looks like I am not alone in my questioning of the name, its history, and its effects.

So now that we're officially in a recession , let's talk sports! There's been rumblings here and there about how sports might be affected by the then "bad economy." The NCAA has asked schools that need to cut teams because of crunched budgets NOT to blame Title IX in the process. Some are wondering if attendance at events might be affected--probably given that the rise in costs associated with attending a sporting event have risen well above the rate of inflation. But let's talk corporate for a sec. All this bailout money to all these corporate giants has many people pissed--to say the least. What might piss you off more? If there is any tightening of belts--it isn't happening in the area of corporate sponsorship . Citibank has no plans to get out of its 20-year naming rights contract with the NY Mets. The in-big-trouble financial institution is paying the Mets $400 million so they will call the field Citi Field. And insurance company AIG continues to pay ...

There have been a barrage of Think Pink events coming across my email (more on that tomorrow) so I have not been paying all that much attention. So that's why I kind of overlooked the press release I received about the 11th annual celebration of Women's Sports Day at St. Johns University.* That is until I saw who was the keynote speaker: Lisa Leslie-Lockwood. Wait, who is this Leslie-Lockwood? I honestly thought there was someone out there--not the WNBA star--who was named Lisa Leslie-Lockwood. Because I know who Lisa Leslie is. I hope most people do. But in case you don't, the press release provides this description: Lisa Leslie-Lockwood, a WNBA all-star known for championing women's issues, will mark Women in Sports Day at St. John's with a presentation on the importance of early screening and detection. Obviously one of those women's issues is not the importance of challenging historic constructions and present-day manifestations of women as the property of m...

I know everyone's watching college football, or professional football, or the pennant race. Some of us are watching the World Cup. But it's hard not to think about college hockey which is gearing up for season openers. The Boston Herald ran a brief column today on the Hockey East conference, in which my alma mater UNH plays. Both the men's and women's teams have been voted first in the coaches' pre-season poll. (The men tied with rival BC.) Alas, reporter John Connolly called the women's team the Lady Wildcats. Grrrr.... I have written previously about the problematic use of the term Lady to designate women's teams and expressed my continued disappointment in Tennessee basketball coach Pat Summitt for her support of the practice. But at UNH, we don't even use the term. (I would have to look into whether we ever did.) So that means Connolly is just using to distinguish--and by distinguish I mean demean because of course "Ladies" can't play...

It may just be the latest trend in women's sports. Nope, not the new Under Armour line for women. Not glitter headbands on softball players either. The dropping of the term "lady" from team nicknames. Athletic Business reports that more and more schools that formerly called their teams the Lady _____ are giving up the lady. The most recent converts have been Cameron University in Oklahoma and Indiana University Southbend who used the term to refer to their women's basketball team. Of course there are still holdouts. Pat Summitt of Tennessee said during the 2007 NCAA tournament that she couldn't imagine ever separating the Lady from the Vols. And of course there are the Lady Lions of Penn State. There are a lot of ridiculous maneuvers that are made to distinguish men's and women's sports and naming practices have been one of the oldest. Any type of naming that seeks to differentiate based on traditional notions of men as dominant in sports and women athlet...

I have long been perturbed by the uncritical use of male pronouns in women's sports: defensemen, first baseman, Ironman, etc. I am very much in the minority in these views, I realize, and so rarely bring them up. But I had a mini-epiphany the other day at a softball game. I went to see UMass take on George Washington. The announcer gave the line-up: "up for the Minute women , first baseman ____." So some schools go out of their way to distinguish their women's teams from the men's by giving them separate ridiculous names like Minutewomen but persist in calling them men.

Christine Brennan takes on a not-too-popular issue in her USA Today column : naming practices for women's teams. And Brennan comes down on the right side of this argument somewhat making up--in my mind at least--for her closing remarks at the Billie Jean King luncheon last week. As I mentioned the other day, I rooted for Rutgers for a myriad of reasons, one of which was that Tennessee persists in calling itself the Lady Vols. Brennan's article actually points out that when coach C. Vivian Stringer took over at Rutgers she took the "lady" away from the Scarlet Knights. She told Brennan: "...with all due respect, I just believe that basketball is basketball and you don't need to make a distinction. ... I think that it's time to just drop the 'lady' thing. Let's play basketball." My level of respect is significantly less than Stringer's. I think it's just wrong. I think teams that persist in this "tradition" are a little s...

Christine Brennan duly noted the lack of respect women's sports get yesterday in her USA Today column . The particular slighting she wrote of was the perpetual use of "women's" as modifier to any sports coverage while lack of an adjective is read as male. What brought on this column was the coverage of Florida's win in the BCS Bowl that prompted sports broadcasters to note that Florida was the first school to hold national title in both football and basketball at the same time. What should have been noted was that by basketball they really meant men's basketball. I am glad Brennan pointed it out and got UMaryland basketball coach Brenda Frese to comment on the slight. Brennan was also able to plug the #1 Terrapins and note the success in terms of the title and of revenue (MD is selling out games this season). But it's a pretty basic argument. You don't even have to know anything about sports to know that men and the things associated with them are alwa...

As I mentioned below, I caught some of the women's AVP final at Manahattan Beach this weekend where Kerri Walsh and Misty May won something like their 7th title of the year. Congrats are in order of course. But I just wouldn't be my analytical/critical self if I didn't find something about gender/cultural norms that arose to blog about. There seems to be some confusion about what Misty's name is. She did get married and is apparently going by May Treanor. The commentators called her Misty May and the graphics lacked consistency showing her as May Treanor as well as just May. I could go on and on (and on) about women changing their names when they marry and the huge problems with that practice but that's not really what this blog about. So instead I will just focus on the huge problems I have when famous female athletes change their names. Sure there's the cultural reasons all marrying women face but because these athletes have already established themselves in t...