Other Women's Sports

10/11/2023 |  Happy International Day of the Girl (Gist Sports, The)

The first-ever IDOG was held on October 11th, 2012, when the United Nations (UN) declared the day to recognize the rights of, and challenges faced by girls around the world. IDOG is all about addressing the unique barriers girls encounter, while empowering them to change a world that stilllacks full gender equity.

And as we know, sports play a pivotal role in improving the lives of girls, with ripple effects that can benefit them well into adulthood.
 

While there’ve been significant strides in women’s sports recently, there’s still a long way to go to ensure girls can get in and stay in the game.

• Just one in three girls aged six to 12 play sports regularly. And, by age 14, girls drop out of sports at a rate two times greater than boys.

• In the U.S., high school boys have a whopping 1.3 million more sports opportunities than high school girls. Not okay.

• And the lack of participation is a global issue: Nearly half of teenage girls in Australia quit sports by age 17, and a Canadian study found that if girls don’t play sports by the time they’re 10, there’s only a 10% chance they’ll be physically active adults.

• Girls of color face even more barriers to access than their white counterparts, having to navigate disparities at the intersection of gender and race.

So what are those barriers? Along with having fewer opportunities, the stereotype that sports are “for boys” still infuriatingly persists. In a U.S. national survey, a third of parents said they believed that boys are inherently better at sports than girls. Absurd.

• And while there are so many incredible pro female athletes, girls still lack female sports role models in their day-to-day experiences. Sixty-eight percent of youth players are coached by men, and very few parents encourage their daughters to follow sports figures.

• What’s more, the cost of playing sports can be out of reach for many families. Budget cuts have also forced schools to adopt “pay-to-play” models which bar many athletes from competing.

It’s hard to overstate the benefits for girls who play sports. Most obviously, sports help girls’ physical health, not just during childhood, but throughout their lives. They have stronger immune systems and are at a lower risk of developing medical issues like heart disease, osteoporosis, diabetes and a myriad of cancers later in life.

• But the mental health effects may be even more important. Young female athletes have higher self-esteem, lower levels of depression, and overall better body images.

Sports also help girls develop valuable lifelong skills, such as teamwork, leadership, and goal-setting abilities. They also learn how to take risks and be resilient when facing failure.

Also important for girls’ future success? Their education. Young female athletes are more likely to stay in school, get better grades, and pursue further education. And 61% of high school girlswith 4.0+ GPAs play sports.

• Not only that, girls who get in the game are 14% more likely to believe they are smart enough for their dream career — it’s no wonder that 80% of Fortune 500 female execs played sports. Leveling the playing field and the C-suite.

As families consider the numerous benefits of sports participation, they also weigh certain risks that are specific to girls. Physically, girls and women are at higher risk of certain sports injuries, such as ACL tears, stress fractures, tendonitis, and concussions.

But more concerning are the risks to girls’ safety and wellbeing. In October 2022, U.S. Soccer released a devastating report on the systemic issue of verbal, emotional, and sexual abuses in the NWSL. Many players who were interviewed during the year-long investigation also described troubling incidents with youth coaches.

• Reports like that, along with high-profile stories surrounding USA Gymnastics and the abuse hundreds of young girls suffered right under the organization’s nose, understandably give many parents and young athletes pause.

Plus, there’s been a massive movement in the U.S. to bar trans girls from participating in sports. Trans youth are already at greater risk of depression, anxiety, and death by suicide than their cis peers and, besides being horrifyingly discriminatory, these bans mean they miss out on the aforementioned benefits of play. Clearly, there’s still work to do.

Though progress is being made incrementally, much work can be done to ensure all girls have safe and inclusive access to sports.

• One way to make it happen? Create more opportunities. And the state of California is doing just that: This 2023-2024 school year is the first full year that girls’ flag football is an official high school sport.

Another big way to attract and keep girls in sports? Representation. According to a 2022 survey, 30% of U.S. sports fans are watching more women’s sports now than five years ago — and the most common explanation is that it’s easier to find games on TV. Groundbreaking.

• But there’s still room for improvement. Only 5% of sports media coverage in 2019 was focused on women’s sports and, aside from The GIST’s 100% female and nonbinary newsroom, only 14% of sports reporters in 2021 were women.

The sports world clearly has a long way to go to achieve gender equity. Empowering more girls on fields, courts, and pitches helps not just them, their families, and communities, but also lifts an industry that has significant impacts on society.

• When we level the playing field for girls, we level it for everyone.

 

10/2/2023 |  The Taylor Swift effect on women's sports (Gist Sports, The)

The GIST: Taylor Swift has the power to boost economies, even one as lucrative as the NFL. She’s singing to a relatively untapped market in sports: the girl at home. Swift's popularity proves that a little celebrity cachet goes a long way in recruiting new fans, especially in women's sports. It's making all of our wildest dreams come true.

The Swift Effect: After one afternoon in a Kansas City Chiefs box, Swift created one of the season's most prominent (love) storylines. The Chiefs-Bears game was the week’s most-watched NFL broadcast with 24.3M viewers, including a 63% viewership bump among women aged 18 to 49.

• Swift's adoring fans are also supporting her (rumored) lover: In the 24 hours after the game, Travis Kelce saw 300K new social media followers, a 400% spike in merch sales, and a No. 1 spot for his podcast on Apple’s charts. She really did put him on the map.

Celeb impact on women’s sports: Beyond just casual interest, celebrity investment can transform pop culture aficionados into sports fanatics. Take Angel City FC — after one season, the celebrity-owned NWSL club accrued $40M in sponsorships, sold $6M of merch, and contributed 38.75% to the league’s 2022 revenue. And this year, Angel City fans shared something special with Swifties: breaking Ticketmaster.

• Speaking of selling out, the US Open benefitted from a pronounced celeb presence when it sold out of tickets and advertising inventory.

The blueprint: As celebrities look to diversify their portfolios, the surge in women's sports participation and viewership is attracting elite investors. It's one thing to have award-winning artists in the stands; it's another to have them in the C-suite. Taylor probably won't be joining an ownership group anytime soon, but her noticeable NFL boost reminds the world that wherever she strays, millions follow.

 

10/1/2023 |  Truth and reconciliation in sports (Gist Sports, The)

It’s no secret that the history of North America is woven with atrocities against its Indigenous peoples. Prior to European colonizers arriving in the Americas, there were an estimated 60 million Indigenous people living across the two continents. Due to disease and genocide, that population dwindled by approximately 90% to 6 million in about 100 years.

Harm of Indigenous communities did not stop there. For centuries, policies and practices in both the U.S. and Canada displaced Indigenous people and sought to eradicate Indigenous culture. One major tool used? Residential schools.

• These government-mandated schools were central to the mission to “assimilate” the Indigenous population. Children were removed from their families and communities under the auspices of “civilizing” Native peoples. Horrifying.

• The first Canadian residential school opened in January 1831 and the U.S. followed suit in 1879. These boarding schools existed in both countries well into the 20th century, affecting hundreds of thousands of children.

• Besides the loss of culture, language, spiritual beliefs, community and even their names, Indigenous children often suffered abuse, and many never returned home. Both Canada and the U.S. have recently discovered mass burial sites at residential schools.

In response to its dark history, in 2021, Canada established the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. In the same year, President Biden declared the second Monday in October as Indigenous Peoples’ Day, officially recognizing the holiday that began in 1977. Small, but necessary steps.
 

Today, many survivors of residential schools cite sports as their key to survival. Amid violence and abuse, Indigenous children found respite in sports and, in Canada, most often on the ice.

• Eugene Arcand, a First Nations residential school survivor who played semi-pro hockey, describes sports as his “safe space.”

But while sports were helpful escapes from the horrors of residential schools, they were also used as tools for assimilation. The use of hockey at Canadian residential schools, for instance, served to indoctrinate the students into seeing themselves more as “Canadian” than as Indigenous.

• Schools often banned or discouraged Indigenous sports, like lacrosse, to separate children from their culture and emphasized winning over other more important Indigenous values, like community.

And for girls, the indoctrination went a step further. Schools were often segregated by gender, and (stop us if you’ve heard this one before) girls were barred or discouraged from participation in sports. Instead, they were pushed into knitting, cooking, or cleaning in an effort to represent more Euro-centric gender roles.
 

In spite of multiple barriers to participation,Indigenous athletes have been overcoming obstacles and setting standards across North American sports for over a century.

One of the GOATs of the sporting world, Jim Thorpe, was near-limitless. The Sac and Fox Nation member took Olympic gold for Team USA in both the decathlon and pentathlon in 1912, played six seasons in MLB, and became a pro football Hall of Famer. Legend.

Another Olympian that (literally) blazed trails is Billy Mills. The Oglala Lakota track star ran the marathon and the 10K race at the 1964 Tokyo Games, becoming the only American to ever win 10K gold when he broke the Olympic record with a time of 28:24.4.

After being introduced to cross-country skiing by a government program for Indigenous youth in the 1960s, Gwich’in First Nation twins Sharon and Shirley Firth suited up for Team Canada at the 1972 Olympics, becoming the first Indigenous women to compete for the country. Together, they netted 79 (!!!) medals for Canada across their skiing careers. Damn.

Canada’s Waneek Horn-Miller may be the embodiment of Indigenous resilience. At just 14, the water polo star was stabbed within a centimeter of her heart by a Canadian soldier’s bayonet during a violent land dispute in 1990.

• The Mohawk woman recovered and went on to help Canada to Pan American gold in 1999 before co-captaining the country’s first-ever women’s Olympic water polo team in 2000.

Today’s Indigenous athletes are changing the sports world. With players like the NHL’s Carey Price (Ulkatcho First Nation), the NWSL’s Madison Hammond (Navajo and Pueblo), the Premier Lacrosse League’s Lyle Thompson (Onondaga Nation), and NCAA volleyball player Emoni Bush (Wei Wai Kum First Nation), Indigenous athletes have more vital representation across sports than ever before.

And it’s not just the pro athletes making noise.Besides the aforementioned North American Indigenous Games, the NYO Games and World Eskimo-Indian Olympics are two annual competitions, inspired by Alaska’s rich Native culture, that showcase pure athleticism in events like the two-foot high kick (akratcheak).

In reclaiming their past, Indigenous athletes are laying the groundwork for the future. Indigenous players are systematically redefining the game of lacrosse, which could make its way back as a medal sport in the Olympics in 2028 after a 120-year absence.

• The Haudenosaunee have their sticks up for the official recognition of their nationhood by the International Olympic Committee, so that they can compete under their own flag.

• Player Brendan Bomberry summed it up in his pep talk to his Haudenosaunee Nationals teammates before last summer’s World Games: “Sports may not be political, but for our people, they are.”

6/30/2023 |  Spain: Camp Nou will be beyond recognition (StadiumDB.com) Although the season is over, workers in Barcelona are by no means thinking about holidays. The construction, or rather demolition, of Camp Nou has started as quickly as possible - there is a lot of work ahead for the team at the venue, and deadlines are coming up. 

6/23/2023 |  Disney unveils new advertising framework dedicated to women's sports (Gist Sports, The) Disney wants advertisers to be part of the women’s sports world. This week, the media conglomerate unveiled Level Up, a new advertising framework that encourages brands to spend on women’s sports content across ESPN’s platforms. Disney is currently pitching the project to advertisers and may already have some takers.