Movin' On: A Place in the SBNation

Full disclosure: yesterday's post about how SBNation.com could influence women's sports coverage (and probably the post before that) was foreshadowing some exciting news.

The exciting news is that as of today, I will be writing for Swish Appeal, a new women's basketball site at SBNation.com, one of the largest and fastest growing fan-centric sports communities full of innovative social media goodies that I'm still figuring out.

Perhaps most interesting, is that Swish Appeal will be the first dedicated women's sports blog on the site.

As someone interested in the expansion of women's sports coverage, I find this to be a pretty exciting development and look forward to continuing to develop as a writer and WNBA observer. For more insight into what we are planning for Swish Appeal, please see our welcome message.

Of course, that means the less exciting news (for me, at least) is that Rethinking Basketball - a relatively small corner of the WNBA blogosphere - is coming to an end. Content from the site will remain in this domain for a week, but then be moved to Swish Appeal.

If you have subscribed to Rethinking Basketball or followed it closely, I recommend subscribing to Swish Appeal today and continuing to follow me there. Blogger has been fun (and I spent way too much time with code on this site), but SBNation.com is an even cooler place to be.

This is a good time to say that I appreciate all of the critique, encouragement, and support (linkage) from people to this point -- that of course is what makes blogging exciting and fulfilling, in addition to the fact that I love writing about basketball.

I hope we can extend the interaction into the SBN community.

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On Writing (Part 2): How Might Advances in Social Media Influence Women's Sports Coverage?

I ended yesterday’s post about “good journalism” as follows and figure it would be a good way to start today’s post:

“Last Thursday, SBNation’s launch of its redesigned website, which includes an innovative “StoryStream” feature, struck me as an interesting lens through which to explore all of these questions.

What strikes me as most significant about SBNation’s approach to sports journalism is that it represents a convergence of the best principles of “traditional” journalism and “fan journalism”. Although SBNation has not previously covered women's sports, their model of journalism has potential to enhance the way women's sports is covered.”

With that I borrow a pair of questions from an upcoming panel at the University of Minnesota’s Tucker Center for today’s post:

1. Will this technological paradigm shift challenge or reproduce the ways in which female athletes are traditionally portrayed in mainstream sport media?

2. Will the unprecedented popularity of social media—and the alternative “ways of knowing” it provides to traditional media—fundamentally alter how we view women’s sports?

Since SBNation has not previously covered women’s sports, it probably seems odd to use that site as a lens to think about social media and women’s sports. However, consider this comment from a post on the One Sport Voice blog:

The ultimate strategy (for women's sports) then it to is push for more integration of women’s sports into mainstream media, while continuing to carve out a space in social media. That way we ensure women’s sports are not ghettoized in the “opt-in” exclusive space (not everyone has access to the WWW) of social media.

I would suggest that the combination of SBNation’s redesign in addition to its size, readership, and partnerships with major outlets like Google, Yahoo, and CBSSports, is the perfect platform with which to begin the integration of women’s sports into mainstream media.

The infrastructure exists in a site like SBN to accomplish the task of elevating women's sports coverage.

Embedded in SBNation’s redesign is the use of social media to enhance, rather than diverge from, the “excavation” process (as phrased by Stephen King and described in yesterday’s post) that characterizes the activity of good “traditional” journalism. In addition to shifting what is covered as “news”, it also has the potential to shift how news about women’s sports is consumed.

As stated in the first paragraph of SBN's statement about the revamped site, it is all about encouraging and facilitating dialogue among fans about things they care about rather than dictating the agenda to follow. Bankoff compares the revamped site to a sports version of Huffington post, complementing rather than conflicting with major media outlets like ESPN.com or CNN/SI.com.

However, the structure of its SportsStream which is a consolidated stream of “the latest news feeds, Tweets, videos, comments that move a major sports story along,” according to CEO Jim Bankoff also represents a shift even from traditional online journalism.

Rather than an emphasis on reporting the story of the day, the focus is on multiple perspectives on a given situation that the readership cares about, commentary on those perspectives, and comments on the commentary.

By hypothetically consolidating the voice of the athlete with the voice of the media with the voice of the fan, readers should be able to get a far richer perspective on any given sporting event than they would have by reading any one of those sources in isolation. It is at the cutting edge of how any news is covered, even beyond the sports world. So could it help women's sports?

Can the technological advances of SBN “fundamentally alter how we see women’s sports”?

On one hand, comparing a sports fan-site to a left-leaning political site might seem like a stretch. On the other hand, maybe it’s appropriate for a sports site to be seen in the same light.

Reading Helen Wheelock’s article about Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist Michelle V. Agins, I was reminded of an excerpt from Raquel Cepeda’s introduction to her book, “And It Don’t Stop”, a collection of seminal hip-hop journalism:

Hip-hop journalism built on the tradition of hip-hop as a societal reflector. The hip-hop journalists not only understood, but were themselves participants also aching to be understood…Today would be hip-hop journalists are faced with a challenge to explore the substance beneath the surface. While the writings about hip-hop in the alternative press legitimized the music because it helped identify it to the masses of eighties, and helped our generation define itself within its social and political paradigms in the nineties, we are now being faced with the task of covering more interesting aspects than what the mainstream predicates. And while we’re ushering in the new millennium, writing about hip-hop still has the potential to be used as a conduit for change.

I would argue that women's sports does function as a social reflector with plenty of rich substance beneath the surface of the game.

However, the question is what it means for women's sports writers to see themselves as "responsible for history", like Akins or early hip-hop writers did. I am not suggesting they do not...but seeing oneself as a journalist responsible for excavating a historical story is much different than a journalist seeing oneself as merely relaying facts.

Furthermore, if you believe Hoopsworld writer Steve Kyler that ESPN influences who is popular and who is not in sports and Huffington Post contributer Casey Gane-McCalla that, “Sports stereotypes have a real effect in the real world,” then the way major traditional sports news institutions cover women’s sports has a real effect on women.

Sports journalism – both how it is covered and how it is consumed – matters, especially when it comes to covering women’s sports which have been unapologetically demeaned by the mainstream media.

If you’re like me, this is a sobering commentary on the state of affairs in the U.S. – the free flow of ideas that seems central to a democracy is not necessarily supported by our media outlets in any domain.

Hence the exuberance about social media, mine included.

However, as Nicole Lavoi wrote in her post about social media back in May, there is no empirical evidence to support the claim that social media will single-handedly change the way women’s sports are covered. However, the technological infrastructure of sites like SBN have the capacity to shift the way the women’s sports are covered. The question is how to best take advantage of that.

After all, there is at least one thing that we do have empirical evidence to support: the mainstream “traditional” media is probably not going to shift the way they cover women’s sports any time soon.

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On Writing (Part 1): What is Good Journalism?

Since blogging has become an extended writing exercise for me that unites academic, professional, and personal interests, I’ve been focusing a lot more on journalism lately, both reading more widely and reading books about writing.

Most of us have the ability to identify countless examples of problematic (or flat-out bad) journalism and criticize it, especially when it comes to the coverage of women’s sports.

However, the much more difficult challenge that I constantly struggle with is actually identifying specific characteristics “good” journalism beyond broad abstractions like “intellectual journalism” or technocratic guidelines for reporting on women’s sports.

What exactly do good journalists do? And how might we apply it to writing about women’s sports? More importantly, how does that influence digital media outlets?

While it may feel tempting to say that there is no universal standard of “good” traditional journalism, patterns have emerged in the reading I’ve done about journalism over time.

Journalism as excavation

As I’ve been reading about journalism it occurred to me that whether it be the hip-hop journalism of the early 1980’s, I.F. Stone’s political journalism throughout the 20th century, or even Stephen King’s description of his brief career as a sports reporter (yes, the horror writer began his career covering high school basketball), there seem to be common characteristics of “high-quality” journalism.

Last Wednesday, I stumbled upon Andy Rooney’s video essay shown at Walter Cronkite’s memorial, which coincidentally echoed what I had already been reading.

[Walter Cronkite] was a great anchorman in the news business because his greatest contribution was not his knowledge or his expertise, as great as those were; it was his steady holding to what was most important. Every writer, every news man or woman who’s worth anything, secretly hopes that he or she will have some good influence on the world. It’s a preposterous wish, of course, but he had it. If it can be said about any individual in our business that he’s been a force for good in the world, Walter Cronkite was that person.

As alluded to in Rooney’s comments, “quality” journalism – whether broadcast, digital, or print – is predicated on the writer’s ability to identify the most important angles of a situation to create a story and present insights that help us reflect on our own perception of the world. That probably strikes most people as obvious at some level, but how one goes about that is much more difficult…at least if you’ve actually tried to do it.

Perhaps more concretely, in his New York Times bestseller On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, King provides a vivid metaphor for writing stories to illuminate the difference between plot-driven and situation-driven writing. Given that journalism is generally situation driven, his description is instructive for journalists as well.

Stories aren’t souvenir tee-shirts or GameBoys. Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible. Sometimes the fossil you uncover is small, a seashell. Sometimes it’s enormous, a Tyrannosaurus Rex with all those gigantic ribs and grinning teeth. Either way, short story or thousand-page whopper of a novel the techniques of excavation remain basically the same.

No matter how good you are, no matter how much experience you have, it’s probably impossible to get the entire fossil out of the ground without a few breaks and losses. To get even most of it, the shovel must give way to more delicate tools: airhose, palm-pick, perhaps even a toothbrush. Plot is a far bigger tool, the writer’s jackhammer.

…

I lean more heavily on intuition, and have been able to do so because my books tend to be based on situation rather than story. Some of the ideas which have produced those books are more complex than others, but the majority start out with the stark simplicity of a department store window display or a waxwork tableau…The situation comes first.

In reflecting on the journalists or writing that I most admire, this attention to the situation during the “excavation” process is exactly what makes their writing great.

Last Thursday, SBNation’s launch of its redesigned website, which includes an innovative “StoryStream” feature, struck me as an interesting lens through which to explore all of these questions.

What strikes me as most significant about SBNation’s approach to sports journalism is that it represents a convergence of the best principles of “traditional” journalism and “fan journalism”. Although SBNation has not previously covered women's sports, their model of journalism has potential to enhance the way women's sports is covered.

Next: How social media can enhance traditional media...and the connection of all of that to women's sports...

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Orender, Parker Among the 55 Most Influential in Basketball

Hoopsworld.com completed their list of the 55 "most influential leaders in basketball" and both Donna Orender and Candace Parker made the list.

54 - Donna Orender, President, WNBA: While the WNBA is far from a mainstream hit, the league is growing and awareness of the brand and the sport continues to grow. While the women's game is nowhere near as popular as the men's game, the WNBA's influence on the female sports fans is significant and advertisers and sponsors continue to support the league.

52 - Candace Parker, Player, Los Angeles Sparks (WNBA): She isn't quite LeBron James, but Parker is a star and her influence over the women's game is profound. She is extremely marketable, and a very solid basketball player. As the face of the WNBA she will be a key component to growing the WNBA fan base into a more mainstream product.

Obviously, the fact that ESPN is #2 on the list has some bearing on that, if you ask me.

2 - George Bodenheimer, President, ESPN – As the dominant sports brand in media ESPN controls the message. Bodenheimer, in turn, controls ESPN, so you do the math. ESPN is the ultimate kingmaker, their experts are experts by virtue of being with ESPN, and they own the broadcasting rights to so much of the sports landscape they can control and influence what is seen and heard across a variety of mediums. ESPN's influence on who is popular, who is not and what teams and situations are news shapes every aspect of the game. To many if ESPN reports it, it is real. ESPN's flagship program, SportsCenter, is one of the most-watched sports broadcasts anywhere. Between their news-making ability and broadcasting agreements no entity has more influence on the game than Bodenheimer's ESPN.

Though women's basketball coverage has gotten better, certainly the way ESPN covers the WNBA will continue to have an affect on its mainstream interest.

Surprisingly, Rebkell did not make the list.


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“Get Schooled”: LeBron James, Viacom, and the Gates Foundation Team Up to Talk Education

I have to commend Viacom, the Gates Foundation, LeBron James, and Kelly Clarkson for taking an interest in the deep educational disparities that exist in the U.S.

Viacom has apparently decided to do some image management by producing an upcoming 30-minute special entitled featuring LeBron James and Kelly Clarkson entitled, “Get Schooled: You Have the Right”.

An excerpt from the press release posted on Slam Online:

“Today, in America, far too many young people enter adulthood unprepared for college, career and life,” said Allan Golston, President of the U.S. Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “Changing this reality requires the full engagement of the corporate and nonprofit communities, working harder to support students, families and schools to create an expectation in every community that a college education is possible for all young people. Through the creativity of Viacom’s team and the strong connections its networks cultivate with their audiences, we have a unique ability to reach young people and their families on this critical issue.”

I sent this out over a listserv that I’m on and a friend sent back the following response:

This made me read James' bio (one of the first sports bios I've read). James experienced an extraordinary amount of support from outside his family. My question to the producers of this show would be, how could we structure social affordances for "all kids" who have this "right to access to college," so that those (millions of kids) who come from "less-than-adequate" households can be taken in by an elementary school sports team coach to live in a "stable" home?

Or am I missing the point?

Nope. He’s not missing the point…but he might have missed the most glaring irony of the whole thing.

Last I checked, LeBron James decided to go to the NBA instead of college…and according to Wikipedia, Kelly Clarkson skipped college for American idol…

So…

What exactly is the message of this program if neither of the stars they have chosen even went to college?

James in particular is an exceptional individual who has led an exceptional life – anybody remember his high school games being broadcast on ESPN? – in a professional sports universe full of exceptional people. What exactly are we supposed to learn about education from these examples?

Hmmm…maybe I’m missing something.

Just to be clear – I have no problem with an athlete like James deciding not to go to college when he was quite clearly the best 18 year old basketball player in this solar system. It just seems like he’s…well…off message for this particular effort.

But where could we find a relatively popular athlete who did go to college and has risen to the top of their game?

Los Angeles Sparks forward Candace Parker maybe? WNBA star, Olympian, and former NCAA Academic All-American?

Doesn’t she better represent the spirit of the program?

I understand she is not nearly as popular as LeBron James -- it would be ridiculous to even think of saying something that absurd -- and I’m not suggesting they made a mistake.

But Parker is a young rising star who succeeded in college and in sports…and it’s worth celebrating that. It would have been an interesting way to spotlight a female role model.

Transition Points:

In other news, recently signed Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Michael Vick is also contributing to the development of our youth by speaking about dogfighting...


"He's a big influential person and what he says matters," said one of the youth.

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Rethinking “Journalism”: What is the Role of the (Sports) Blogger?

One way to think about the role of media in society is to think about how information is produced, distributed, and obtained during a major national event.

Yesterday we had such a major national event: the announcement of Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

(I know political news is not at all the same as sports news…but hopefully you’ll quickly see where I’m going with this)

For a moment, I am going to ask you to set aside your political opinion about the nomination and think about a simple question: how did you find out about the nomination (assuming you found out about it before now)? And more importantly, what types of sources did you go to in order to find that information?

I first found out about Sotomayor’s nomination on Facebook through someone’s status message, which included a link to the CNN (Reuters) article. I glanced over it and started searching the web for information on her past decisions, when a friend emailed me another article that was copied and pasted into the body of the email. So I read that briefly.

Still unsatisfied with the information provided, I kept digging and found a Washington Post article that was a bit more detailed. I read a few more news stories throughout the day (I got distracted by news of the Proposition 8 decision and real life) and then tabled it for a while.

Later on in the afternoon I was sitting with a friend in a coffee shop and we were talking about Sotomayor and he sent me a link to the SCOTUS Blog, which had a detailed account of Sotomayor’s past opinions and potential arguments that she might face during confirmation.

Why do I bother laying out this short story?

Petrel at the Pleasant Dreams Blog wrote an article about two weeks ago entitled, “Can blogging ever replace journalism?” The post itself is worth a read -- it starts with the fact that newspapers are going through tough times right now and ends up with how bloggers figure into that equation. However, if we were to answer the question posed by the title of petrel’s post based on how people find information about a major political event, I would argue the answer is an emphatic “no”.

For a more nuanced answer to the question I might answer a bit differently: bloggers are less a threat to reporters than a complement.

In fact, I would even go so far as to say that the relationship between the two is mutually enhancing for the average citizen – not only do we get hard news, but we also get a set of commentaries that help us gain a deeper understanding of how to interpret that news. Outlets like CNN.com and the Washington Post have the access to break news, social networks spread news, and bloggers provide a range of alternate perspectives to help us interpret all of that information.

But blogs are not a perfect source of news.

One sentiment that was expressed in the comments of my post about newspaper staff reductions was the lack of accountability and quality in blogging vs. “traditional” journalism. The topic came up in response to the suggestion that bloggers could adequately help build interest in the WNBA given the (increasing) lack of coverage from “traditional” media.

And trust me, I am sympathetic to this critique – I often look back at some of my old posts and wish I had an editor aside from MS Word. However, I would take the stance that “traditional” journalism – reporters and public relations folks – and Web 2.0 journalism are not mutually exclusive. Moreover, in sports, they may complement each other in a way that encourages deeper dialogue about the game.

Furthermore, to argue that bloggers are responsible for the death of newspapers is almost completely inaccurate – the 24-hour news cycle died years ago with the rise of broadcast television and online media outlets. Sure the proliferation of citizen journalism may be the nail in the coffin for newspapers, but it is hardly responsible for the downfall of newspapers.

So the question becomes what is the relationship between the blogger and the mainstream media reporter? And what is the role of blogging for niche sports like the WNBA?

As a WNBA blogger, I don’t consider these to be selfish or narcissistic questions but questions absolutely essential to the growth of women’s basketball in the current media context. And ultimately I think some insight into the value of bloggers can be gained from the theme of the upcoming “Blogs with Balls” new media sports journalism conference – bridging social media and the mainstream media.

What do blogs like SCOTUS Blog add to the conversation?

If we return to my information seeking story about Judge Sotomayor, I think we can learn a lot about the relationship between bloggers and traditional journalists.

The SCOTUS Blog's function was really quite simple: it provided legal analysis and archival synthesis of information that is not otherwise easily attainable by the average person. By “not easily attainable” I don’t mean that the information is restricted as much as the fact that the information is condensed in a way that it can help the average (literate) citizen understand news related to the Supreme Court.

And of course, this is definitely a niche blog for people particularly interested in news related to the Supreme Court. The friend who showed it to me has a few lawyers in his family and his best friend from childhood is now a lawyer, so it is in conversations with them that he found this blog.

When you look at what SCOTUS Blog does well and the audience it attracts, it definitely represents the role of the “blogger as historian” (as petrel put it). This is not a threat to newspapers and in fact, blogs such as SCOTUS Blog often rely heavily upon newspapers to do the primary reporting of hard facts that they can then collect and put together.

However, that is politics, not sports.

And though I love sports, let’s not pretend the two are the same.

Sports is about the market of opinions. Watching the game. Talking trash. Pontificating on what might happen in the future.

That happens in politics – and some people who claim to be political journalists do nothing but pontificate -- but the stakes are higher. The two don’t present the same product and really they shouldn’t. I don’t want Wolf Blitzer reporting on sports. And I don’t want an ESPN analyst doing politics (sorry, I went there). Politics are important because they influence people’s living conditions, sports because they entertain and I love competition.

Sports bloggers – and particularly niche sports bloggers – should see ourselves in a similar light as the SCOTUS Blog: to bring together scattered information on the web and thereby offer insight that reporters are unable to offer, either due to the pressure of deadlines or corporate interests. And in being provocative, the blogger can build a unique connection to sports fans that should be leveraged, not disdained.

The sports blogger as provocateur

I have particularly liked this description of a blogger’s responsibilities from the Outspoken Media blog:

As your blogger,

* I will try to offer up viewpoints that perhaps you hadn’t thought of in order to get people talking and open a conversation.
* I’ll do my best to be useful, creating resources worth your bookmarks. (See last week’s post on how to launch that small business Web site.)
* I’ll tie events together to create a story you perhaps didn’t see.
* I’ll take a polarizing stand if it’ll get you to think about things differently and question yourself for good, not just because I’m bored or because I can.
* I’ll craft posts in a tone most appropriate for the subject matter, even if it means I’ll be written off as “sensational” for my choice of language. I’ll use my language as a tool to open people up, not a weapon.
* I will never make links or fake debate my end goal.
* I’ll bring attention to causes, issues and news that I think are important or that will benefit you.
* And I’ll do it while being responsible and accountable for my words.

In a nutshell, that’s what being a blogger is about to me. It’s about being interesting, being useful and to respect your readers enough to challenge them when necessary. Or at least that’s the role I try to fill.

These basic attributes of a blogger also apply to the role of the sports blogger – to provide fodder for discussion or new angles on old childhood games. Re-arranging facts and coming up with alternate explanations is sometimes as valuable as the initial facts themselves – it enhances news rather than detracting from it.

This impulse to challenge common sense rather than merely representing the facts of the world is what helps bloggers enhance journalism rather than detract from it.

Yet that impulse to be provocative can be one of the blogger’s greatest assets and greatest downfalls. Sometimes stringing together loosely connected facts to illuminate a new claim can help us understand our world better. Sometimes it is just flat out nonsense. (Depending on your political leanings, you may think that claims about President Barack Obama being a socialist Muslim terrorist without U.S. citizenship fall on either side of this spectrum.) And unfortunately, the most nefarious of provocateurs end up shaping people’s opinions about all bloggers – hence the gripes of some traditional journalists with bloggers.

So let me present an example of a provocateur that I think “works”.

My favorite example of a provocateur in sports blogging is Dave Berri, a professor who writes the Wages of Wins blog. The reason I like this blog as an example of being provocative is that he is trying to challenge the assumptions underlying how we understand basketball by taking a unique statistical approach to the game – evaluating players based upon their contribution to team wins.

I know some people dislike Berri – they either take issue with his claims or the way he constructs statistics to make his claims. And that is exactly why I’m using him as an exemplar of the sports blogger’s role. I don’t think we have to agree with him, but he forces us to re-evaluate how we think about the game and its stars. To me that’s fun and just adds to what makes sports fun.

One blog entry from the Wages of Wins in particular entitled, “How Sportswriters are Like Coaches: Explaining the Vote for Rookie of the Year” exemplifies why I like his work. The gist of the post is that sportswriters typically choose the Rookie of the Year in the NBA not based on the best performer overall, but on more superficial elements of the game such as points scored, draft position, and team success.

Although Berri presents us with a small example, this exemplifies “sports journalism” of questionable quality despite accountability. And he’s talking about the “traditional” guys.

Berri demonstrates how shallow analyses of basketball undermine the quality of sports journalism in the mainstream media despite their accountability. And the blog post itself perfectly exemplifies how bloggers can intervene – to provide an alternate viewpoint that may sometimes be more complex, but allows us to gain a deeper understanding of the game.

In the end, this is more a matter of differing goals than degrees of quality or effectiveness. And those goals will resonate with audiences in different and very important ways. Furthermore, once bloggers build an audience by being provocative, new opportunities for sustaining and building a sports fan base emerge.

“Blogs with Balls”: Looking to bridge the divide

Although the intersection of bloggers and mainstream media has yet to be fully explored or articulated, I recently came across a website for the Blogs with Balls conference, a sports blogger and new media conference to be held in NYC.

If you go to the site, you may notice that these are primarily bloggers for men’s sports (if you couldn't figure that out from the name)…but I think the core theme of this year’s conference still applies to blogging for niche women’s sports:

Povia said part of the impetus for creating BWB was ham-handed marketers looking to tap the huge audiences drawn to sports blogs.

“After major events like the Super Bowl and March Madness, we were being contacted by big PR companies on behalf of major clients looking to get blog mentions,” he said. “The problem was they were speaking a different language and offering things that weren’t relevant to what we do.”

Povia said a key goal of the conference is to engage marketers and bring them into the conversation with a more interactive, Q&A-type format not generally associated with professional conferences.

This connection between bloggers and marketers is interesting and something that might really help a niche sport like the WNBA by providing access to different subsets of the fan base, that might be otherwise difficult to identify. This is different than bloggers just providing commentary – this is about bloggers actually reaching fans in ways that “traditional media” does not necessarily.

So the question I am left with is how this idea of connecting bloggers to marketers can help a league like the WNBA? And is that really a worthwhile effort to make?

Blogging is clearly not a threat to journalism as much as an expansion. Newspapers are on the decline for multiple reasons, the web included, but that really has little to do with bloggers. What I think people need to figure out -- and what makes me interested in the Blogs with Balls conference -- is how to bridge this divide.

It would be interesting to know what other WNBA bloggers think. One thing I find interesting is the variety among bloggers: there are league-wide blogs and team-specific blogs. Fan blogs and journalists with blogs. Blogs that post essays and those that post links. Those that link sports and politics and those that remain politically neutral. And so I wonder what a conversation between WNBA bloggers regarding this question of their role in advancing the WNBA would look like.

I suppose I could have just emailed a bunch of WNBA bloggers…but isn’t transparency part of what makes blogging great?

Transition Points:

Berri’s poster child for the way people (mis-)analyze basketball is Kevin Durant – a volume scorer who does little else for his team (although anybody in their right mind would admit the man has a ton of potential). The praise for Durant during his rookie season may have been overblown because of the fact that he was such an effective scorer. The fact that he rarely created for teammates and plays suspect defense therefore never entered into the equation.

Which brings us right back to the question of accountability and quality in sports journalism – if you believe Berri (and I think he supports his claim quite well), then the issue of bloggers not being effective at building a sport due to lacking accountability and quality becomes moot. Not only are bloggers merely working in the market of opinion, but in reality, many “traditional” sports journalists are not actually engaging in quality analysis of the game.

And in a sense, Berri’s blog embodies the critique that I would use the aforementioned post to advance – bloggers complement journalists not only by providing a market of opinions for sports fans to consume, but also by watching the watchdog and filling in the gaps when they provide shallow analysis.

Another point about the related issue of “objectivity”: One of my favorite professors in college once said on the first day of his course in Reporting that any reporter who tells you they’re objective is lying – it’s an ideal that shouldn’t necessarily be let go of, but is ultimately unreachable. And when I think about the difference between bloggers and journalists, I see degrees of subjectivity within different motivating goals.

Another thing to think about regarding blogs is the notion of "echo chambers" -- that many blogs become places where like-minded people talk to each other, not across difference as many people would hope the web would enable. Bad thing? No -- as David Weinberger points out, that's what happens in real life. But helpful for a league to expand its fan base? I'm not sure -- it might help strengthen and sustain an existing fan base, but I'm not sure how blogs could extend a fan base, even with connections to marketers...something to chew on, I guess...

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Expect Great ’09: A case study and reflection

Unfortunately, I don’t have any juicy information about the opening of WNBA training camps that you couldn’t get elsewhere.

So instead, I thought this was a good opportunity to comment about another major occurrence yesterday – the television premiere of the newest Expect Great ads.

As excited as I was about yesterday’s NBA game sevens, they were a huge disappointment, which is probably why my mind just wandered to this post.

I watched with 3 of my friends at my friend C’s house (pseudonyms have been used to protect the identities of the innocent). As the games continued to suck, our attention wavered and we started talking about all kinds of random stuff, including watching YouTube clips of C’s brother’s band at one point.

So what ended up grabbing my attention was my friends’ responses to the Expect Great commercials. Of course, the commercials are what inspired me to write this blog so naturally I’m interested in how well this newest iteration “works”. And what better way to do that than with a bunch of over-educated dudes watching basketball?

Anyway, C is in love with his DVR and has now decided that he has no use for commercials. So we “accidentally” caught the WNBA commercials only twice (I’m not sure if they were on more than that throughout the afternoon). But I think the conversation (and non-conversation) was enough to make a point about this year’s first iteration of ads.

We are all graduate students (meaning we have a lot of time on our hands to think about inconsequential aspects of the world around us). None of them are WNBA fans and they don’t watch as far as I know. I’m not sure if they’ve ever been to a game. None of them played high school basketball, though I have played intramural basketball with C and R, both of whom did play a high sport. All of us, however, are NBA fans, and at least C and G are NCAA fans as well.

A random note that should not matter, but usually manages to come up in conversations:
C just got married last year (no kids yet), R is engaged, and G is pathetically single, like me.

Obviously, I had seen the ads before online and I’m assuming they had not. And prior to watching it with them, here’s essentially what I thought:

I agree with those who say they are an upgrade from last year – the gloomy tone is gone and the images are…interesting – but they still fall way short of building a buzz about the league among their target audience.

After watching it with my friends, here’s what I think now:

Whereas last year’s initial spots targeted men, grabbed their attention, and challenged them to interrogate their own biases (thus turning off a number of lunkheads who were shocked that women were allowed to leave the kitchen), this year’s ads are still targeted at men, but fail to grab their attention and hardly get them to interrogate their own biases.

My thoughts on last year’s ads

Just to recap, here’s what I thought about last year’s Expect Great ads:

My friend and I were trying to figure out if these “Expect Great” commercials were effective and whether we liked them. After some deliberation, the verdict was “no” on both counts.

The tone was probably too gloomy and it was just uninspiring. I also have a hard time getting over the grammatical incorrectness of “Expect Great”. I guess it grabs attention because it’s so awkward….but whatever…

So after thinking about what the commercials needed to communicate, here’s what we came up with: in order to appreciate the WNBA people have to stop comparing it to the men’s basketball as inherently “inferior”.

People have to be able to envision basketball without 300 pound 7-footers and highlight reel dunks. Somehow people need to redefine their own conceptions about what basketball is and how the women’s game fits under an umbrella that includes many distinct variations: the NBA, FIBA rules, And1 Mix Tapes, NCAA basketball, and everyday streetball.

That of course essentially frames the goal of this blog – to just appreciate the WNBA on its own terms and find ways to highlight its bright spots (some of the best female athletes in the world competing to see whose team is best).

So here’s what happened yesterday.

Data: My friends’ responses

So when the ad flashed on the screen for the first time, we were all just zoned out or in the middle of a conversation or something. The ad passed by without anyone even bothering to pay attention to it. If anyone did have a thought, they just didn’t share. My only thought was – man, that fell as flat on the big screen as it did on my computer.

But when it came on the second time, there was a different response, it went roughly as follows.

[Commercial ends]

[Collective reflective pause]

“You know I was just reading that Sheryl Swoopes is coming out of retirement this year…like she just had a baby two years ago or something,” says R.

[Collective bewildered pause]

“Yeah, I just read that Candace Parker is having a baby and might not be playing this year,” says C.

[Pause]

“Actually R, Swoopes played last year,” I say. “In fact, she played right here in Seattle for the Storm.”

“Oh,” says R somewhat surprised. “Well I thought someone was coming out of retirement or something.”

[Pause – I realize now he’s talking about Holdsclaw…but before I can respond…]

“You know I would really like to go to one of those games this summer if any of you are up for it,” says R.

“Yeah, I’ve been to a few. I was planning on going this summer,” I say. “We should get together and go sometime.”

“Cool.”

Data analysis: Conflating old narratives

What I find absolutely fascinating about this is that R had essentially conflated three different major WNBA “narratives”:

• Holdsclaw coming out of retirement
• Swoopes, clearly a star around the time we were in college, who did have a child
• And Parker, who just had a child

Clearly, R has some fledgling interest in the game and would go if given a reason (in this case, I would take him). But do the commercials on their own really tell him anything about the league or somehow give him a narrative to latch onto?

No.

And thus he is left grasping at straws to create connections among a bunch of images of players he doesn’t even know.

The Holdsclaw story would certainly grab attention, but given that she’s left teams twice for personal reasons, making that story prominent for this season is probably inappropriate.

However, it is Lisa Leslie’s last season. People do know Swoopes. But I imagine the average male who knows those players knows nothing about the current league or who is even playing in their own city – even when it is Sheryl Swoopes.

C might have read the ESPN the Mag article about Parker or seen something on ESPN.com, but probably couldn’t tell you who Parker plays for.

Keep in mind, this was one of the most intelligent conversations I’ve had with men about the WNBA since the league started (I had a college roommate who is now a sports producer who just knew everything about every sport).

So where does this leave us?

Implications for Future Research

Obviously, I can't really generalize or make any causal claims based on this case study "data". However, it does lead me to some insights we could gain from this.

First of all, if the WNBA wants to target male fans (which I'm not saying is the best strategy) my group of friends are the type who I think the WNBA should be targeting. They're far more likely to show up at a game than the clown in the bar who is looking forward to lingerie football. Lingerie football and the WNBA are just incommensurable. Let the lunkheads do as they please, WNBA. We'll address them at some later date...

In this particular group of males, we do not see the blatantly disrespectful and dismissive remarks that we might find at the local dive bar or a Lingerie Bowl fan club. So they, like me, would probably be interested in the WNBA purely for the sport of it. They just need a reason.

However for this group – and many males like my friends – I imagine the WNBA equation looks something like the following:

WNBA = Leslie + Swoopes + Holdsclaw + Parker

I’m sure that there would be additional names added to this equation depending on location and age. And there may be additional individual differences based on where people went to college. But in my experience – this and others – even players like Lauren Jackson, Sue Bird, and Diana Taurasi are relative unknowns on a national scale.

The problem, of course, is that Leslie, Swoopes and Holdsclaw are past their primes, if not retiring. And Parker won’t be playing for a while this season.

So when taking this “data” (really just grounded assumptions) into consideration, what can we say about WNBA marketing?

The first impulse might be to say that we need to pump up these “unknown” stars to demonstrate that indeed, the league has made progress since inception and there are reasons to watch.

But upon further reflection I thought of something else – with Leslie retiring, isn’t this the perfect time to come up with some “passing the torch” campaign? Something reminiscent of the “We Got Next” campaign? Like who has next after Leslie, Swoopes, and Holdsclaw are off the radar? Yeah, sure there’s Parker but now that she’s out for a bit, why not introduce the next squad who has next?

I thought the Olympics set the stage nicely for a “passing the torch” campaign – the Leslie to Fowles handoff was essentially executed in Beijing as far as I’m concerned. So why not expand that theme a little?

In addition to Fowles, there’s Candice Wiggins, who’s like lightning in a bottle off the bench. Then there’s a set of young players like Cappie Pondexter, Candice Dupree, Sophia Young and Seimone Augustus who can flat out play.

Fowles, Wiggins, Pondexter, Dupree, Augustus, Young…and of course there are others...

They got next. Why not tell us to watch them in your commercials?

Why not give people an actual story to follow of some sort?

This is not to say that Bird, Jackson, and Taurasi are somehow uninteresting – you know I love Taurasi. But why not build a narrative – no matter how contrived – that people might hear about and talk about and actually want to go see develop?

What if the conversation with my buddies involved hearing about the next dominant post player in the WNBA in Fowles? Or the scoring ability and intensity of Candice Wiggins (who some people may know from her NCAA days? Or Augustus’ ability to score 30 points on 80% shooting on one of the best defenses in the league?

You want my buddies to Expect Great? Tell them what’s been going on in the last decade since they last paid attention to Leslie, Swoopes, and Holdsclaw. Tell them what’s on the horizon and help them step into a developing story.

I’m not even suggesting a second iteration of “We Got Next” – the slogan could certainly change, but I think that spirit would be perfect for the WNBA right now. But everybody likes to be the one who picked up on the next big thing before they were the big thing. Why not help people get there?

Random images of people they don’t recognize and pictures of girls in the crowd ain’t gonna do it.

Transition Points:

The NBA has had similar campaigns “passing the torch” campaigns to promote Kobe and Tim Duncan in the post-Jordan years. Of course, it was all with the help of their corporate friends:

Sprite - Kobe Bryant and Tim Duncan - 1998
Uploaded by GarfieldFan2000. -

But some of it was the NBA’s own promotion of the game. Anybody remember the hype around the Kobe-MJ matchup in the 1998 all-star game?


There was also a brief effort to compare Dwyane Wade to Jordan (a disservice to both men) on a lesser scale as well.

We can debate whether these efforts were “effective” – and honestly, they annoyed me to no end -- but there’s no doubt that this set of players have ended up carrying the torch for the NBA while the world waited for LeBron to just take over.

Lebron james nike commercial
Uploaded by barkich. - Music videos, artist interviews, concerts and more.

And as though the anticipation around a Kobe-LeBron NBA finals showdown needed more hype this year, the commercial that got us all going during yesterday’s games was Nike’s Kobe-LeBron puppets commercials.


The thing is, I could imagine Kobe being that…um…”proud” of his accomplishments… I think it would even funnier if they added a Carmelo Anthony puppet just begging for some attention…

Something else I thought about: Right now may not even be the time to really campaign hard for the WNBA -- it's not starting until June 6th. So maybe right now is just the time to plant the seeds since there's not much to watch yet...maybe the WNBA will have a second iteration closer to June 6th tip-off? Who knows...

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Lisa Leslie's Mother's Day interview on ESPN....

Last night I was pleasantly surprised to see Lisa Leslie on Sportscenter discussing motherhood, whether women will ever play in the NBA, and her trip to the White House.

My first thought was, hey, this is great exposure for the WNBA, especially given that the pre-season is starting up next week.

My second thought was, wait, when was the last time they asked an NBA player – or any male athlete -- about managing fatherhood and professional sports?

My third thought was, whoa, they didn’t even mention that the season was coming up (training camps open May 17)…that’s odd…

OK, that’s not entirely fair – the interviewer did say, “Now with the season going on how do you handle being a mother with the season.” And Leslie did respond, “That’s why I chose to retire this year.”

But folks, I’m sorry – this is ESPN and I’ve seen plenty of these Sunday Conversations. They are typically about the athlete and the game. To not even ask a question about the WNBA’s upcoming season strikes me as odd. I won’t necessarily say it’s problematic because it was Mother’s Day afterall…but let’s just say… odd.

But then I reverted back to my second thought – what does it say about us as a society when male athletes who play longer seasons almost never mention bringing their kids along with them, much less sharing advice about taking care of their kids? Shouldn’t we have higher expectations for fathers at some point?

Which gets to the following point made by Full Court Press correspondent Sue Favor:

What it will likely mean is that there will be lots of children at practices and on road trips. Christofferson, an attorney, said it puts her and her players on par with mothers everywhere.

"The fact is that we're struggling with the same thing as women in all professions," she said. "In some ways it's easier because we have more flexibility in our schedules, but in other ways it's harder because we have to travel."

Yes, it does put them on par with women in other professions -- the expectation that women need to be superwomen with amazing juggling skills.

Oh well...ESPN is on a roll with their portrayal of WNBA players...

Transition Points:

I thought Leslie's response to the question of whether women will play in the NBA one day was interesting: "We hope not. Because there's no need for that...you would really need to be on something to make it out there." "Integrating" the NBA and supporting the WNBA is the difference between equality and equity. I am all about equity -- support a league for women to play in, not a few individuals riding NBA benches...

Malcolm Gladwell did an excellent job of firing people up about girls basketball. The latest to chime in is Brian McCormick who writes the Crossover Movement blog (among other things)...and he makes an interesting point:

As 12-year-olds, the press is fine. The problem, however, is that many girls in this league start at 8-years-old and they are unable to handle a press four years later. The problem isn’t the one team that presses with 12-year-olds: the problem is that for four years, players have done the same things playing with the same rules and they have not developed the skills necessary to make inbounds passes under pressure or pass out of a trap.

I question the coaching methods of the team because they admitted to making no attempt to develop their players’ skills. However, the other team’s complaints are unjustified, as players should have basic skills by 12-years-old. Defense will still be ahead of the offense, but if coaches teach skills each year, it starts to balance out.

The problem, I imagine, is that in previous seasons, the complaining coaches sat back in zone defenses and ran set plays and spent all practice memorizing set plays and different defenses to win their games, so their kids never developed basic skills either. When they faced a press, they were ill-equipped to handle the press.

Players need to develop skills. They need to be taught how to handle pressure and develop passing and ball handling skills. 12-year-olds should be developing proper shooting technique.

Somewhere someone must have written a spiral curriculum for age appropriate skills to teach young basketball players. And yes, if coaches were thinking in terms of developmental skill building, they should be able to handle a press by 12. But now I need to actually read this Gladwell piece rather than absorbing the opinions of others...

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Sir Charles takes a subtle dig at the WNBA...

Last night I was at a bar with a friend casually watching the Hawks-Heat “game” and talking about random stuff when I thought I heard Charles Barkley say something about the WNBA during the halftime show…

…This ain’t the WNBA…

Of course the volume was low and people’s voices were high so I couldn’t really make out much more… but fortunately, the TNT half-time shows are available online at NBA.com. And sure enough, Sir Charles did take a subtle dig at the WNBA...

Here’s the clip…and the segment in question begins at 4:01…

(Transcript below)
(4:01) Ernie Johnson: “At any rate, it’s a 63-40 game and we’ll be talking about what happened last night with Dwight Howard also with Rajon Rondo and Brad Miller…”

Kenny Smith: “PHYSICALITY...IN THE PLAYOFFS IS HERE!”

Charles Barkley: I love it baby. It’s about time someone hit somebody. This ain’t the WNBA.

EJ: Why don’t you get physical with... Get physical with Kenny, Charles.

CB: I don’t wanna hurt her.

OK…so was this the worst thing going on in the world yesterday? Certainly not.

Worth raising hell over? Consider the source...he's a loud mouth and should be taken with a grain of salt.

But was it a necessary comment? No…and it’s unfortunate that he felt the need to degrade the WNBA in making his point about the NBA. Oh well…

…but C-Webb, you can't let that fly -- I thought you appreciated the WNBA!

Anyway, can we hurry up and get to the LeBron-Kobe showdown, please? The rest of this just seems like a waste of time...

Related Articles:

Obama And Women's UConn Basketball: Watch The Impromptu Game Of Their Lives (VIDEO)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/01/obama-plays-impromptu-gam_n_194847.html

Transition Points:

More praise for the Huskies: Renee Montgomery is getting a ton of attention. I thought it was cool that Congresswoman Shelly Capito commended Renee Montgomery on the House Floor...



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How might reductions in local newspaper coverage affect the WNBA?

It's becoming increasingly clear that nobody is safe from the current economic crisis and newspapers have been hit particularly hard.

Newspaper readership has been declining for years now and in the middle of an economic crisis, they are pretty much forced to make staff reductions.

As documented by Michael Arceneaux of theRoot.com, even recession writers (Lou Carlozo of the Chicago Tribune) are being cut in response to the recession. And in a climate where the people covering the recession become victims of he recession, you can bet sports writers will be equally -- if not more -- affected.

Bill Benner of the Indianapolis Business Journal writes about the impact the current economic situation my have on sports journalism:

Nonetheless, I worry that the difficulties facing daily newspapers might force them, here and elsewhere, to use stringers or generic wire copy more often. I worry more that readers won’t notice or care.

Then again, we are transitioning into a new age of information dissemination, one cluttered by blogs, Web sites and 24-hour cable coverage. Sports, long considered the “toy department” of journalism, could be an easy target for cost-conscious accountants and editors.

If sports are considered the “toy department of journalism”, what on earth does that mean for coverage of the WNBA? In that framework, the WNBA would be like a “cereal box prize department of journalism”.

Thus, it stands to reason that what little professional coverage of the WNBA was out there will be cut. And in my one season of really paying attention to media coverage of women’s sports, wire coverage of the WNBA is almost not even worth reading.

So it is not unreasonable to believe that that the economic downturn could have an adverse affect on the WNBA in comparison to men’s sports. Of course, that problem is not new, as described in an AfterEllen.com post last week:

It has been a catch-22 for women's professional sports teams for decades: newspapers and magazines won't waste space on leagues with no fan base; leagues can't expand their fan base without media coverage.

So for a league that desperately needs to promote narratives about women in sports, how might a reduction in newspaper coverage hinder that process? How might blogs, twitter, and other Web 2.0 or social media make up for the lack of newspaper coverage?

I have a few thoughts…but it’s difficult to predict what the future might hold…

Lack of access is not helpful to the WNBA

Whatever you might think about the state of current WNBA coverage in newspapers, professional journalists have one massive advantage that even the most dedicated blogger might have a difficult time matching: a press credential.

Anyone – ahem, me? – can sit at home and spend time writing about watching WNBA games. What we don’t have is that behind the scenes perspective.

Access to press conferences, the locker room, and building relationships with players and coaches are vital to a sport’s ability to construct narratives that include character development as well as reports on the game action that we can all see from the stands, the television or a webcast.

To take a page from sports history, Howard Cosell’s relationship with Muhammad Ali is arguably as important as Ali’s greatness – while Ali performed, Cosell framed the narrative and presented it to the audience (reciprocally, one could argue that Ali is therefore among the most important figures to sports journalism because without him, Cosell would not be the legend he is today).


Cuts in professional journalists covering the teams means equal cuts in the amount of privileged information fans get about the WNBA. I would argue that the stories that we get beyond the action on the court are absolutely essential to building a sports brand. I happen to think print journalists are vital to establishing that. I also think there are alternatives that might help.

The Web 2.0 revolution…will not be televised…but might be on Twitter…

(Please do not forget the brilliant original song)
I have written a few pieces in the past about the role that Web 2.0 media plays in building the WNBA brand, engaging fan voice, and shaping the way we see the game. And the WNBA is definitely making strides in terms of how they use social media, as described by AfterEllen.com:

WNBA teams started their social media blitz earlier this year, offering tickets to people who joined team fan pages on Facebook. They brought it with a league Twitter. They asked each team to set up their own Twitters (see below). And, perhaps most importantly, they encouraged individual players to begin Tweeting about their teams, their lives, their training, their breakfast, anything to forge a connection with fans.

Yet I would argue the WNBA could still do some tiny things to better utilize the social media it is working with. Women’s Professional Soccer is still by far one the leaders in utilizing social media if you ask me.

It’s not just about having a Facebook/MySpace presence or having a YouTube page but making people aware of those things and, you know, actually making them seem like they are an integral part of what the organization does and how it builds community.

Case in point: from the front page of the WPS website, I can find 8 different ways to connect with the league on the main navigation bar. It’s a button even…that says connect.

The WNBA has both a YouTube and Facebook presence but you have to scroll down the page to find out about the Facebook link and after a few minutes of looking, I have yet to find a link to their YouTube page.

The issue here is not just about having these social media opportunities available, but somehow making them visible and easily accessible to consumers…ahem…fans. And to some extent they are doing that, in particular with ticket giveaways on Facebook.

Building a massive word-of-mouth campaign...

So I wholeheartedly agree with what Megan Hunter at Because I played sports wrote in her coverage of the WNBA draft about how bloggers could be instrumental in the growth of the game:

While I realize that there is much more research to be done, I know that the most important thing we need to do as ex-players, moms and female athletes is to get people to the games and start taking control of conversations.

We need to create one of the biggest word of mouth campaigns that has ever been created - one that will save WNBA and create opportunities for years to come.

With the economy shaving away at the future of the league, the time is now for us to step up to the plate. Now that the WNBA is open to feedback and willing to engage transparently with the public, I believe we can help turn this thing around.

But the key question for the WNBA is how do they take that energy and integrate it into what they do?

Furthermore, if the next move forward is for the web to become “invisibly present in everyday appliances” (see video below) how can the WNBA be sure to infiltrate the collective sports consciousness? (This by the way is a scary thought to me, but I caution that it’s not George Orwell that will be rolling over in his grave as much as Aldous Huxley – the control of society through learned desires…scary).


Among the many things WPS has done well in terms of its marketing, I would argue that its Fan Corner social media site is an excellent example of an attempt to encourage and formalize fan involvement in the game.

Of particular relevance to the issue of blogging, they have a section on their social media site specifically for fans to create blogs. Of course these blogs aren’t as customizable as your average Blogspot or Wordpress blog, but it provides a space for fan voice that is somewhat unique. Most importantly, it encourages fans to consolidate that voice in one place, without controlling the multitude of voices out there. (Note: the Phoenix Mercury already have a social media site for their team -- Cafe Merc -- with 247 members)

Idea – could the WNBA have a list of blogs they deem valuable listed in some sort of space on their website? Would it be that difficult to have a feed with recent fan blogs aside from the “approved” fan bloggers already there?

I would argue that WPS is leading the way in this social media blitz and the WNBA should follow despite its current progress.

“Nothing from nothing means nothing”


Ultimately, I suppose my message about the impact of reductions in newspaper coverage on the WNBA is as follows (and, yes, partially inspired by Billy Preston):

If newspapers were not widely or consistently covering the WNBA to begin with, then the WNBA does not have much to lose from reductions in newspaper coverage.

However, the increasing reductions just make it imperative that the WNBA does figure out how to use social media effectively and quickly. As “traditional” media becomes even less reliable, you can bet that leagues like the WNBA (and WPS) will get even less publicity.

Of course, this is all uncharted territory – nobody has the perfect solutions for how to use Web 2.0 for marketing a relatively young (niche?) sports league. And that is all the more reason for the WNBA to get as creative as possible with how it encourages and channels the energy of its fans.

Related Articles:

Women’s pro sports: Facebook awaits you
http://becauseiplayedsports.com/2009/04/11/2009-wnba-draft-a-journey-back-to-my-love-for-womens-basketball/#more-1101

Interview With Peter Wilt: WPS Chicago’s CEO Takes One Step Backward For Two Giant Leaps Forward
http://www.amandavandervort.com/blog/2008/04/interview-with-peter-wilt-wps-chicagos-ceo-takes-two-steps-backward-for-one-giant-leap-forward/

The Machine is Us/ing Us
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g

Transition Points:

If the WNBA needs coverage, then what of a new women’s league like Women’s Professional Soccer? I’m curious about their outlook given that they are starting up in the middle of a terrible economy. It would be terrible if the league’s ability to succeed was stifled by the unfortunate coincidence of launching when the economy is struggling…

The final “Recession Diaries” blog from Lou Carlozo that was cut from the Chicago Tribune is absolutely worth a read…because if you can figure out what about that blog post led the Chicago Tribune to pull the post, I’d like to know. I’m at a loss.

Fantasy job musings: I was musing with a friend this weekend about how my fantasy job before getting all tangled up in thinking about racial inequality in education was sports writing. And I would gladly drop everything and write for a WNBA team (*cough* ChicagoSky *cough*) this summer if they covered travel and basic living expenses (no nachos and beer, I promise). Yeah, ok, that’s presumptuous – there are probably hundreds of other folks who would “glad drop everything and write for a WNBA team this summer”. And why on earth would someone want a job that is likely unstable and cut more often than created? But hey, worth a try…right?

Response to fantasy job musings: So the logical response from my friend about this fantasy job of being a sports writer was laughter – I mean seriously, leaving graduate school to cover a game? But honestly, my reasoning is simply that I enjoy basketball and as I’ve tried to demonstrate in the past, I do believe that the WNBA is valuable as a tool for challenging gender inequality simply by the way it could shape perceptions of women and what “womanhood” means. I realize that could be trivial – the father of a girl I dated in high school remarked to me the first time I had dinner at their house, “Back in my day we were protesting Vietnam and now the biggest thing you can write about is sports?” OK, fair enough – sports are not the biggest issue in the world. I know that…but everyone has to find their niche right? I like basketball…and think some good could come someday from writing about it…who know

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Geno vs. "the Nation of Cowards": What Auriemma's comments tell us about racial dialogue in the U.S.

Far more interesting to me than Geno Auriemma’s initial comments about the racial stereotyping of Stanford and Connecticut women’s basketball players is the ongoing commentary about the “incident”.

Of course, there have been many different reads of Auriemma’s comments on race…which is pretty much what he anticipated with the opening line of his statement:

I know this is going to get played out the wrong way. But I'm going to say it anyway. And I know I'm going to get criticized for this.

But what has caught my eye in the current political environment (you know, people think we’re all post-racial now that we have a black president) is the way race is talked about in response to Auriemma’s comments. However, rather than critique others and make a negative argument of how not to talk about race, I was in the process of writing a piece about what I thought we could learn from this latest Auriemma episode.

Then I saw a Sunday article by Casey Gane-McCalla on Huffington Post about Auriemma's comments that I think is worthy of our attention:

The problem with stereotypes in sports is that they often lead to general stereotypes. If you say "white men can't jump," why not "Black men can't read defenses"? And if Black men can't read defenses, maybe they can't read books either?

Sports stereotypes have a real effect in the real world. Most employers are not concerned with employees' natural athletic abilities, so stereotypes of African-Americans being athletically superior for the most part do not help Blacks in the real world. However, the stereotypes of whites being hard working, disciplined and smart are helpful to them in finding employment.

The problem is not that Auriemma “inserted” the issue of race into an otherwise racially neutral social context – race does have an impact on how we see athletes. Nor is the problem that he detracted attention away from the success of an outstanding University of Connecticut team (as described nicely by the Women's Hoops Blog). Race is there like it or not and it’s worth talking about.

The problem in my opinion is actually perfectly phrased by Phil Sheridan of the Philadelphia Inquirer (although I’m not entirely sure we agree with his conclusion):

Honestly, I think we often fall into this trap of blasting anyone who tries to address racial issues. It is OK and even necessary to discuss the role race plays in various situations and circumstances. The problem here isn't that Auriemma decided to "go there." The problem is he apparently got himself lost on the way.

So building upon Sheridan’s comment, I want to extend Gane-McCalla’s argument and suggest that in addition to the harms of stereotyping on society, Auriemma’s comments and the ensuing responses demonstrate a fundamental difficulty that we in the U.S. have with talking productively about almost all topics regarding race – whether it be the significance of having a black president or the “achievement gap” in education or gang violence and police brutality.

Are we a “nation of cowards”? Not quite. But we do still have a long way to go when it comes to racial dialogue on the path to challenging racial injustice.

The U.S. is a Nation of __________ (???)

Just to be clear, I am not advancing the argument of Attorney General Eric Holder by calling the U.S. “a nation of cowards” in all matters of race.

Aside from the fact that I found the comment to be politically unproductive, I think it may even misrepresent the problem we’re facing regarding racial dialogue. What’s worse is that it may have even done more harm than good in terms of moving race relations forward – antagonizing the nation that you’ve been appointed to lead in some capacity is probably not the best strategy for moving people to action.



Instead, I would identify a different problem and an important consequence:

First, contrary to what Holder states, I think we do talk about race quite a bit, but in a number of coded and implicit ways. This is essentially what Auriemma has alluded to…or really should have alluded to more clearly – implicit racial stereotypes shape how we describe and talk about athletes (and people in the real world) everyday. A very simple point.

Second, racial discrimination, racial stereotyping, and structural racism have differential consequences on men and women that cannot be ignored.

When we consider the dearth of mainstream black female role models in our society, the way we discuss and portray female athletes therefore has “a real effect in the real world” on how we think about black women. Moreover, considering that the WNBA is the most prominent and well-established professional sport, the way black female basketball players are portrayed and perceived takes on more significance than I think some people grant it.

So consistent with Gane-McCalla, I am going to just state up front that the way we apply racial stereotypes to athletes does indeed matter. Second, I think it’s important to continue this conversation as a lens or platform with which to understand issues of race in broader society.

But sticking to women’s basketball, once again I think this goes back to that issue of narrative creation and maintenance – what are the narratives we are presented about black female athletes and how does that affect how we understand women’s basketball generally and the WNBA in particular?

Not Just a Matter of Finding Examples, But Thinking About How We Describe Those Examples…

I first read about Auriemma’s comments on Jayda Evans’ blog. Given that Ms. Evans is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers, I almost just accepted her thoughts about Auriemma’s statement:

I mean, as far as the color divide on toughness goes, hello, does Auriemma have Alzheimer's? While I'm not going to say former UConn PG Sue Bird (Seattle) is the toughest beak on the block, does he remember Diana Taurasi (Phoenix)? What about Svetlana Abrosimova (Connecticut)? With the Storm, I'm drowning in tough "white" examples from Michelle Marciniak to Lauren Jackson, so it's ludicrous to spend much time on the subject.

And my first thought was yeah, I agree – and she even forgot Janel McCarville and Lindsay Whalen!! (I assume they were somewhere in that body of examples she was drowning in.)

But then as I thought about and read more about the story, I began to disagree with the notion that it’s “ludicrous to spend more time on the subject”. In fact, I think it’s the perfect time to discuss race.

At issue here is not whether there are examples to counter the stereotype, but how people perceive others through the lens of these stereotypes. We do hear these stereotypes often in sports. Auriemma is not just making that up, although it is unclear exactly what he was responding to in that moment.

And even in this world in which we can find plenty of examples to contradict our stereotypes, stereotypes carry with them quite a bit of inertia – they are extremely hard to break once they are established. And as long as they go unspoken and thus unchallenged, they will continue to persist and influence the way we think.

Michel Martin describes this phenomenon nicely in her story last month on NPR in response to Holder’s comments:

Is this active hostility, fear, resentment of blacks? At one time, sure it was. But right now, maybe it's more likely unchallenged assumptions you've forgotten you have — the store clerk who assumes the black woman can't afford the dress she's trying on, the law firm hiring partner who just assumes the black kid made it through Harvard on a wing and a prayer, the cop who just assumes every black motorist is a gangbanger in training.

In other words, even when we don't think we're talking about race, we sort of are. It's not that we don't talk about it.

Leaving these subtle forms of stereotyping unchecked will do nothing to move this country forward in terms of race relations. And as I think Gane-McCalla and Martin point out, they happen all the time in our daily life – whether we are talking about sports, at work, or even among friends. If we believe that challenge racial discrimination is important, then finding ways to unearth and challenge these assumptions is of great value.

But how on earth do we do that?

Petrel from the Pleasant Dreams Blog made a great comment on Chantelle Anderson’s blog post, “The choice between sports and sex appeal” that addresses the issue of stereotyping and the trouble with combating them (it’s comment #47):

One of the common putdowns of women in sports is "women ballplayers are ugly" - and how do you fight someone's loaded personal opinion? Trying to prove that you're pretty is just playing the same game - "I'll show you!" To some men out there, "female" and "athlete" are contradictory terms…Posing has the power to break the All Female Athletes are Ugly stereotype - if you look at Lauren Jackson's photos and still think she's ugly, there's no help for you but opthamology. Anything that expands the boundaries of what a woman can be - athletic, attractive, intelligent - is a good thing. Posing not only highlights the "attractive" side, but throws positive light on the "athletic" and "intelligent" sides as well.

Although the problem Petrel and Chantelle are pointing out concerns gender, I think a very similar argument can be applied to matters of race.

The problem -- that I think Petrel rightly pointed out -- is that if you directly attack the stereotypes, you are essentially playing on the turf of the ignorant. It’s similar to the argument George Lakoff makes in his book, “Don’t Think An Elephant” – if political candidate 1 presents platform X and candidate 2 presents a counter platform of anti-X, candidate 1 has already one because they’re controlling the discourse (which is what the Republicans had mastered in the past eight years).

This is why it’s even more difficult to undo these racial stereotypes when race and gender meet – already it’s hard to imagine an athletic and intelligent woman. It has to be doubly hard to imagine an athletic and intelligent black woman. And likewise, in broader social interactions, black women are routinely facing more barriers than their black male counterparts – it’s hard to simultaneously fight racism and sexism…and not always at the same time.

And yet the only way to break a stereotype seems to be to provide frequent and substantial evidence that changes the way people see patterns that create the stereotypes. So hmm… how do we avoid that bind?

Breaking the Inertia of Our Entrenched Stereotypes

It does seem like the first thing to do is call out a stereotype for what it is…

Obviously, Auriemma attempted that.

And obviously, it didn’t go over so well.

However, what I think we should pay attention to is that it’s not like it was blatant white supremacists coming out of the woodworks to lambaste the guy.

Most of the critiques that I read have been of a different nature – color-blind dismissals of race discussion.

Color-blindness is what might inform a comment such as the following in response to a pretty good article about Auriemma’s comments from Uncle Popov on Bleacher Report:

I would say that hardly anyone thinks of race when they are watching Tiger Woods and Venus Williams, two of the most visible black athletes in history.

And of course if nobody is thinking about race when they watch sports – or politics for that matter given that the heads of both major political parties are black – then there can’t possibly be an appropriate time to discuss race. Especially in this post-racial society we live in (please someone explain to me how a post-racial society is even possible). Race just becomes nothing more than a distraction, as described in the following quote:

Is it time to talk about race in college athletics? No, not really. What purpose would it serve? What territory are we supposed to be driving towards by noticing that there’s only one white guy playing meaningful minutes in this Final Four game between Michigan State and UConn, and he’s not even from America? That’s a fact. So what?

So one of the primary problems then with confronting racial stereotypes (much less than discrimination or structural racism) is that many people don’t even think there’s a problem to begin with, as nicely summed up by Uncle Popov:

Nevertheless, it is much easier to generalize and it happens so much that we tend to overlook it and not think about the consequences of doing so. It is as though we have naturalized these labels and do not critically challenge the notions of the "gutsy" white player or "naturally gifted" black player. It tends to be accepted unproblematically.

These generalizations fuel some people's longstanding beliefs about what type of players can play which position or in which sport. This was part of the central thesis of my previous article on race in sports.

And what’s worse, is that in the current climate, if I do accuse you of having these assumptions you don’t think you have, you assume I’m calling you a racist…and that’s a whole separate (though obviously related) matter. The very acknowledgement of race becomes completely taboo.

It’s a sort of strange paradox – it’s politically correct to denounce racism, so it’s incorrect to be a racist, so it’s easiest to prove one is not a racist by not talking about or ignoring race, which means that when confronted with a situation in which race cannot be avoided we simply go silent.

Race talk thus becomes the territory of extremists – those dangerous black radicals pumping their fists and threatening to occupy a state capital near you or those evil hooded Ku Klux Klan guys who are looking to burn a cross on someone’s lawn. Either way it supports two completely false beliefs: race is a thing of the past and people who discuss it are some hardline wingnuts trying to shove some racialized agenda down your throat.

Yikes!

So let’s bring it back…

Really, it’s not about going around calling people racists or proving to people how stupid they are. It’s about finding a way to clearly represent the world so that we discuss it on some sort of common ground and begin to make well-reasoned arguments about how to collectively move forward and (hopefully) create a better, more just society.

Ultimately, anti-racism is not even about talk (which is why these discussions about implicit biases and stereotyping usually annoy me)…it’s about action of some sort. And ideally, collective, targeted multi-racial action that critiques the elements in society (institutions and people) that maintain racial inequality and presents alternative ways of existing as a happy community.

(That feels so much better.)

But we can’t even reach the fantasy world of a racially just society unless we can talk to one another and respect one another as human beings, who are different but ultimately have a stake in each other’s success.

So I argue the problem here is not that race is a distraction that should never be brought up, it’s that race is a “distraction” because we have no language to collectively discuss it or listen to it in a productive way.

To take the point further, what incentive is there for a white person – particularly a rather privileged white male – to talk about race anyway? (Whole other discussion – see George Lipsitz’s “Possessive Investment in Whiteness” – decades and decades of white supremacy create a whole system of white privilege and maintaining that system often becomes a motive at the expense of non-whites, whether intentionally or not)

This tangle of complexity summarizes why most people won’t even venture into that feared territory of race talk.

Auriemma did…and did so with a disclaimer…because he knew there was no way to clearly communicate anything about the topic as a white man without getting himself into trouble. So he fumbled through a discussion of the issue and tried to end with a joke about how the West Coast is full of pansies to sort of relieve the tension. Which of course made his point even harder for some people to decipher.

Um…ok…so…?

Resolving Race Talk Dilemmas in U.S. Sports…and How That Might Push Racialized Assumptions

Mica Pollock has described this strange paradox of not talking about race but always talking about race in her book “Color Mute: Race Talk Dilemmas in an American School”. Gloria Ladson-Billings summarizes the main argument nicely in the Foreward to another book, “Courageous Conversations About Race: A Field Guide for Attaining Equity in Schools”:

Race is the proverbial “elephant in the parlor.” We know it’s right there staring us in the face—making life uncomfortable and making it difficult for us to accomplish everything we would really like to do—but we keep pretending it isn’t.

We do not know what to call each other or if we should call each other anything that has a racial designation. But Pollock demonstrates that even when we avoid talking about race, we are talking about race; that is, even in our avoidance of the subject, we are engaging it.

Ladson-Billings goes on to present us with a kernel of insight that sort of explains why talking about race is relatively important:

…in a study of teachers teaching early literacy (Ladson-
Billings, 2005), my colleague and I observed teachers regularly talking about students’ failure to read without ever mentioning race. Almost all of the struggling students were Black or Latino. It was not until six months into the project that teachers recognized the salience of race in the students’ achievement. At this point, we were able to deal honestly deal with the students’ academic issues.

So let me try to make the leap here: if we cannot talk about black women in the sphere of a basketball game, it will be a whole lot more difficult to talk about black women in society at large. In recognizing the salience of race in everything we do and that it has “real effects in the real world”, we can start to honestly deal with the huge elephant in the parlor that Auriemma wanted us to pay attention to.

But why bother placing so much weight on sports? Can’t we just enjoy the game? Why does someone always have to make it about race?

Sports are not some panacea of facilitating race talk, but it’s a contained context in which there are some very clear racial undertones. There’s no reason not to talk about race in sports as a pre-cursor to the much more significant problems we face. Why not check our assumptions on something so small if it could pave the way to eliminate general stereotypes?

And a Brief Response to Eric Holder…

So if we’re color mute as a society, then we can’t possibly be cowards, as described nicely by Michel Martin:

I have been thinking a lot about what Attorney General Eric Holder said in his now-famous Black History Month speech, that we are a "nation of cowards" when it comes to race. But I wonder whether it's really that we are just comfortable. Cowardice requires consciousness — a conscious awareness to choose not to do something you know you should do.

But what if you don't know?

And that’s exactly where I would argue we are – we simply don’t know what to do (and many whites – not to mention non-whites -- are never encouraged to know). Those of us that do know what to do get sick of dealing with those poor saps who don't have it figured out yet...which is (again) a whole separate problem of the self-righteous anti-racist that must be addressed with equal tenacity.

Auriemma’s comments and the responses demonstrate our struggle with finding ways to talk about race in public. The question, as described by Martin, is what we do about it:

I think if we are honest with ourselves, we can admit that we all do it. We make assumptions, and we don't bother to test them because we don't have to.

So now the question really does become one of moral courage and, yes, cowardice. What are we prepared to do to break free of untested assumptions? What hard questions are we prepared to ask ourselves? What are we prepared to do to know what we don't know?

And these are questions that extend well beyond basketball and manifests itself in national politics…even after we have elected a black man president, as described by Barbara Crosette of the Nation just yesterday:

Would an American delegation bearing a message from Obama have made a difference? Critics will say no. Nicole Lee, executive director of the Washington-based TransAfrica Forum, has long argued that the United States belongs at the Durban review. In a message in March asking advocates of American attendance to write to anyone and everyone in Washington, she recalled the comment by Attorney General Eric Holder that Americans are a "nation of cowards" when it comes to discussing race.

What she wrote then still rings true: "The decision to boycott the Durban Review Conference not only underscores the difficulty that we have discussing race, but it also potentially undermines the solid progress made by groups and governments around the world that have worked hard to address racism and intolerance. And, unfortunately, for many in the US it raises questions about the racial lens through which this administration develops and implements policy."

Real effects…in the real world…on real people.

Transition Points:

The intersection of race and gender is complicated. Race x Gender x Sexuality?!?!? Shiver-me-timbers! Yo, head for the hills! I’ll leave that to folks like Chantelle Anderson.

Big props to Uncle Popov on Bleacher Report for managing to cite Edward Said, Marion Young, and Skip Bayless in one article. I wonder what a discussion would be like if you put those three in a room together?

Is this just a knee-jerk response to some knee-jerk palaver after the Women’s Final Four as DWil suggested would come out about this situation? Eh, possibly. But why should folks be expected to end this discussion? I say keep it going…

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