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Archive for the ‘The Athletes’ Category

Mortarboard moment: Sharing advice I got from Gail Marquis, Olympic superstar and Wall Street success

Friday, May 10th, 2013

By Ashleigh Sargent Gail Marquis is a powerful woman in sports, business, and volunteer foundation work.  She won a silver medal as a part of the 1976 U.S. Women’s Basketball Olympic Team and played basketball professionally in Europe, before taking her competitive drive and spirit to Wall Street where she worked ...

Do we have the stomach for football?

Saturday, January 12th, 2013

By Laura Pappano News that NFL veteran Junior Seau, who committed suicide last year, suffered from degenerative brain disease was hardly a revelation. We paused, saddened, on Thursday when the National Institutes of Health announced that Seau’s brain revealed evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy – the result of absorbing frequent blows to ...

Warm-up playlist: Time to get pumped up without being put down

Thursday, December 13th, 2012

By Ashleigh Sargent and Mariah Philips Get ready, it’s game day!!!!! As you prepare mentally and physically, you want help getting into your zone. Which songs pop up on the warm-up playlist? Chances are, messages of female empowerment and gender equality are not major themes in your favorite jams. In fact, it might ...

How would Lindsey Vonn fare against men? (Pretty well, I calculate)

Thursday, November 8th, 2012

By Laura Pappano When the International Ski Federation turned down Lindsey Vonn’s request to compete in the men’s downhill World Cup the explanation was wearily familiar – there are races for guys and races for women and they’re separate. Actually, FIS secretary general Sarah Lewis didn’t put it quite like that, rather ...

Olympic mettle has no gender

Wednesday, August 8th, 2012

By Katie Culver How can one not be inspired by the Olympics?! The 10 days of coverage I’ve watched remind me of my spirited Olympic dreams. As a young gymnast, I was rapt by Nadia Comaneci (the first perfect 10!) in 1980 and by Mary Lou Retton in 1984. Women’s soccer years ...

Marathon Olympic challenge: More female athletes, but fewer events

Friday, July 27th, 2012

  By Laura Pappano In 1963, a Sports Illustrated story headlined, “Why Can’t We Beat This Girl?” got at one tender aspect of the Cold War conflict: U.S. Olympic medal counts suffered in comparison to the Soviets because American women, we learned, “will not even try.” No need to worry about that now. This ...

Title IX: 40 years and three generations chart the change

Thursday, June 21st, 2012

By Laura Pappano For those of us who think and write about gender and sport, Title IX never seems adequately enforced, to go far enough, or to be effective enough in addressing the inequities in our culture around sport. And -- still! -- it's often under fire, forcing us to ardently ...

Before Title IX, working the concession stand was a sport

Thursday, June 21st, 2012

By JoAnne Pappano Title IX passed in 1972 when I was 27. I remember thinking, “This is a good thing because I have three daughters.” I graduated from Cleveland Heights High School in 1962 and it was a much different time. It was a boy’s world. Girls my age felt that the ...

Title IX pushes back at limits imposed “because you’re a girl.”

Thursday, June 21st, 2012

By Laura Pappano When Title IX became law in June 1972, I was 10 and unaware of what it was or would do. I had discovered that being a girl could be limiting. My father, a volunteer Little League coach, honed my baseball skills in the backyard but wouldn’t let me join ...

Title IX legacy for my generation: Run for joy without judgment

Thursday, June 21st, 2012

By Olivia Lynch Title IX was designed to give women the resources and opportunities to prove their abilities on and off the field. However, strangely enough, what I most appreciate about Title IX (as it relates to sports) is the way in which it has catalyzed the creation of an athletic environment in which ...