Kelly Kulick, barraged by press requests, and her mom Carol Kulick, just back to her Union, N.J. home from Las Vegas and hoarse (but elated) each spoke by phone with FGN about the experience  – and what the watershed win means.

FGN: How important was this victory?

KK: I think this is going to change the face of bowling as we know it. If there weren’t bowling fans before this happened, we gained some this past Sunday.

FGN: How much did you win?

KK: $40,000. It’s my highest prize money ever.

FGN: When you went out to Las Vegas, how did you feel about Kelly’s prospects?

CK: To be honest, at first I didn’t think she had a chance because she was bowling against these men and it is awkward to be the only woman [competing at the event].

FGN: When did you begin to think she had a shot at winning?

CK: Actually winning?  I noticed that she was striking and [Chris Barnes] wasn’t and I thought, ‘She’s going to do this! She’s really going to do this!’” The crowd was unbelievable. I really think they were behind her. They were so there for her that it pumped her up. They were cheering; it was awesome. It is amazing what the crowd behind you can do.

FGN: Kelly bowls with a 15-pound ball; many men bowl with a 15 or 16-pound ball. The pins, the lanes are the same for men and women. What makes people think the guys should always win?

CK: [The argument is that] because of their strength…they just have the power so they can scatter more pins.  It’s always been a question: Can women keep up? Can they do it? But it’s not about power anymore. It’s about precision. It’s about placing the ball. It’s about your timing. It also goes back to being told all your life that you can’t play with men. I always joke that if Kelly were a man, she’d be pitching for the Yankees.

FGN: You are saying that part of the problem is the message to women and girls…

CK: Women have been told all their lives that they can’t compete [with men]. And so they don’t think they can. It takes one woman breaking through. There is room in every sport for women. As long as they are told they can’t, they will believe that. But one by one, they are finding out that maybe they can.

KK: I always thought women could compete against men. It is more mental strength than anything else. Where men have an advantage is that as you play, the lane breaks down. It gets drier and it forces you to play a part of the lane that may not be a comfort zone. The men’s ball speed is usually faster and has a higher rev rate [more revolutions] than most women [which gives it more force against the pins]. My game is versatile enough that I can play the angles and I can usually keep up with them.

FGN: This sounds like a matter of technique and training. Are there more female bowlers who have this great training and technique?

KK: There are many more opportunities to learn now — the training and the coaching are readily available, compared to what it used to be. It has become more of an individual challenge – how far you want to perfect yourself as a professional athlete.
FGN:The women’s tour folded after the 2003 season (the year Kelly won the Women’s US Open). Since 2004, women have been allowed to qualify for the men’s Tour. Is there reason to revive a women’s tour (assuming the money is there) or should women continue to play with the men?

CK: What the women have been doing is having something like seven events just to try to get something going. But its not really an official tour. I don’t know if there will be a women’s tour again. If you could see the collegiate bowling out there it’s excellent — and these women have no where to go. HIgh school bowling is bigger than ever.

KK: I would like to see a ladies tour. We have to be marketable as people and athletes. Some of the best compliments I have received are from girls who say, “when I grow up I want to be like you.” I’m excited. I know I have affected a lot of lives.

By Megan Wood

I’ve played softball for 15 years, and for nearly my entire career I have been coached by men. Sure, a few female pitching coaches helped on the side, but T-ball through high school, all of my head and assistant coaches were guys.

Even when I reflected on the umpires, tournament directors, athletic trainers, equipment vendors, and league leadership the people I have seen running my sport have all been of the same sex: Men, men, men and – yes – more men.

My sport may be dominated by female athletes, but males are running softball.

I wondered: How can this be? Women’s softball has gained in popularity, particularly over the last ten years, so surely there must be women at the highest levels administrating this sport? One has only to look into the governance of softball to see the male dominance.

Consider:

–   On the Amateur Softball Association of America (ASA) website, the 1,000-word chronicle of the game’s history dutifully describes the men who helped mold the sport BUT never mention the impact of women (beyond the fact that the sport was divided into three divisions: fastpicth, slowpitch, and women).
–  Only three of fourteen ASA Board of Directors members are women and no female has ever served as President since the organization’s founding in 1933.
– Of 25 national umpire staff members, only four are women. And while the ASA supports the International Softball Federation’s (ISF) umpire certification program (which allows umpires to officiate World Championships or international games), the ISF has certified 972 male umpires – and only 103 female umpires – since beginning in 1952.
–  Fewer women now coach softball than in 1977, down from 83.5 percent that year to 64.7 in 2008, according to the Acosta and Carpenter study on women in collegiate athletics.

We spend a lot of time in women’s sports talking about “progress” and the quest for equity. In softball at least, it looks like we are moving backwards.

Megan Wood is a senior at Wellesley College who is majoring in Peace and Justice Studies. She is a pitcher and left fielder on the varsity softball team.

Pink is nice, but how about baby blue?

If the NFL wants to leverage the resources of Monday Night Football (and Sunday day and night football, too) on a public health issue — and do it in a gender-coded manner — how about a prostate cancer campaign?

Why not speckle the player’s arms, coaches hats and referees shirts with a bit of baby blue?  Prostate is the number one cancer among U.S. men (breast cancer is #2 among women – behind lung) and messaging about prostate cancer screenings could reach more than 8 million men.

Or, could the NFL draw attention to testicular cancer, known to strike young men aged 20-34? Sounds like prime viewership of NFL football to me.

Sadly, the men watching this testosterone-charged sport hear strikingly little about prostate or testicular cancer when compared with the flood of breast cancer awareness messages women receive.

Absolutely: Breast cancer awareness is an incredibly important cause, but it is already heavily lobbied by a variety of non-governmental organizations and businesses. (Last year, the National Cancer Institute spent more than $572 million on breast cancer research, nearly twice as much as on prostate cancer. Even though they have about he same number of new cases each year, the mortality rates for prostate cancer are slightly higher overall — and significantly higher among African American men, according to a 2008 American Cancer Society report – see p. 44).

Breast cancer is an almost entirely female disease, and the messaging that was most clearly delivered last night by the announcers (get mammograms!) is aimed at women over 40. One has only to consider the viewership to see that the NFL message hit a relatively small “target” audience. (The NFL audience is 66% men, with an average age of 45 — hence all the ads for beer and erectile dysfunction drugs.)

My point is not that the breast cancer campaign is worthless — or even bad. No doubt, the NFL effort contributes to breast cancer awareness and helps to keep this burdensome disease center stage.

But just think what the NFL could achieve were it more strategic with the health messaging it chooses to endorse rather than simply jumping on the breast cancer bandwagon.

Lauren Taylor is assistant lacrosse coach at Yale, former three-time college All-American, and 2009 graduate of the Yale School of Public Health who now works for the Yale Global Health Leadership Institute.

The lead women’s pack at mile 18 of The Boston Marathon 2009

One of the most frustrating things about watching the Boston Marathon is that it’s hard to tell how fast the runners are. I’m not talking TV coverage or the delay in the Boston Athletic Association website in recording runners’ progress (it’s actually a GREAT site). Or even the what-just-went-past? sensation one has watching from the race course.

What I mean is that we are keenly aware – especially this year – of how much slower the elite women’s pack was than the elite men’s pack. But that glaring gap misses the story.

Pause to note: This comment doesn’t diminish the fact that the women’s race was a riveting, nail-biting-scream-at-your-TV-exciting finish. American Kara Goucher put on a stunning effort for the USA, finishing third at 2:32:25. And she wasn’t even the one offering the tape line drama of Salina Kosgei of Kenya edging out Dire Tune of Ethiopia  — that’s 2:32:16 over Tune’s 2:32:17. Tune collapsed at the finish line. (Wouldn’t you, if you’d just lost a 26.2 mile race by ONE SECOND??!!)

My point, though: The men’s race was less dramatic, but swifter, with Deriba Merga gliding across the finish at 2:08:42, nearly a minute ahead of second place finisher Daniel Rono of Kenya and Ryan Hall of the USA.

BUT because the women’s race begins before the men’s race and because results are reported by gender first, the take-away is about how much faster the men are than the women (and, again, particularly this year when the women started off slow – the part of marathon running that is not about sheer speed but about gaming and strategy and how to beat your field).

Yet, if we look at the big picture of marathon running, we see that – heck – many of these really good women are running as fast as these really good men. Take Colleen De Reuck of Colorado (she led the women for a few moments at mile 18), who finished in 2:35:37, that was top among women aged 45-49. A little-made comparison: She came in second among the men in the 45-49 age group, right after Oleg Strizhakov of Florida (2:31:27) but before Michael Platt of Massachusetts (2:39:07).

Go through the race results and you find women finishing among top men around their own age. In the 40-44 age group, Alina Ivanova of Florida (2:36:50) was just a few seconds behind Robert Landry of Massachusetts (2:36:46), who finished 10th among his age peers.

Marathons are reported as men’s races and women’s races, but when we look beyond gender, it’s hard to miss the other story: There’s an awful lot of overlap among really good male and female distance runners.