Femsportsmag2

FEMsports PUTTING WOMEN AT THE CENTER OF A MAN’S FIELD.

WOMEN IN SPORTS JOURNALISM The different stuggles women face in journalism. pg. 2

THE LADIES OF MIZZOU The female players at Mizzou may play the best, but they aren’t marketed the best. pg. 6

women in sports journalism

BY JACK SUNTRUP

K

athleen Nelson faced a dilemma but not an uncommon one in today’s newspaper industry: Should she quit her job as a sportswriter at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to spare someone else’s?

“There have been at least seven or eight rounds of layoffs at the Post,” she said, reflecting on her February decision. “It’s not like they were laying off people to hire cheap people. They were just reducing the staff.”

After repeatedly doing the combined workload of what four or five people had done just a decade earlier, Nelson left. Her 31-year career with the paper had ended.

“It wasn’t the work that I got into this for,” Nelson said. “This was drudgery work and working unpleasant hours. Enough was enough.”

While her decision was a relatively routine one in the industry, female sports journalists are often faced with a host of other challenges males never even think about, Nelson said.

“If you make the decision to have a family, then it is extremely difficult to stay in sports and take road trips, stumbling home at 2:30 in the morning from a two-hour drive,” Nelson said. “That really drains you and you have to decide what’s more important to you. Ninety-nine percent of the time it turns out to be your family.”

Nelson had to make that decision in 1987 after three years working for the sports section.

“My son was born in 1987,” she said. “Working nights was impossible when you have a child that small. My husband also worked in sports so I went to features and was there until I came back to sports in 1996.”

FS 2

by beatriz costa-lima

The men Nelson worked alonside did not face the same problems she did.

“Every guy on staff I think is married now except for one and every guy has kids except for the same one,” Nelson said. “They weren’t forced to make that decision.”

Balancing family life and work was not the only problem, Nelson said. While female sports journalists are now allowed into male locker rooms without anyone thinking twice, that hasn’t always been the case, Nelson said.

“There was a time when women weren’t welcome, but that was 25-30 years ago,” she said. “Early on women were an oddity. It was a little different, and people would refuse to talk to you, and it didn’t have anything to do with ability.”

Working as a female in sports journalism also had its perks, Nelson said. Post-game interviews can get tense. A cadre of journalists with microphones and camera equipment surrounding athletes around their lockers tends to add up to an abrasive, short-worded interview more often than not, Nelson said.

If there is any situation where pushy journalists could amplify an athlete’s displeasure, losing a Super Bowl would probably be one of them.

After the Rams lost Super Bowl XXXVI, people wondered why.

“It was a close game at halftime,” Nelson said.

“The Rams lost by three, but really for no apparent reason in the second half, Mike Martz decided to go almost exclusively passing, taking Marshall Faulk out of the equation.”

“Marshall Faulk tries to be charming on television now, but he was a crabby and surly human being as an athlete,” Nelson said. “He can be a very unpleasant man to deal with.”

Post-Dispatch editors knew this, but they also knew Faulk was a ladies’ man, Nelson said. The editors assigned Nelson to write a sidebar about Faulk’s reaction to Martz’s decision.

“I was like, really?” she thought when she heard her assignment. “But I knew why they wanted me to do it: because he was the kind of guy that if I went to Rams Park would open the door for me. He’s a ladies’ man, but he’s also nice to all women. I watched it with my own eyes that being a women and being polite helped me with him because this was not an easy question to ask him, especially after a Super Bowl and with a surly, surly guy like Marshall Faulk.”

Nelson asked the question and stayed around the area for a few more minutes.

“He gave me a very well-reasoned answer,” she said. “Three minutes later, a guy came up and asked the same question, not quite in a polite manner, and [Faulk] gave him about 10 words. The guy, of course, being a persistent sports writer was not happy with

that answer and tried again, to which Marshall Faulk looked at him, glared, and answered.”

Tough questions will surely have to be asked to athletes around St. Louis in the future, but the PostDispatch will have to rely on a male to do it. Nelson was the paper’s only female sportswriter.

A 2006 survey of 300 daily newspapers found that only seven percent of sportswriters were female.

Their participation is even less in terms of how many female sports editors there are, according to a report by The Smart Journal.

While editors are making an effort to diversify their staffs, the report showed, for shrinking newspapers like the Post-Dispatch, hiring anyone — male or female — is a rarity.

Although the amount of female sportswriters is few and far between, there does seem to be an increase in female sportscasters. This growth, though, has been a turbulent one.

When Bret Musburger, a 73-year-old ESPN veteran took to the booth for the 2013 BCS National Championship and called Alabama quarterback AJ McCarron’s girlfriend a “beautiful woman” all hell broke loose.

“You quarterbacks, you get all the good looking women. What a beautiful woman. Wow!” Musburger said.

After ESPN issued an apology after the game, Musburger dug deeper in his next broadcast, saying that sideline reporter Holly Rowe “was really smokin’ tonight.”

Female sports broadcasters are joining an industry reliant on beauty working in sync with a masculine, strong voice conducting the play-by-play.

Anne Doyle, one of the first female sports broadcasters, was decidedly displeased with Musburger’s comments.

In a Forbes article, she vented her frustration.

“With a proliferation of busty, blonde, tightlyclad, female microphone holders masquerading these days as sports reporters — laughing off the inevitable leers and degrading ‘pranks’ — it’s no wonder a dinosaur such as Musburger feels entitled to publicly comment on the physical attributes of women in his gaze,” she wrote.

This incident opened the door, at least in Doyle’s article, to a debate about the role of female sportscasters in a male-dominated industry. Are listeners comfortable with hearing a FS 4

female voice doing play-by-play, or should women be confined to the anchor table and sideline?

“I think it’s moving in the direction of more females doing play-by-play, said Chris Gervino, the sports director at KOMU, a University of Missouri owned NBC affiliate. “Overtime there have been more and more opportunities and the women have taken those opportunities and run with them.”

Gervino knows the future of the journalism industry first-hand. His job is to train buddingsportscasters for the television industry, giving them in-studio experience. In his years at MU, he has seen a steady growth in the amount of females who want in, he said.

Women will play an increased role in sports broadcasting, inevitably ending up in more play-byplay positions. But it will be a long slog, Gervino said.

The slow turnover in the booth will be a factor, he said.

For example, either Jack Buck or Mike Shannon has filled at least one seat in the St. Louis’ KMOX press box since the end of World War II.

The announcer’s box is not all male, though.

Perhaps the most prominent example was the hiring of Suzyn Waldman by the Yankees — the largest media market in the world — to do the team’s play-by-play.

Just as women want into broadcasting, though, they are finding that they have to be confined to sideline reporting, Doyle wrote.

A sideline reporter is a useless position — one where the game could easily go on without it, Nelson said.

“You’re not gaining any color or insight by having a sideline reporter there, male or female,” Nelson said. “I’d get rid of the whole lot of them.”

But while Nelson thinks that the positions are useless, she said that those positions, along with local sports reporting, are probably the most surefire ways for women to advance.

“To the audience, I think, the play-by-play is a comfort factor,” she said. “That voice is part of the fabric of the game; a male announcer is as much as part of the game as hardwood floors for basketball, green grass for a football field.”

Gervino disagrees. Eventually, women will be accepted in the announcer’s booth, he said.

“I don’t think it matters whether it’s male or female,” Gervino said. “People are watching more for the athletes, not the announcer” FS

NIKE

JUST DO IT.

THE LADIES

BY PHIIL BERGMAN

F

rom a young age on, many kids across the country dream of nothing more than getting the chance to play a college sport. Youths spend countless hours during their adolescent years perfecting their craft, while parents shell out thousands of dollars annually to give their child the best chances to get recruited and live their dream.

For most people, this dream stays a dream, as very few students get the opportunity to put on a jersey and take the field for a college or university, and even fewer get to do so at the Division 1 level – the highest level of collegiate competition in the United States.

There are those who get there, though. Many of those believe they will be stars with television cameras everywhere, fans lining up for the chance to meet them and students begging to get autographs and pictures with them.

Sadly, this is not the case for many women who make it to that level.

While these student-athletes spend countless hours practicing their sport and balancing their classwork, the media do not take time to cover women’s sports on television screens or in magazines.

“I’ve got to be realistic about it, but it is disappointing as well,” Sarah Reesman, University of Missouri Athletic Department senior women’s administrator, said about the coverage of women’s athletics. ”There are a lot of stories out there of kids that ought to be covered that aren’t”.

While Reesman is upset about the amount of coverage women’s sports get – especially considering that some of them rank higher than some men’s programs – she knows that it’s tough for the media to cover all female sports.

“They [have] to balance between trying to do what they know is a good thing, and publicize events that women are participating in, but also going by what they think their viewership wants and is asking for, so they got a business balance there too,” Reesman said.

FS 6

OF MIZZOU The female athletes at Mizzou make up 40 percent of the student-athletes at the university, and their sports events have attendance numbers similar to that of the lower-tiered, or non-revenue sports (football and men’s basketball). Reesman said that the Athletics Department makes sure to put extra effort into publicizing the female sporting events.

Along with publicizing the teams through Twitter and Facebook, Reesman said she believes the new SEC Network, which will start up in 2014, will

Mizzou soccer player Alyssa Diggs takes control of the ball in a game against LSU.

help to expand the viewership of women’s sports. “[The SEC Network] is another way to get sports televised, so you’re certainly going to see additional women’s sports in the SEC having a chance to be on television,” Reesman said.

While Reesman said that the exact amount of coverage that female sports will receive on the channel has not been decided yet, she believes it will increase from the amount currently shown.

by beatriz costa-lima

Though coverage of women’s sports may increase in the near future, Reesman said there is still a long way to go until the media treats women’s sports equally. Reesman said that part of the reason media do not cover men’s and women’s sports equally is because there are still very few female athletic directors.

While Reesman said she thinks more opportunities will become available to female administrators over the next few years, one sport in particular has created a roadblock in having men and women’s sports be treated as equals: football.

“I think the biggest piece of it is the football piece.” Reesman said. “You have a very, small number of women that play football, and fewer coach football.”

Reesman added that if more women played or directed the sport, women would be seen as equals in the football program.

Women are not absent from Mizzou’s football field, though. Although they are not playing the same game as the men, the Golden Girls dance team can be found cheering on the sidelines at football games. They are talented dancers, but the Golden Girls are known for the pomp and pageantry FS 6 they bring to the game day festivities.

by beatriz costa-lima For former Golden Girl Kayla Biek, the first time she heard what she had to wear was a little bit daunting.

“Basically I told my mom, ‘We’re screwed,’” Biek said. “I have to have something called ‘big hair.’

I didn’t know what it was, but it had to be two inches bigger than it currently was. I have to be tan. I have to have makeup on, false-lashes, blush and my lipstick have to be red [and] not brown-tone so that I don’t look bruised in the yellow gymnasium, and I can’t have nail polish on because that would be distracting.”

Unlike most female athletes, the Golden Girls are a group known mainly for their physical appearance.

“Of course [looks are] a part,” Biek said. “I don’t think it’s any secret, anything that you’re not supposed to know. [Coach] Shannon [Fry] does look for the pretty girls, because we’re the ones that end up on ESPN. As terrible as that sounds, looks are a part of it, and people have to realize that you’re picking a group of girls to be the face of the university that is shown on sports television stations where like the average person watching it is like the 50-year old guy. That’s who is in the audience for the games and all that.”

Biek also noted that sometimes girls with better dance skills are not put on the squad because their looks do not meet the physical appearance standards.

“I understand the people that are like, ‘They’re just girls that are good looking, they can’t dance,’ and I would be the first one to say, [Coach] Shannon [Fry] told me point-blank my freshman year to a group of us, “If you are a pretty girl but can’t dance, that’s okay, because I can make you a good enough dancer to make this team,” Biek said. “If you are a decent dancer, but haven’t got the looks, it’s harder for me to put you on the team because I can’t fix the looks. As terrible as it is to say, that’s what Mike Alden expects when we go on to that field, is for us to look good, for people to say, “Oh god, their dance team is just so pretty, we love to watch them dance.”’

Interestingly enough, while looks do matter, Biek also says that demographics matter as well.

“You have to realize that we can’t just have an entire team of white girls,” Biek said. “It just doesn’t work, especially in Missouri where you do have quite a large African-American population on campus.

They’re looking for a certain look, and we have to have so many black girls, and so many Asians, and a redhead.”

On top of the looks, the Golden Girls are known for their outfits, which entail wearing short, tight gold dresses, and big white boots that Biek said were Go-Go boots strait out of the 1970s. For some, these outfits bother fans because of the way they sexualize and objectify college students that are between the ages of 18 and 22. However, Biek said she does not mind the outfits.

“Yes you are being objectified a little bit, but everyone is being objectified right there with you, so it doesn’t seem like as big of a deal” Biek said. “You’re pretty, you’re in shape, so you’re going to wear something that will show [you] off. So our dresses are short, but if you look at any of the dance teams in the South, their dresses are just as short as we are.”

While looks are a major component of being a Golden Girl, dancing is still the main purpose of the group. For Biek, dancing has been a part of her life since she began competing at the age of four.

“I grew up dancing 40-50 hours a week.” Biek said. “I competed maybe 15, 16 different routines whenever we competed. [I would go] from school to high school dance team then to studio where we competed. There was no break. You didn’t sleep. You didn’t eat. You barely did your homework – barely-passed-

class type [of] thing.”

While the Golden Girls put in countless hours in the gym every week, Biek says that the Athletic Department doesn’t give the girls the same benefits as other athletes.

“We don’t get any of the perks that the athletes do. We don’t get to have any tutoring help, anything that’s provided to athletics, no scholarships,” she said.

“So we don’t get any of those things that could be helpful in some cases and that definitely do help other athletes.”

While not being treated the same as other athletes bothers Biek, the thing that upsets her the most is that most fans don’t realized the amount of work that goes into the routines do each week.

“Just like the football team, the soccer team, the spirit squads practice as well.” Biek said. “People forget that we do have to put in work. People don’t realize that what they see at the football games, you have to practice that. You have to do it over and over and over.

It doesn’t just happen out there on the field.”

Because the media portrays the Golden Girls mainly as beautiful women, most forget that the Golden Girls are good athletes and good dancers. In fact, this past year the Golden Girls placed second at the NDA Collegiate Dance Championships, held in Daytona Beach, Florida. “[People] see the looks and [that] you’re pretty, but there’s a lot of time dedicated to that program,” Biek said. “You got used to people underestimating you and taking the whole thing for granted, that Golden Girls just showed up to things. People only see what they want to see.”

Biek, a recent graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism, believes that better media coverage will help diminish the stereotype that the Golden Girls are only beautiful, and get people to focus on their dancing abilities.

“So many news crews come in the past, and it will be a feature of the Golden Girls, and basically they’ll take stock footage from the football games and be like ‘Aren’t they pretty,’ and I so wish that we could send a news crew from somewhere and follow the Golden Girls around for a week during football season. See them go day-to-day out in the sweltering heat, show band camp. Show how much work goes into that. I have stayed past two in the morning; we’ve had practice past two in the morning. I wish that we could just have people follow us around, so that people understood how much work actually does get put into

this team than what shown at the football games.”

On the other side of Mizzou Athletics is Ashtin Stephens, a rising junior infielder on the nationally ranked Mizzou softball team. For Stephens, playing softball in college is a dream-come-true.

“I’ve dreamed of playing D-1, let alone top 10 since I was four years old when I started playing.”

Stephens said. “It’s just really, really cool. Sometimes when I’m at the game warming up, I look at the crowd and tear up, because it’s like, wow I’m really here. After watching people on TV and always wanting to be there I think it’s really cool finally being there.”

While Stephens and her fellow Tigers have been rising up the rankings over the past few years, she still believes that people don’t care about her sport enough.

“I just wish that more people would realize that our sport is a lot of fun, and that a lot of work goes into it, and I just wish that they would appreciate us more.” she said. “It does suck that all the football players, even the basketball players get all this attention, when honestly our football team sucks, and we’re really, really good, and we work just as hard as them. We put in countless hours just like them, not to mention we have a better GPA than them. We work harder in the classroom. I think if people really appreciated us as a sport, or a female athlete, it would be a lot better.”

On top of not getting treated the same by fans and the athletic department, Stephens believes that they’re portrayed as more feminine than they actually are. A clear example of this is at the photo-shoots that upperclassmen players have to do. “[At the shoots], they tell them they have to wear a lot of makeup, get dressed up, fix your hair, and I think they do try to portray us as ladies,” Stephens said.

Stephens said the commercials found between innings of the Women’s College World Series on ESPNU. These ads featured players and coaches on the participating squads laughing and smiling with each other while sitting on a bench.

“It makes us look like a joke,” Stephens said, “It’s like we joke around, and it’s not like a business.

The guys would never be caught dead doing that stuff.”

Unlike many female sports, Women’s Softball has been lucky enough to get some television coverage over recent years, usually on ESPNU. However, Stephens isn’t a fan of the games being shown on the channel.

FS 8 “I don’t really like the U,” she

said. “I feel like it’s a slap in the face because it’s like you’re on ESPN, but where does that show? Online where no one has it and everyone can’t watch it? It’s just stupid, kind of makes me mad.”

While Mizzou has been lucky enough to be seen on television come postseason play, Stephens still thinks that not enough softball is seen across the entire spring season.

“I don’t think they show enough women’s sports period,” Stephens said. “There was a baseball game going on. It didn’t even matter. They were two really bad teams and we had Super Regionals going on and our game gets delayed on ESPN because their game went into overtime and it was ridiculous because we’re two top-10 teams playing to go the World Series and we get cut because we’re softball.”

Though Stevens and her teammates did end up losing the Super-Regional series to the University of Washington for the chance to go to Oklahoma City for the Women’s College World Series, she is still very excited for the chance to go down there. For once down in Oklahoma City, and although for only a short time, Women’s Softball becomes the talk of the town, and the female athletes are finally treated as equals by the media.

“I’ve never thought about being the number one sport before,” she said. “It’s going to be awesome, it’s going to be great.” FS

credits ARTICLES JACK SUNTRUP PHIL BERGMAN

PHOTOS BEATRIZ COSTA-LIMA

ADVERTISEMENTS DIRECTOR: GRANT PIEPER DESIGNER: BEATRIZ COSTA-LIMA

MAGAZINE DESIGN JILL DEUTSCH

COPY EDITORS BEATRIZ COSTA-LIMA JILL DEUTSCH