Elite athletes
Amalie Benjamin at the Boston Globe profiles some young elite athletes and the sacrifices they make (including moving away from home at young ages to train).
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Amalie Benjamin at the Boston Globe profiles some young elite athletes and the sacrifices they make (including moving away from home at young ages to train).
Helen Wheelock does a great job on Women's Hoops Blog of comparing NYTimes coverage of the U.S. men's basketball team bronze medal win to the U.S. women's basketball team bronze medal win. As you can guess the word count difference is significant. I'm going to give a look at USAToday and see what's there.
Not sure why this didn't run in the sports section, but the NYTimes had a piece yesterday on young women athletes who battle eating disorders (the focus of the piece was a high school runner who died of cardiac arrest caused by anorexia) - and how most coaches don't know what signs to look for. The key is a girl who is not menstruating - but this is hard for coaches to track. The story that women athletes battle eating disorders is not news but the piece is good - I just don't understand why it ran in Fashion and Style.
The Boston Globe has a front-page sports page profile on Laura Georges - a student and soccer player at Boston College who is one of the top players in the world. She's from France and also plays for the French national women's team. I like blurb in particular form the piece:
"BC is a solid team with quality players in a premium league, the Atlantic Coast Conference. But it's no soccer superpower. And Georges is ignored in a city that develops a rash when presented with anything other than the four traditional American team sports."
That final sentence really sums up nicely sports coverage in this city (the word men's should be inserted in there), so it was nice to see this profile get big play.
Christine Brennan at USAToday weighs in on Michelle Wie and why she should reconsider publicly airing her ambitious career goal/dreams. The piece was triggered by a comment Wie made to reporters about wanting to play in the Ryder Cup someday.
"Hopefully, I will be able to play the Ryder Cup one day. That would be awesome, and I think it is totally possible."
However, this is the kind of quote I would like to see prefaced with "After a reporter asked Wie if should would like to play in the Ryder Cup someday" because, to me, it changes the context. Wie didn't just blurt out here desire to play - she was asked.
Reporter: You are part of a new breed of young women who are becoming increasingly competitive in golf - do you think there could ever be a time when women could qualify for the Ryder Cup?
Wie: Hopefully I will be able to do it one day, that would be awesome. I think it is totally possible. Anything is possible in the future. I think players, both women and men, are getting better and we are starting to get stronger and work out more and are mentally tough and we can do it.
Granted, as Brennan argues, she might want to reconsider her answers to these questions. Because the media jumped on this one quote and ran headlines such as "Wie keen to play in Ryder Cup" and that becomes the focus of the story. Here is the full transcript of that interview.
Classes started today. The campus is bustling. There is always so much energy at the start of the fall semester. It sounds corny, but I always get a little buzz walking around campus these first few days -- of course this fades as student papers pile up, and the cold and snow move in :)
Anyway, the Sports Journalist's Association in the UK released a study/article on women sports journalists - less than 10% of British sports journalists are women (this is similar to the U.S. where the number is around 13%
Keeping on the other side of the Atlantic, the London Observer has a piece on the pressure some women athletes face to dress "sexy" and more on the status of women athletes
