KEYNOTE
STORIES of SPORT 2019
SLIDE 1: (.50)
1. Thank you to Luke and Alan for inviting me to speak at this roundtable session.
2. Although you see me here, I actually represent three other women: Katie Dredger,
Crystal Beach, and Cathy Leogrande. We met last year during this very same roundtable
session. As is common for most roundtables, we were grouped together based on our
shared interests of how social justice issues intersect with sports and sports media. Today,
I’ll be sharing each of our ideas with you, in hopes that you will not only begin to think a
little differently about how to teach about sports and sports media, but also in hopes that
you’ll want to work with us in some capacity.
SLIDE 2: (.51)
1. Before I begin, I’d like to know, how many of you are sports fans?
2. Great. My next question is, how many sportscasters can you name? You can think of
these or jot them down. You have 20 seconds.
SLIDE 3:
1. By show of hands, how many of you listed Bob Costas or Howard Cosell? Okay. So, I
added this part as proof of my psychic ability. Just kidding.

2. By show of hands, how many of you listed Lesley Visser, on the left, or Linda Cohn, on
the right?
SLIDE 4: (2:06)
1. If you ask a sports fan to name 10 sports broadcasters, from Bob Costas to Chris Berman,
the list will likely include men of all ages who have covered a variety of sports from the
Kentucky Derby to the Olympics. Whereas, women like Lesley Visser or Linda Cohn
who have broadcast that same assortment of sports for high profile outlets, such as CBS
and ESPN, will most likely be left off the list or added as an afterthought. Even though
women sports broadcasters began to break barriers over fifty years ago, they continue to
be a small percentage of the journalists seen on the screen at sporting events. They also
are likely to be marginalized in terms of the roles they are given. Thirty second sound
bites from the sidelines or segments in the studio highlight show remind us that women
are still not regarded as equal to their male counterparts.
2. The visibility of women in televised sports media and the nature of their work and their
credibility are often shaped by the various locations in which they are seen. The type of
reporting and commentating differ for all sports broadcasters based on the role
requirements of particular spaces (such as studio host versus sideline reporter), but this is
even more of an issue for women. They are more likely to work in spaces in which they
provide supplemental information, quick summaries of games or features stories. The
places in which they work impact how they are perceived. The stereotype of the pretty
reporter in the fur coat on the sidelines at a football game continues to exist. When
women reporters find themselves in such situations, they are often perceived less as a
journalist and more as "eye candy for male viewers” (Doyle, 2013).

3. The role of athletics in Western society speaks of privilege and power. Using a critical
media lens, readers see ways in which sports stories are told that may reinforce or disrupt
patterns of power and the ways that power is enacted.
SLIDE 5: (2:04)
1. So, what about female athletes?
2. Often considered a male pursuit, participation in sports and consumption of sports media
have increased exponentially since the passing of Title IX (Blumenthal, 2005). Girls and
women in classrooms and on extracurricular sports teams have worked to define their
style on and off the court, and the commentary disseminated around these choices can be
examined and disrupted. Choices in athletic gear, hair styles, advocacy wear, and off the
court style have been described and analyzed by media analysts and have been defended
by athletes themselves. Students should be encouraged to deduce bias and to disrupt this
language use, calling out text that objectifies, sexualizes, or censures.
3. Let’s take hairstyles, for example. There is no evidence that a hairstyle has ever
contributed to assault, and yet hairstyles have been policed by social media users and
even referees when the style has no bearing on the physicality of the athletic endeavor.
Yet policing of hair styles is not just for perceived safety, but also has been a part of
people’s desire to have athletes conform to aesthetic norms. For example, Simone Biles
was famously hair-shamed after her Olympic gold medal performance and again years

later, as she performed as an honorary guest with the Texas Titans (Jamison, 2017).
Megan Rapinoe’s purple hair has been analyzed on social media, giving the athlete a
chance to be a model for personal style and athletic prowess (Rearick, 2019). While
women know that hair alone does not have magical powers, commentators concluded that
Serena William’s act of putting her hair in a bun spurred her semi-final win at
Wimbledon (Yahoo Sports Staff, 2019).
4. I have to pause here to tell you all. In preparation for this discussion, I Googled each of
these to better understand what all the fuss was about. I had no idea that people had
accredited Serena’s semi-final win to her hairstyle. It’s really quite ridiculous. But this is
what female athletes face.
SLIDE 6: (1:25)
1. Adolescent female athletes have faced a different set of challenges than their pro-athletic
counterparts. Female athletes even in their teens have agency to use social media to air
indignation and to draw attention to sexist norms perpetuated in schools. When schools
post quotes on the walls above lockers that read, “The more you act like a lady, the more
he will act like a gentleman” (Downey, 2018), students can go to their own social media
accounts to call out such norms. These norms perpetuate a culture that does not value and
identify women and young women for their athletic purposes. Instead, it perpetuates rape
culture in that it suggests that males react to female dress and behavior and that girls are
responsible for boys’ behavior.
2. This quote was challenged quickly through individual social media accounts by the
young people that went to school there. The local media response helped to critically
highlight the ill-advised wall decoration (Downey, 2018). While this is something that

happened in the school, the exciting part about it is that a student used social media to
call out the school and the message that it was sending. The student argued that it is not a
girl’s job to act a certain way in order to get attention from the male gaze nor to control
male behavior. Students challenged this message in their school and used media to garner
attention to help them change this quote.
SLIDE 7: (:36)
1. This was an example of athletic activism at the school level. However, athletic activism
isn’t new at the professional level. Muhammad Ali refused to fight in the Vietnam war,
and was subsequently exiled from boxing (Brown, 2018). U.S. Olympians, Tommie
Smith and John Carlos protested poverty and lynchings by removing their shoes, bowing
their heads, and lifting one raised fist during the 1968 medal ceremony in Mexico City
(Brown, 2017). The iconic image has been etched in our collective consciousness as an
example of how to use an athletic platform to raise awareness of injustice.
SLIDE 8: (1:46)
1. Decades later when COLLIN Kaepernick chose to sit, and later kneel during the national
anthem, his actions were reminiscent of Ali, Smith, and Carlos; however, media changed
significantly. Whereas journalists and cameramen were the primary ones documenting
and reporting media narratives in the past, now social media provides sports fans
everywhere with the ability to initiate, disseminate, and comment on news stories. This is
exemplified with Kaepernick; his protest during the national anthem went unnoticed for
two games, until a San Francisco 49ers fan tweeted an image of him (Coombs, Lambert,
Casillo, & Humphries, 2017).

2. After the 49ers next game against Green Bay, Kaepernick revealed that he was protesting
“a country that oppresses black people and people of color” (Wyche, 2016). His dissent
was focused on the police brutality of African Americans, which continues to be a long-
standing national conversation, but had been amplified by social media, particularly with
the deaths of Michael Brown, Philandro Castile, and Alton Sterling. At the time of his
protest, at least 200 black Americans had been shot and killed by police in 2016 alone
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2016/). Kaepernick
said that his activism was “bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look
the other way” (Wyche, 2016). He chose to use his NFL privileged platform to raise
awareness about an historically disenfranchised race, with whom he identifies. When he
eventually knelt during the national anthem, he was using his power within one
hegemonic structure (football) to protest social injustice of another hegemonic structure
(police brutality against unarmed African Americans).
SLIDE 9: (:44)
1. In some ways, social media provided a vehicle to both mute and supplant Kaepernick’s
message with patriotic discourse debates (Martin & McHendry, 2016). In other ways,
social media and sports media conversations influenced what has been coined, “The
Kaepernick Effect” (McNeal, 2017, p. 148), the deliberate emulation of Kaepernick’s
actions of protest that extended into K-12 educational settings. Across the U.S., K-12
students and athletes, including a six-year-old took a knee during the “Pledge of
Allegiance” to protest social injustice the same way Kaepernick had (Coleman, 2017;
Schering, 2017; Tate, 2017). Students physically brought the conversation to their
schools. However, instead of support, some students were met with consequences. The

six-year-old student was reprimanded for not showing “loyalty and patriotism” (Tate,
2017), and high school football players in Houston were temporarily kicked off their
team (Coleman, 2017).
SLIDE 10: (2:05)
1. So, what does this have to do with teaching? Or teaching English? Or educating our pre-
service teachers?
2. Because the media teach about and influence society and culture, Kellner and Share have
said that educators have a responsibility to teach K-12 students how to recognize and
resist implicit media pedagogy. According to them, critical media literacy is one way to
do this. It “involves cultivating skills in analysing media codes and conventions, abilities
to criticize stereotypes, dominant values, and ideologies, and competencies to interpret
the multiple meanings and messages generated by media texts” (Kellner & Share, 2005,
p. 372).
3. The way we view and interact with sports and sports media is included.
4. In the case of women sports broadcasters, critical media literacy helps viewers ask why
women are seen more in certain sports and settings, how they look and act compared to
male colleagues in similar roles, and how the decisions about these spaces perpetuates the
dominant power structures. Through questioning what is seen, critical media literacy
provides an opportunity to reframe gender inequity, persistent stereotypes, and media
impact on beliefs and values.
5. In terms of female athletes, the female athlete garners attention in mainstream and social
media, in and out of playing arenas. Teachers can develop readers’ critical literacies and
incorporate real world issues by examining the writing style of sports commentary, social

media, and other written and spoken words that surround female athletes. Sports and
sports media weaves through our societies’ messages, and many youth today are
consuming more of these messages than they may have before screens were as ubiquitous
as they are today.
6. Finally, critical media literacy can be used as a framework that can support K-12
students’ analysis of the role that traditional and social media play in athletic activism.
Using specific concepts and questions can offer a method for specifically understanding
Kaepernick’s social justice stance, the role the media played in framing and shifting his
initial message away from activism, and what this says about how media influence
culture.
SLIDE 11: (:35)
1. So, with that said, my colleagues and I hope that you’ll join us in writing about how we
use media to view, interact with, and discuss sports. This book is scheduled for
publication October 2020. We invite you to submit an abstract by December 9th. The call
for proposals is located on each table, and of course, we welcome you to discuss these
ideas further throughout the conference.