Going Deep: Sports in the 21st Century speak with Meghann Burke, executive director of the National Women's Soccer League Player's Association

Going Deep: Sports in the 21st Century

It's our annual Super Bowl episode - but this one comes in stages. The day after John and our show's producer recorded it, former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores filed a lawsuit against the NFL alleging racial discrimination, sham interviews for coaching positions, and more. We recorded a second time to include that in the show, plus we also feature part of an earlier Going Deep episode where John and Marcia explained why coaching in the pros is far more difficult than in college.

In this episode of Going Deep, our hosts go back to an issue they've spent much of their recent years discussing - concussions in contact sports. They catch up with two engineers - Eric Nauman and Tom Talavadge - whom they first met while John was coaching at Purdue University. They've talked with Eric and Tom before about their work on microconcussions, and they get the latest on what the pair have discovered in their research, and how it can be applied to sports like football.

This episode of Going Deep goes deep into our archives for two conversations that are just as topical now as they were when they were recorded in 2018 - Origin Stories Part 1 & Part 2, and The Coaching Rollercoaster.

This episode is not really about Jon Gruden, whom John Shoop worked for with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2004. It isn't really about Bruce Allen either, who was the general manager of that team. It isn't about the email exchanges between Gruden and Allen that were recently revealed that led to Gruden's resignation as head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders on October 11th, 2021. They're all just actors in the play. This episode of Going Deep is really about the characteristics of white supremacy culture, as defined by Tema Okun.

In their last episode, John and Marcia only scratched the surface about mental health in sports. They go deeper in this show, and they bring in an expert to help - sports social worker Natalie Graves of Chicago.

In this episode of Going Deep, our hosts take some time to slow down and dive into two topics in the sports world which are getting varying degrees of news coverage - athlete mental health (a lot) and race-norming in the NFL (very little).

Our hosts tackle a topic they've long wanted to in this episode - youth sports - and in particular, the trend toward having teens specialize in one sport at younger and younger ages. Their guests include Jon Solomon of the Aspen Institute, which will release a 'children's bill of rights in sports' on August 12th. Three members of the city of Asheville's parks and recreation department also join the program to discuss what's happening locally.