The Athlete & the NARP

From an early age, girls learn that women’s sports are viewed as inherently inferior. Relegated to second-rate TV channels and promoted far less often than their male counterparts, female athletes have constantly struggled to command respect and appreciation for their work. When female athletes dominate their sports and are strong advocates for themselves, they command people’s attention, and that is where role models are made. Representation in athletics is vital for increasing young girls’ confidence in themselves and showing them that there are no limits on what they can achieve in sports. In this episode, we discuss the female athletes who have been most influential and inspiring to us, both because of their achievements within their respective sports and also what they represented outside of them.

Plus, on this week’s Fun Friday, Claire prepares an “Over or Under” quiz for Jenna centered around some of the most notable sports statistics of 2023.

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Put on some makeup before competing and you’re too feminine. Add some muscle during preseason and you’re too masculine. No matter how female athletes present themselves, they can never meet the ever-changing standards of what an “ideal” woman in sports should look like. When women like LSU’s Livvy Dunne or UMiami’s Haley and Hanna Cavinder try to take back control — and make an honest living — off their image, they are slandered and demeaned, as if flaunting their femininity somehow makes them less of an athlete. Recent media coverage has done little to celebrate, or even recognize, their success. Instead, it perpetuates surface-level stereotypes of female sexuality and exploits female athletes for engagement. Just because a woman proudly owns her physical appearance does not open the door for harassment.

Plus, on this week’s Fun Friday, we draft dodgeball teams made up of our favorite professional athletes.

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America is saturated with professional sports teams. If you don’t live in a city that has one — or a handful — chances are there’s one not too far from home that you can pledge allegiance to. Teams can weave themselves into the fabric of a city’s culture, as with the New York Yankees or the Dallas Cowboys, or bring a new fanbase to life, as with the Vegas Golden Knights or Angel City FC. The demand for American professional sports is insatiable: existing leagues are expanding and new ones are forming, leaving teams’ ownerships to grapple with selecting the perfect locations for new organizations to thrive. After all, building a team from the group up and, more importantly, getting the fans to buy into it is a massive investment. It would be a shame if it didn’t work out.

Plus, on this week’s Fun Friday, in honor of the NHL opening the regular season, we rank our top five favorite NHL reverse retro jerseys from the 2022-2023 season.

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Sports are, quite literally, on a level playing field — or are they? The prominence of nepotism, both at the league-wide and individual levels, taints sports’ reputation as a meritocracy. Athletes like Bronny James have made millions cashing in on their family name en route to a professional career in the NBA, a league where many players come from nothing. Meanwhile, the million-dollar entry fee required to make it in a racing league like Formula 1 necessarily excludes everyone but the extremely wealthy. Who you know gives you access to coaching positions, roster spots and a foot in the door in the world’s most prestigious sports organizations, a process that often leads to whitewashing at the administrative levels. The name sports professionals are given can bear stigma or prestige - it’s up to them to make it their own.

Plus, on this week’s Fun Friday, we share our athlete superlatives for Cutest Couple, Best Dressed, Best Captain, Drama King/Queen and Most Likely to Have a Reality TV Show.

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“Dye it pink, throw on some glitter and shrink it down” is typically the misguided approach the sports industry has taken when marketing to women. Brands are clueless about how to engage a female fanbase, a rapidly growing market that simply wants to enjoy the game without receiving belittlement. At the same time, engagement with women’s sports — at the professional and collegiate level — is consistently breaking records, proving that women deserve as much of a right to the sports landscape as their male counterparts. We live in a world where the University of Nebraska’s women’s volleyball team can play in front of 92,003 fans — it’s time we reconstruct our perceptions of what it means to be a woman in sport.

Plus, on this week’s Fun Friday, we face off in a game of Who Said What? featuring social media posts, interview snippets and quotes from famous athletes.

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The Pac-12 Conference was always a mixed bag. Big name sports brands were, until recently, locked into a television contract with other less profitable west-coast schools. When UCLA and USC saw their chance to hop conferences to the Big 10 last year, they took it, and the rest of the Pac-12 crumbled in the months that followed. The Pac-12 implosion may have secured most of the former members spots in conferences with more lucrative membership contracts, but the physical, emotional and mental toll the realignment will certainly have on their athletes has clearly been an afterthought. In this episode, we discuss the implications of this unprecedented shakeup as it pertains to the people who make billion-dollar contracts possible — the student-athletes — and place the conversation surrounding it in the context of athletes' mental health and well-being, where it belongs.

Plus, on this week’s Fun Friday, we describe which fruit each of the top-ranked NFL quarterbacks reminds us of.

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