BY HANNAH PURKEY

In print | Published January 29, 2009

With the Super Bowl less than a week away, the playoff traditions of sports fans are starting to emerge across campus. Whether it’s putting on your football team’s jersey and not taking it off until they lose or refusing to shave in order to have the best “playoff beard” in NFL history, these traditions vary depending on the fan and the sport. Personally, I prep for playoffs by combining my two favorite things: sports and movies. When playoff fever starts to infest the nation, and most sports fans turn to ESPN, I turn to my DVD collection. Before my teams begin their playoff competition, I watch a movie featuring the sport of the season. Although not the most critically acclaimed films, I tend to choose movies that remind me of the excitement and honor of sports.

For Super Bowl XLIII, I turned to the reliable classic (if you apply a very liberal definition of the word “classic”) “The Replacements.” For those who have not seen it, the movie tells the timeless story of a greedy professional football team that goes on strike a few games before the playoffs and the no-name, heart-of-gold players the coach recruits to replace them. At first glance the film seems to contain everything necessary to make it a B-movie hit: the attractive yet sensitive quarterback, the motley crew of supporting players with enough quirks to leave serious doubt as to their sanity and, of course, the cheerleader whom the quarterback wins over after initial resistance. Yet when watching it once again in prep for this year’s playoffs, I was reminded of a line from the movie that has always bothered me. In a back and forth between coach and quarterback on the dangers of professional football, the coach says, “that’s why girls don’t play the game.”

This quote is even repeated later in the film, again as some sort of testament to the true manliness of the film’s hero, apparent in his willingness to win the game in the face of great personal harm and implying, or more accurately stating, that a woman in his position would not have been able to do the same. Although I recognize that in the history of football there have been few female players, and that many support the argument that the technical aspects of the game do not lend themselves to the success of female athletes, I sincerely doubt that the fact that it is “rough out there,” as this coach says, is the reason girls don’t play the game.

As a sports fan, it is hard not to notice the lack of professional women participating in team sports. The fact is that women are not given nearly enough chances and not nearly enough encouragement to play sports, especially such contact sports as football or hockey. This is the reason they don’t play — not because they are incapable. Even when women are able to become successful in a sport, usually due to Title IX accommodations or the creation of professional women’s teams, the media coverage remains minimal and often objectifies the female athletes.

According to a report published by the American Psychiatric Association’s Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, as female athletes become more visible in the media, trends show that the amount of sexualization of these athletes increases at an alarming rate. This sexualization can be seen in a higher percent of time spent focusing on the faces of female athletes compared to men and the use of much more suggestive posing in photographs in magazines such as Sports Illustrated. These trends of objectification can even be seen in the comments made by sports announcers, including the description of the 1999 U.S. women’s soccer team by several media outlets as “booters with hooters.” This is a team that has won the World Cup twice, as well as three Olympic gold metals and numerous other championships, yet one of its players is still spoken of as owning “the most talked-about breasts in the country” by a national media outlet, according to the APA task force’s report. Coverage like this counteracts any good press given to the increasing prominence of women’s sports in this country and serves to disprove the idea that with this increase we have somehow solved the problem of gender inequality in sports.

It is difficult to create fair programs that encourage girls to get involved in sports that until recently have been male-dominated. I applaud the few programs that attempt to take on this task, including notable events such as the Sixth Annual Girls’ and Women’s Martin Luther King Holiday Ice Hockey Tournament. The tournament featured 37 teams of female hockey players, ages six to 36, in a weekend packed with games at the San Jose Sharks’ facilities in San Jose, CA, according to coverage in the local paper and during recent Sharks game broadcasts. The tournament and its media coverage are good steps toward encouraging more girls to get involved in sports like hockey, even if it simply proves that there are girls out there who want to be involved in these sports. More events and programs like this are needed to truly achieve gender equality in all sports, from professional soccer to youth hockey.

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