Spotlighting women in sport

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/10/2014 (4026 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There’s no call display on my office phone that flags readers calling to talk about our sports coverage as such a feature would, frankly, be redundant.

You see, the fact they’re sports fans comes across loud and clear long before they introduce themselves or get to whatever point they want to make. The voices are almost always loaded with passion. Frequently, I find myself in a no-win situation.

For the True Blue crowd, it’s all about the Bombers. If the team got three pages of coverage, they’ll ask why there wasn’t a fourth page. Or they’ll tell me in a not-particularly-subtle way that it’s time to ease up.

For Jets Nation, coverage should be 24/7. Even in July. While we’re at it, shouldn’t Gary Lawless be a little tougher on GM Kevin Cheveldayoff or left-winger Evander Kane?

Toss in questions about box scores and rankings, NCAA brackets and leaderboards, and I sometimes feel concussed by the time I put down the phone.

But here’s something that should give all of us a reason to shake our heads: The passion that exists for the Bombers, the Jets and pretty much everything else in the sports world revolves around the games men play — not women. Sure, you’ve got your Venus and Serena Williams. Danica Patrick has turned heads in the world of auto racing. And after the 2012 London Olympics, Christine Sinclair became a soccer hero in this hockey-crazy nation.

But despite all the gains women have made elsewhere, when it comes to sports coverage, they’re still getting shortchanged.

Today, the Free Press takes a step toward addressing that inequity through an ambitious project chronicling the University of Manitoba women’s volleyball team as it defends its national title.

Our goal as we follow these athletes through the season is to shine the same kind of spotlight on these hometown sport heroes as we do on the Bombers and the Jets. Sure, we will tell you when they win and when they lose. But we also want you to get to know the players, to share their highs and lows. If we do our job properly, we might even convert readers into fans so more than just friends and family cheer players on at home games.

But the narrative over the course of the next several months serves a purpose beyond the wins and losses column. We’ll also address broader issues surrounding women in sport.

Here’s a taste from Melissa Martin’s opening chapter of our series Digging Deep on the front of our sports section: “In a society still struggling to raise professional women’s team sports up to the brightest lights, many of women’s greatest athletic achievements happen in amateur competition. Mostly off of prime-time sports television, mostly out of mainstream sight. But these achievements are evolving the script for what the next generation of young women can grow up to be.”

Game on!

 

— Paul Samyn is the Free Press editor

paul.samyn@freepress.mb.ca Twitter @paulsamyn