Last month my mom broke her hip.
She’s 88 years old.
She did it while she was bowling.
I thought about her today after a SXSW panel featuring four prominent women committed to advancing women’s sports. They didn’t mention bowling specifically, though I’m sure they would support more opportunities for female keglers. They did, however, mention some statistics.
Google Director of Global Sports & Entertainment Marketing Kate Johnson, a former Olympic rower, pointed out that 94% of female executives had played sports, with more than half having played at the collegiate level.
However, she also noted that young girls are dropping out of sport at a rate greater than when equality-encouraging Title IX legislation came into effect. That’s a problem all these women want to address and one way they’re doing it is from the top down.
As ESPN’s Laura Gentile (who played field hockey at Duke University) pointed out, women haven’t always had access to executive positions in which they could make decisions about sports-related matters. But as progress in that area has accelerated, it has allowed women in positions of authority to begin to direct resources toward their gender’s athletic pursuits.
This panel focused specifically on mass media and the extent to which it showcases women’s sports content. Ally Financial Chief Marketing and PR Officer Andrea Brimmer (a soccer player at Michigan State University) pointed out that “less than 10% of media coverage goes to women’s sports” currently. She’s working to change that by devoting half her company’s sports media spend to women’s leagues and teams.
Johnson has embraced this sort of equitable distribution as well, including during a stint at Visa that preceded her Google gig. Gentile laid the groundwork for much of the increased visibility of women’s athletics when she spearheaded the establishment of the ESPNW vertical more than a dozen years ago. And it turns out that those decisions did more than help advance a cause about which they were passionate – they made business sense as well.
The fourth member of the panel won four Olympic medals with the United States national ice hockey team. Angela Ruggiero now works producing data that will help those spending marketing dollars on women’s sports justify the investment. Her Sports Innovation Lab’s research shows, for instance, that fans of women’s sports are ahead of the curve in adopting new tech (a characteristic one would think valuable for a property like Google).
One problem they all cited is that no matter how much companies like theirs might want to spend on women’s sports, finding enough available inventory is a challenge (some of us creators are working on making more inventory, fyi). But they also acknowledged progress has been made. I can relate to that. When I began my career, women’s sports options on TV were mostly limited to tennis, golf, and the Olympics. I couldn’t have worked on women’s sports if I wanted to. Now, however, I’ve gotten to do projects for the likes of Athletes Unlimited (a league Ruggiero referenced) and the Dallas Wings. A film we just finished talks about women’s emerging presence in the sport of American football. And I’m working on a documentary about Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Famer Nancy Lieberman.
So to loop back to one of the statistics from near the top of this piece – girls, don’t give up on sports. There are people working to make more of a sports world for you than ever before. In another session I attended, Amazon Global Chief Creative Officer Jo Shoesmith talked about how an organization on whose board she serves, Baseball For All, works to give women and girls more opportunity in that sport.
Nancy Lieberman didn’t get to play baseball as a teenager because the boys league wouldn’t let her. Brimmer couldn’t compete in the Olympics because there was no U.S. national team when she played and no women’s soccer in The Games until 1996. And my mom, despite having once scored 57 points in a high school basketball game, had no real options for playing beyond that level during the 1950s.
So she did what Gentile suggested a lot of women in sports do – she tried to help another generation. My mom had girls’ backs. She encouraged my sister and her daughters. As a physical education teacher, she worked every day to help girls (and boys) learn how to stay fit and realize the other benefits sport brings. It’s good to see that’s still the case with a lot of women.
The good news about my mom is she’s out of the hospital and healing as hoped. The doctor said she’s likely recovering more quickly than if she weren’t active, a legacy of her sports background. She’s the best bowler in her memory care unit and the activity director is hoping she gets back up to speed soon, because sports should be for a lifetime – for everyone.
Rush Olson has spent two-plus decades directing creative efforts for sports teams, broadcasters, and related entities. He currently conceives and executes content projects through his companies, Rush Olson Creative & Sports, FourNine Productions and Mint Farm Films. Through MFF, he’s at work on biographical documentaries about Nancy Lieberman, Sidney Moncrief, Pudge Rodríguez, Ed Belfour, and Bob Lilly as well as a show about the The College Gridiron Showcase.
Subscribe to @MintFarmFilms on YouTube to see excerpts from upcoming documentaries.
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