The biggest issue in sports




To me, I think the culture that fans, players and sometimes, even reporters create is the most dangerous issue that faces sports today. While I feel that sports today are more inclusive as far as welcoming different types of people into fandoms, I still think that the culture surrounding sports is highly problematic. While there’s plenty of different aspects I’m sure I could touch on, to me, the most important issue that needs to be combatted is sexism in sports.



Recently, I was given the opportunity to become content coordinator of BruinsLife.com - a blog that reports on everything and anything Boston Bruins related. This opportunity brought me a lot of followers from various hockey outlets on Twitter, and I was ecstatic both about the friendships and networking it presented me with, and that my writing was good enough for these people to want to read what I was writing. A writer for a newspaper I won’t name tweeted a question about a Bruins prospect, and knowing the information I had was correct, I answered him. We got to talking about hockey, and then he changed the subject to my looks and made a comment about how sexy I was. I was dumbfounded - why would a professional journalist representing a news outlet say these things to me? 



After I successfully dealt with this incident, I started noticing it happening a lot more to my fellow female hockey journalists. I watched as a girl I follow, who is pretty much an expert on all things Detroit Red Wings, had her information used in a newspaper - which would have been exciting, had the journalist not credited the information to “a local puck bunny” rather than using her proper credentials. I started following more female reporters of other sports, and their mentions and the sexism they battle every day appalled me. I reached out to The Boston Herald’s Karen Guregian and she told me that I had every right to feel the way I was feeling - both for the incident I went through, and for the things I was witnessing on a near-daily basis. 


I feel that female reporters on TV get the short end of the stick - they’re belittled if people don’t think they’re good-looking, and they’re belittled if they are. While I’m not the most confident person out there, I’ve never been one to chalk any of my successes, mistakes or problems up to my gender. I feel that being a woman comes with advantages and disadvantages, and I’ve never really given much thought to how professionals would react to me because I figure that if if someone is qualified, friendly, enthusiastic and hard-working enough, the opportunities will present themselves regardless of gender. I never figured gender would be a problem for me, and looking back on it, maybe that was a bit naive of me to think. There are endless examples of sexism that females face - reporters or not - in the sports world. Janay Rice is another huge example. In order to successfully combat the problematic issues in sports, I think reporters, fans and athletes alike need to redefine sports culture.

Sports Bucket List

A million things come to mind when I think about a bucket list that is exclusively sports-themed, and quite a few of these things are on my own personal bucket list. Needless to say, I hope all ten (as opposed to just the five semester-specific ones) get to be crossed off this list someday.

5 Items I Can Complete This Semester
1) Learn how to ice skate.
2) Meet Patrice Bergeron.
3) Get to talk with Amalie Benjamin, my favorite Bruins beat reporter from The Boston Globe.
4) Understand football.
5) Completely understand the salary cap systems of different sports.

5 General Sports-Related Bucket List Items
1) Meet Bobby Orr (and introduce my father to him).
2) Visit the NHL Hall of Fame.
3) Attend a championship game (preferably a Stanley Cup Final, but I'll take what I can get).
4) Cover a Stanley Cup Final.
5) Go to a sports awards show.