April 28, 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the day that boxing champion Muhammad Ali (1942-2016), citing religious reasons, was stripped of his heavyweight title for refusing to be inducted into the United States Army. That memorable event is somehow all the more amazing when considered as part of an evolution whereby “The Greatest” went from being reviled as a “draft-dodger” to being respected as a spokesperson against Islamophobia and a political activist for persons living with Parkinson’s disease.

Born as Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr. into a Baptist family in Louisville, Kentucky, he abandoned his “slave name” and became known as Muhammad Ali when he joined the Nation of Islam in 1964. It was a deep commitment, one that continued throughout the rest of his life—most recently in the context of Donald Trump’s comments about banning Muslim immigration to the U.S., when Ali released a statement that read, in part: “True Muslims know that the ruthless violence of so called Islamic Jihadists goes against the very tenets of our religion. We as Muslims have to stand up to those who use Islam to advance their own personal agenda. They have alienated many from learning about Islam. True Muslims know or should know that it goes against our religion to try and force Islam on anybody.”

In the case of refusing conscription in the military during the Vietnam War, he famously declared having “no quarrel with those Vietcong,” confronting white protestors and stating , “My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father… Shoot them for what?…How can I shoot them poor people, Just take me to jail.” Within two months, Ali was convicted of draft evasion, sentenced to a five-year stint in prison, fined $10,000, and banned for three years from boxing. Awaiting his appeal, he somehow arranged the “Fight of the Century” against Joe Frazier—losing after 15 rounds (the first loss of his professional boxing career), but winning an overturn of his conviction for draft evasion from the U.S. Supreme Court in Clay v. United States (403 U.S. 698) in 1971. His local draft board rejected Ali’s application for “conscientious objector” classification, but the country’s highest court reversed the conviction, deciding that the government had failed to properly specify why Ali’s original application had been denied.

At this time, it might be instructive to review Muhammad Ali’s history relative to the military. In 1964, he failed the qualifying test for the U.S. Armed Forces, his writing/spelling skills considered sub-standard; later, as those test standards were revised, he was reclassified 1-A—making him eligible for the draft. It was at this point that Ali publicly declared his refusal to serve, citing how , “War is against the teaching of the Holy Qur’an. I’m not trying to dodge the draft. We are not supposed to take part in no wars unless declared by Allah or The Messenger. We don’t take part in Christian wars or wars of any unbelievers.” Ali then changed his legal residence to Houston, TX and, even though the federal judicial district denied his appeal for reclassification as a Muslim minister in a 4-0 vote, he refused three times to step forward when called to serve. As noted in the 2013 film Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight, it took the Supreme Court ruling that moral and ethical objections to war were valid if for religious reasons. While highly controversial, his decision also was a financial setback; yet, it is important to point out that today, the Muhammad Ali Institute for Peace and Justice, headquartered at the University of Louisville, works to advance Ali’s emphasis on peace-building, social justice, and the prevention of violence through educational programs, training, service and research. Drawing on his vision and work, it “develops initiatives that support human dignity, foster responsible citizenship, further peace and justice and address the impact of violence in local, state, national and international arenas.”

When, in 1984, it was revealed Ali had Parkinson’s disease, he allowed his iconic image to become the face of “Fight Night,” a fund-raiser for the Muhammad Ali Parkinson Research Center (MAPC) at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, AZ. His philanthropy extended to serving as a United Nations Messenger of Peace, and in his hometown Louisville, KY, he frequented soup kitchens and hospitals and supported numerous national organizations. Relative to war, jail, judicial decisions, and even his own health, Muhammad Ali was a fighter beyond the boxing ring. In the award-winning documentary When We Were Kings (1996), which dealt with his October 30, 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle” heavyweight championship match against George Foreman in Zaire, Ali reclaimed the title taken from him for his refusal to be drafted. Today, we would do well to recall his prescient declaration relative to that event: “I am America. I am the part you won’t recognize. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion; not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me.”

Linda K. Fuller (Ph.D., University of Massachusetts), Professor of Communications at Worcester State University, has produced 250+ professional reports and authored/(co-)edited more than 20 books—including National days/National ways (2004), Sport, rhetoric, and gender (2006), African women’s unique vulnerabilities to HIV/AIDS (2008), Sexual sports rhetoric (2009), Tsunami communication (2010), Women, war, and violence (2010), CS Monitor: An evolving experiment in journalism (2011), The power of global community media (2012), and Female Olympians: A mediated socio-cultural/political-economic timeline (2016). She has also been awarded Fulbrights to Singapore and Senegal.

The National Women’s Soccer League begins its fifth season this week with markers of success that eluded the two failed U.S. women’s professional soccer leagues that predated it. Perhaps first and foremost is the league’s longevity. Both the Women’s United Soccer Association (2001-2003) and Women’s Professional Soccer (2009-2012) folded after three seasons. With no sign of impending failure, the beginning of a fifth season for the NWSL bodes well for this league’s ability to break into the national sporting imagination. Currently, when I ask the undergraduates I teach to name a women’s pro sports league, they are only able to recall the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA). This could change in the future, but only with a league that lasts long enough to build a national profile.

In fact, the NWSL has expanded since its 2013 kickoff, adding teams such as the Houston Dash and Orlando Pride, and will feature 10 teams during the 2017 season. Though uneven and still lower than WNBA and Major League Soccer (MLS) figures, average attendance has risen. The Portland Thorns, perhaps the league’s best-known team, routinely draw crowds into the tens of thousands and turned a profit almost immediately upon joining the league.

In February, the NWSL announced a three-year partnership with the television network Lifetime. As a new sponsor, Lifetime will air an NWSL game each weekend during the season. This partnership is an enormous boon for a league that, like women’s sports more broadly, struggles to garner mainstream mass media attention outside of major international tournaments. In addition, NWSL Media is a newly formed, joint creation of Lifetime and the NWSL. The first commercial advertisements produced by this partnership are notable for their quality production values and focus on the athletic talent of the players.

Beyond these commercial and corporate successes, the U.S. Women’s National Team recently scored a goal for gender equity when it signed a new collective bargaining agreement with U.S. Soccer. This five-year deal closes some (but not all) of the gap between men and women national team players in compensation and benefits. It also guarantees that U.S. Soccer will continue to provide financial support for the NWSL, further solidifying the status of this still-fledgling league. The NWSL recently announced an increase of minimum NWSL salaries to $15,000, up from $7,200 in 2016.

From the outside looking in, then, the NWSL looks to be on solid ground, both commercial and social victories characteristic of its first few seasons. Yet this “success” depends entirely on the league’s increased mirroring of men’s professional sports leagues in their practices, goals, and outcomes. Men and men’s sports remain the benchmarks against which the league is inevitably compared. As much sociological research has shown, however, the values that organize men’s professional sports, such as competitiveness, aggression, and rampant commercialization, have very real social and physical downsides. What does it mean for women’s professional soccer to adopt these values as their primary understanding of success?

For one, an all-consuming focus on competition and winning have increasingly permeated all levels of girls’ and women’s soccer down to the lowest levels of youth participation. As sociologist Rick Eckstein argues in his compelling new book on girls sports, a “winning-at-all-costs” mentality pressures girls to specialize early and totally, denying the benefits of sports participation to girls who prefer to play for fun or who want to pursue multiple sports. The development of a competitive, private pipeline in girls’ soccer leading into the college game also funnels out those who cannot pay to stay in it, particularly girls of color and girls from poor or working class families. While the racial and ethnic diversity of women’s soccer has improved in recent years, greater diversity in the future will require attention to the accessibility of youth soccer. The prioritization of competitive play has also generated high and growing rates of injury. For example, one recent study found that sports-playing girls were more likely to experience a concussion than boys, owing in large part to high rates of concussion in girls’ soccer.

In addition, unmitigated commercialization and corporatization drive a “star” system that sees the rewards of “success” distributed unevenly. Only a few players on the Women’s National Team have reaped the benefits of greater corporate investment, particularly after the team’s win in the 2015 Women’s World Cup. Their celebrity status, and the endorsements that accompany it, are not shared by rank-and-file NWSL players who often need to work second jobs while in season. It is also not accidental that the players who have these opportunities are disproportionately white, heterosexual, and feminine, indicative of a long lingering homophobia in women’s sport. And when these best-known players in the country go abroad to play, as forwards Alex Morgan and Crystal Dunn have done recently, these moves are feared to hurt attendance by depriving NWSL teams of the only players with widespread name recognition.

Finally, as in women’s college sports, the NWSL is owned and operated almost entirely by men. Research has shown that as women’s college sports gained in size, prestige, and resources post-Title IX, men increasingly wanted and obtained jobs in women’s sports. Persistent beliefs in men’s greater competence in sports than women contributed to shifting employment patterns. As a result, the percent of college women’s teams coached by women has dropped from 90 to 40 percent since 1972. Although it is too early to know definitively, similar dynamics may be operating in women’s soccer; for 2017, only 1 of 10 head coaches in the NWSL is a woman.

The NWSL is one of the few fully professional women’s team sports leagues in the United States. As such, it is a rare and important case study for understanding gender relations and gender (in)equality in elite sport. As the league gains visibility and accrues additional resources, it would do well to simultaneously ask itself what, exactly, success looks like, and what the consequences may be of reaching it.

Rachel Allison is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and affiliate of Gender Studies at Mississippi State University. Her research examines the gender, racial, and class politics of U.S. women’s professional soccer. A book on women’s soccer is forthcoming with Rutgers University Press.

Several cases working their way through the legal system have placed a national spotlight on the issue of transgender access to bathrooms. While some states have taken steps to allow access based on gender identity, many are considering legislation that restricts bathroom use by the sex assigned at birth.

Most of these court cases also apply to student athlete access to locker rooms and question schools’ obligations to provide appropriate facilities as well as the rights transgender athletes have to access these facilities.

The result has been considerable debate over how to accommodate the needs of transgender athletes. As researchers who focus on diversity and inclusion in sport, we see significant changes in the ways trans athletes are treated and believe there are pragmatic solutions available that will serve all athletes.

The changing landscape of sport for trans athletes

While legislative battles over transgender rights have been focused on school bathrooms, the issue of transgender rights in the entire sporting world is not a new one. Changes at higher levels indicate a shifting, more trans-inclusive sport landscape.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC), which for a long time was recognized as having one of the most exclusionary policies in sport, recently made some influential and groundbreaking changes. The old policy allowed transgender Olympians to participate only if they had transitioned via sex reassignment surgery, had completed at least two years of hormone therapy and could provide legal documentation of their transition.

In November 2015 (just two months before the Rio Olympics) the IOC changed course. Finding the previous trans policy to be unsupported by scientific evidence and recognized as excluding – rather than including – trans athletes, the committee revised it: Trans men (athletes assigned female sex at birth and who identify as a man) can compete without restriction. Trans women (athletes assigned male sex at birth and who identify as a woman) can compete as long as they have testosterone levels below a certain threshold.

The IOC is not alone in shifting to a more trans-inclusive approach. The NCAA – the governing body of college athletics in the U.S. – implemented a new policy in 2011. At colleges and universities across the United States, trans women can now compete against other women as long as they have had at least one year of hormone treatment.

Interestingly, it’s in the context of high school athletics where trans athlete policies vary the most. The majority of state high school athletic associations permit athletes to compete according to their gender identities.

A handful, however, have more restrictive policies than the IOC or NCAA. In these cases, transgender students are often prevented from competing in the category that matches their gender identity. One such state is Texas, where a transgender boy recently won the high school state championship in girls’ wrestling, as he was required to compete based on the sex listed on his birth certificate.

Locker rooms and facilities

As with policies governing their participation in high school sports, policies influencing trans athletes’ use of locker rooms vary considerably by state – and even by school. In some cases, trans athletes may be restricted to use facilities congruent with their sex assigned at birth. In other cases, they’re restricted to separate facilities specifically for them.

To illustrate, consider the case of a high school in Palatine, Illinois. There, a transgender female athlete was permitted to play on girls’ teams, but she was excluded from the girls’ locker room. The locker room contained private changing areas that the student intended to use. Nevertheless, she was forced to use a private changing area located in another part of the building. The Department of Education found this exclusion to violate the student’s civil rights and eventually reached an agreement with the school district that now permits the student to access the girls’ locker room.

Why does it matter?

Specialized, private facilities can magnify the potential for isolation. In the now-infamous case of Gavin Grimm, he was asked to use a retrofitted broom closet and nurse’s restroom because he was a transgender student.

In such cases, the transgender students may internalize the message of their unequal worth. Such isolation also physically separates trans athletes from much of the bonding and planning that goes on among teammates in a locker room.

It is not just transgender students who are affected. All others are privy to these cues. When this happens, observers are likely to adopt views that transgender persons are lesser than their peers.

Inclusive locker rooms: The best option for all athletes

A more inclusive option is to allow all athletes to access facilities – including locker rooms – that are consistent with their gender identities.

Two objections, however, are sometimes raised to gender-inclusive locker rooms: safety and privacy.

Arguments around safety are sometimes expressed as a concern that transgender individuals themselves are a threat to cisgender female users of the locker room. Other times, it’s fear of the alleged risk posed by non-transgender men – the belief that men may take advantage of the inclusive policy to enter the girls’ locker room without restriction.

Neither of these concerns, however, has any empirical basis. The latter, in fact, reflects an illogical presumption that a sign on the door keeps criminals out of locker rooms.

Privacy, on the other hand, is a relevant consideration, but not a reason to exclude transgender athletes from gender-appropriate locker rooms. Rather, privacy is a concern for many students faced with the prospect of communal showers and large undifferentiated changing areas. It would seem that most individuals – irrespective of their gender identity and expression – don’t want to change in the open or bathe in gang showers.

To alleviate the discomfort that all students – transgender and cisgender alike – might experience in such settings, as new schools are built, new locker rooms across the country are being designed with privacy in mind, with individual showers and changing areas available for any student. Meanwhile, existing locker rooms can be effectively and inexpensively retrofitted with privacy screens, as was done at several schools in New York.

Many institutions and sport governing bodies recognize this as best practice that promotes not only the inclusion of transgender athletes, but any athlete with a preference for modesty.

The national governing body for collegiate intramural and recreation offers guidance that addresses both transgender athlete needs and the needs of all students:

“Transgender student-athletes should be able to use the locker room, shower, and toilet facilities in accordance with the student’s gender identity. Every locker room should have some private, enclosed changing areas, showers, and toilets for use by any athlete who desires them.”

Given the problems associated with open locker room concepts, the answer for better services, privacy, and trans inclusion all revolve around better locker room spaces.

The answer: Inclusive principles for all athletes

It’s possible that the courts will soon clarify the obligation of education institutions to accommodate transgender students’ use of segregated facilities. Regardless of the outcome, sport associations in the educational context and beyond can, and in our view should, continue to lead the way toward more inclusive practices and spaces for all athletes.

George B. Cunningham, Professor of Sport Management and Director, Laboratory for Diversity in Sport, Texas A&M University and Erin E. Buzuvis, Director of the Center for Gender & Sexuality Studies, Professor of Law, Western New England University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Five years since Tim Tebow and “Tebow Mania” flooded mainstream media, electoral politics, and religious discourse, the genuflecting born-again Christian is relevant in American sport culture once again. Though Tebow no longer throws fluttering passes in the NFL, the barrel-chested southpaw now crowds the plate at First Data Field in Port St. Lucie, Florida for the New York Mets in spring training. On September 5, 2016, the Mets signed Tebow to a minor league contract that included a $100,000 signing bonus.

The Denver Broncos drafted Tebow 25th overall in the 2010 NFL draft and signed him to an $11.25 million contract despite signs that Tebow was not an NFL caliber quarterback. The scouting report leading up to the NFL draft provided clear suggestions that Tebow may struggle. Even when he performed relatively well, pundits maintained, “he just can’t play,” with some suggesting he was worse than notoriously bad NFL quarterbacks Ryan Leaf and Jamarcus Russell. Tebow is now a 29 year-old “prospect” who signed with the Mets despite not having played organized baseball since high school. Wandering in left field and stiff at the plate, in his 2016 fall league debut Tebow hit under .200 and struck out in 20 of 62 at-bats. Longtime baseball analyst Keith Law described him as a “farce” and “imposter pretending to have talent.”

Many have suggested that the Mets are “shamefully” employing Tebow’s athletic talent, or lack thereof, in so far as he continues to bring reliable merchandise sales and valuable branding to the club. After proving incapable at quarterback, Tebow bounced around the NFL as a backup with three different teams from 2012 to 2015, received very little playing time, yet still managed to lead the league in jersey sales. Tebow’s Mets jersey, selling for up to $119.00, is already a league leader.

Tebow’s particular branding is part of a broader history of Christian fundamentalist media and marketing that Steinberg and Kincheloe (2008) call Christotainment. Christotainment refers to the commercialization of Christianity, particularly in television and radio entertainment, that spreads conservative Christian ideas and American recovery narratives (e.g., “Making America Great Again”), and serves white supremacy. Since the 1960s, Christotainment has been dedicated to remaking the image of Jesus into a hero for white men and boys. This new symbol of Jesus represents conservative ideals, American nationalism, and the masculine strength to “recover” what, it is perceived, has been “lost” in America such as patriarchy, “nuclear” family values, and white dominance in the economy and electoral politics. Tebow’s public image is not intolerant or explicitly in service of white identities in these ways. Rather, Tebow is a “softer” face, and sporting spectacle, of this recovery heroism.

Branding is meant to bolster private entities’ appeal to consumers and generate income. Tebow’s brand appears as a non-brand, if you will, because it is of God’s image, good will, and giving back to communities. This brand and public image is about “giving” rather than “receiving” from consumers. The meanings of Tebow’s brand are exemplified in his non-profit Tim Tebow Foundation, a globalized community outreach charity with a mission “to bring Faith, Hope and Love to those needing a brighter day in their darkest hour of need.” Making money off this kind of brand might seem antithetical, if not unethical, but it is crucial for Tebow to 1) become a professional football and baseball “prospect” who gets offered lucrative contracts and multi-million dollar endorsements; 2) sell Tebow-commodities, such as two autobiographies and Tim Tebow Foundation jewelry; 3) use sport and the media to evangelize; and, 4) as my research with Josh Newman demonstrates, fit the “pro-life” Super Bowl commercial message in which he was featured, and promote conservative Christian recovery, persecution, and white-male victimhood narratives.

Tebow’s brand has been built upon a lifetime of opportunity and privilege in social life and in sport. If anyone was meant to succeed in sport, it was Tebow. This is not a rags-to-riches story by any means. According to his autobiography, Tebow was homeschooled by his mother, which afforded him the leisure time to develop his large physical frame. He routinely worked out and consumed protein shakes plus other supplements that contributed to his physical strength and athleticism. His born-again parents are also land-owners whose finances and Christian networks afforded Tebow the opportunity to experience foreign cultures where he became privy to public relations practices. Ultimately, in order to play quarterback as a homeschooled athlete, Tebow lived in a spare apartment owned by his family in another county, allowing him to play football at a Florida public school. Tebow eventually parlayed this upbringing into a full-ride scholarship to the football powerhouse University of Florida. He now compounds this privilege, rife with opportunity, into an over-extended, deeply commercialized career that combines a supposedly not-financially-motivated innocence with dogmatic, conservative Christian commentary about society.

Yet when he was released by the New England Patriots in 2015, Tebow’s commercial and ideological opportunism became apparent. He turned this new chapter into more media exposure, another lucrative autobiography, a six-figure contract, and a well-worn American Dream trope. Consider his message in a recent interview with ESPN about people who doubt his latest baseball pursuits: “It is unfortunate in society,” Tebow explained, that people just “live with the status quo….live by all these rules, and….just accept [the] average nine-to-five rather than striving for something” more.

In this statement on American society, Tim Tebow, a millionaire, is ironically recasting himself as a symbol of hardship and perseverance, as a surrogate for new conservative responses to structural inequality, diversity, and lack of opportunity. Which is to say, “if Tebow can do it, anyone can.” Tebow’s version of the American Dream works for privileged people like himself in Trump’s America, and against many underprivileged populations including people of color, members of the working class, and, in this case, non-Christians, as well as the actual baseball prospects who have been stripped of opportunity because of how Tebow’s brand provides value for team owners.

In short, Tebow’s privileged background gives him ample access to professional sport where he builds a conservative Christian brand. This brand possesses economic value for professional sport franchises, presents Tebow with more (undeserved) opportunity, and has cultural value in, and for, contemporary conservatism in American society.

Matt Hawzen is a doctoral candidate at Florida State University in the Sport Management department. He is interested in media representations of sport celebrities, conservative politics in sport and physical culture, and labor relations in the sports industry.

The NCAA Division I Men’s and Women’s National Basketball Tournaments tip off this week, bringing together players and spectators from around the world. Commonly known as “March Madness”, these annual tournaments have come to be seen as one of the biggest performance platforms for young basketball players from both the United States and, increasingly, across the planet. Generating more than $1 billion in advertising revenue alone, the NCAA basketball tournament has drawn more attention globally thanks to international broadcasting, digital technology, and the rise of international (non-U.S.) “student-athletes” at U.S. colleges and universities. In this article, I’ll discuss some noteworthy international players in this year’s tournament in light of the debate set off on college campuses nationwide by President Donald Trump’s policies surrounding immigration.

In sporting leagues across the world, there has been an increasing movement of athletic labor between countries, navigating issues of ethnicity, politics, economics and culture. This international movement has become increasingly prevalent in U.S. collegiate athletics. According to NCAA records, close to 7% of all active, Division I basketball players are international (non-U.S. national), representing an overall increase of nearly 133% since the association began keeping track of the measure in 2000. Exemplifying this growing internationalization, the University of South Florida women’s team has players from eight different countries on its roster, with head coach Jose Fernandez stating: “There really is so much talent all over the world that it’s great to have a broader recruiting pool to choose from.” At Florida State University, the women’s team boasts a trio of players from Spain (Maria Conde, Iho Lopez, and Leticia Romero), plus Ama Degbeon from Germany, while the men’s team has two Canadians and one player each from Chad, Nigeria, and Colombia. More notable international players include Przemek Karnowski (Poland) of the highly-ranked Gonzaga men’s team and freshman Lauri Markkanen (Finland) of Arizona, who was recently named to the Late Season Top-20 list for the John R. Wooden Award. The Louisville men’s team is another example of a multicultural locker room, with Anas Mahmoud (Egypt), Deng Adel and Mangok Mathiang (Sudan), and Matz Stockman (Norway). Adel and Mathiang were both born in Sudan and hold full citizenship in Australia. Sudan, one of the seven countries included in President Trump’s executive order, has been a continual supplier of talent in college and professional sports in the U.S. that stretches back to Manute Bol in the 1980s. Such an example highlights the impact of geo-politics and cross-border (transnational) movements and processes athlete migrants must navigate under their respective sporting leagues or organizations.

Historically, U.S. colleges and universities have long been hubs for hosting and educating international scholars and students while benefitting from their presence in return. Only more recently has the steady growth of international student-athletes in college athletics also expanded. In NCAA Division I, college basketball coaches have fueled this migration through the steady recruitment of players from an assortment of countries. With international recruitment in college basketball becoming so standard in today’s game, the summer recruiting period for college coaches has transformed into the “overseas travel” period in order to attend FIBA world championships and other international basketball events. Under extreme pressure to recruit top talent and win championships, some coaches are even given expanded budgets to seek international stars beyond the U.S. border. Potential international players are recruited through a network of coaches, scouts and other basketball personnel.

As foreign affairs debates have escalated in the United States in recent months, immigrant hostility and xenophobic rhetoric have left college administrators feeling anxious about the future of international student communities. Reflecting concerns by both sport practitioners and sport sociology researchers (see Christorpher Faulker’s recent posting on Engaging Sports), understanding migrant athletes’ day-to-day experiences abroad are fundamental to preserving and fostering internationally diverse sporting leagues and organizations while also protecting the rights of the players themselves. For my dissertation, I am examining push-pull migration factors and cross-cultural experiences of basketball migrants in the NCAA. In exemplifying a unique case, Cal-Berkeley’s Chen Yue is China’s first female NCAA Division I basketball player and has proven to be an important figure on campus for both the international community and Cal student-athletes. Chen Yue’s relationship with her teammates was described in The Daily Cal as:

“The more time they spent with her, the more they learned about her upbringing in China and the cultural differences between her old and new homes. Talking about topics — from China’s one-child policy to differing gender norms — opened up a whole new perspective on life for everyone around Chen.”

Such athletes have the ability to enliven both classroom and locker room discussions. To date, sport and migration research has originated from scholars in different countries and sporting contexts. Comparative studies such as Norwegian players who chose to attend university in the U.S. and those who did not or an analysis of migratory motivations of American professional basketball players highlight the importance of understanding athlete migrant motivations and experiences. Future studies of this kind can better inform policies of sport organizations, educational institutions, and countries alike. International student-athletes will again enhance March Madness as elite performers and, more importantly, as students on their respective college campuses by bringing global perspectives to their American peers and serving as liaisons between the college athletics and international community populations. As underdog upsets and last second buzzer beating shots dominate the headlines in the coming weeks, we should also take note of the cultural exchanges happening between players of all nationalities and recognize the important place that international communities have on college campuses across the United States.

Ryan Turcott is a Ph.D. Candidate and instructor at the University of Georgia. His research centers on sport labor migration, qualitative research methods in sport, and sport for development. His dissertation focuses on the migration influences and lived experiences of international (Non-U.S.) players in NCAA Division I basketball.

The United States Women’s National Soccer Team will take the field on March 1 for the SheBelieves Cup. With no upcoming major international tournaments, these matches will be the team’s most publicized events of 2017. Though the team’s success has been rightly celebrated as an achievement for women in sports, there has been far less analysis about the racial and ethnic diversity of the players. Prior to the 2015 World Cup, several journalists noted the team’s overwhelming whiteness, but this discussion largely took a back seat to female empowerment narratives and Title IX salutes that followed their victory, celebratory parade, and subsequent time in the spotlight.

Celebrating female athletic success is critical, but it is equally important to examine other factors that influence sport participation. Many sport sociologists have pointed out that Title IX has benefitted white women more than it has benefitted women from other racial or ethnic groups. They have also found that young people who aspire to be athletes have an easier time imagining themselves as successful in a sport if media images of that sport contain people that resemble them. The SheBelieves tournament is a good time to think about who the public will see when they watch some of America’s most beloved female athletes.

To assess this, I reviewed the past and present rosters of the team and recorded information about each player’s racial appearance. A research assistant helped me categorize the players and investigate their biographies for more information about each player’s background. Of course, photographic assessments don’t always align with player self-identification, but they do reflect the racial labeling system that is embedded in U.S. culture and, thus, suggest how the players are likely to be viewed by the audience. Within this system, those with fair skin are often classified as white, while individuals with darker skin tones are classified as non-white. With respect to skin color, the history of the “one-drop” rule suggests that individuals who have some black or African ancestry are non-white, even if those people also have white or European ancestry.

For the 2017 SheBelieves Cup, 76% of the U.S. players are white, while 24% are not. This roster features more players of color than recent American teams, but slightly fewer players than the US teams of the mid-2000s. Between 1999 and 2016, the U.S. women appeared in five World Cups and five Olympic tournaments. According to published records, 68 different women were rostered for the U.S. in those 10 events. Of those women, 58 were white (79%), while 14 were women of color (21%) (you can find full data at the bottom of the page). According to the 2000 and 2010 census, whites made up 75.1% and 72.4% of the population, respectively. This means that among the U.S. women’s team, white players are slightly overrepresented in comparison to the general population.

A deeper look shows that the players don’t necessarily reflect the racial and ethnic diversity of the United States. There are six players of color on the current roster. Four of them (Casey Short, Christen Press, Mal Pugh, Lynn Williams) are multiracial and two of them (Brianna Pinto and Crystal Dunn) are black. The increase in women of color from the last tournament is a welcome change; however, nationally, these two groups (black and multiracial) represented 15.5% of the U.S. population. Latinos of all races, who make up 16.3% of the population, are barely represented among the players. Amy Rodriguez, the only current Latina, has Cuban grandparents but is phenotypically white. According to my research, there has only been one other Latina national team member, Stephanie (Lopez) Cox. Several former players (Tiffany Roberts, Lorrie Fair, and Natasha Kai) were Asian/Pacific Islander, but none of the current players are, even though these groups represent five percent of the U.S. population. Furthermore, all of the current players were born in the United States. These numbers seem especially low given the massive popularity of soccer across Latin America and Asia as well as the cultural importance of soccer to American immigrants from these regions.

It’s also interesting to note that the women’s team stands in sharp contrast with the U.S. men’s national team. The latest roster of the men’s team (Feb. 3, 2017) is almost equally split between white and non-white players. Of the 21 players, one third have Latino ancestry; two of those players also have Asian ancestry. Further, several of the men’s team members immigrated to the U.S. as children or were born to immigrant parents. Bottom line, the men’s team reflects the global popularity of the game, while the women’s team does not.

What does existing research tell us about this difference? Not much. The majority of research about race in American sports examines blacks and whites. Though there are some notable exceptions, the research on Latinos and Asians in sport has generally not included women, so we know very little about their participation in soccer or other sports. Globally, female athletes from Latin America and Asia have struggled for acceptance, recognition, and resources, which limits youth participation and influences cultural perceptions. Immigration scholars have noted that Latino and Asian migrants tend to place stricter regulations on girls than they do on boys. Both cultures also tend to place a great deal of emphasis on academic achievement, especially for girls. There is also some evidence that the structure and location of the national team pipeline might be a barrier for some women of color. Though these explanations are all helpful, it is important to remember that there is tremendous diversity among the U.S. Latino and Asian populations in terms of social class, immigration status, and length of residence.

Though we may not know much about why Asian and Latina women are not playing soccer at the highest level in the U.S., I hope that this story functions as a call for us to learn more about these communities and their involvement with sport. It is possible that these groups are playing other sports or are participating at more local levels. For example, NCAA data shows that Asians are represented well in tennis and golf but not in other sports. We should investigate the ways that race, ethnicity, immigration status, language, social class, and (dis)ability all interact to influence sport participation among these groups. In addition, we need continued research on how these factors also matter for black and multiracial women who are playing sports other than track and basketball. Research consistently shows that sport involvement helps young women develop self-confidence and learn lifelong health habits, and thus it is vital that sport experiences are not limited by race or ethnicity. As the American population continues to grow and diversify, and as women continue to embrace athletics, the sport community must engage with more diverse populations to ensure that there are meaningful opportunities for all women to play and to believe.

Players of Color and White Players Appearing for US National Women’s Team
1999 World Cup: players of color – 20%; white players – 80%
2000 Olympics: players of color – 16.7%; white players – 83.3%
2003 World Cup: players of color – 25%; white players – 75%
2004 Olympics: players of color – 16.7%; white players – 83.3%
2007 World Cup: players of color – 28.6%; white players – 71.4%
2008 Olympics: players of color – 23.5%; white players – 76.5%
2011 World Cup: players of color – 9.5%; white players – 90.5%
2012 Olympics: players of color – 5.9%; white players – 94.1%
2015 World Cup: players of color – 13%; white players – 87%
2016 Olympics: players of color – 16.7%; white players – 83.3%
2017 SheBelieves Cup: players of color – 24%; white players – 76%

Jen McGovern, PhD, is an assistant professor of sociology at Monmouth University. Her research centers around how race, ethnicity, and gender interact to influence experience and opportunities within sport, exercise, and physical fitness.

Sexual violence in college sport represents an important problem that coaches and administrators must address. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the government has conducted 365 investigations of colleges for possibly mishandling reports of sexual violence since 2011. A simple search in the Chronicle’s Title IX database using the terms “football” and “sexual assault” yields around 250 matches for currently open investigations and 49 matches for cases that have been resolved. Further, roughly half of the student athletes surveyed in a recent study admitted to committing coercive sexual behaviors. Scholars have been investigating the relationship between college football and sexual violence for a long time, and the problem has not gone unnoticed by journalists, critics, and higher education administrators.

Jessica Luther’s 2016 book Unsportsmanlike Conduct: College Football and the Politics of Rape characterizes what she calls a “playbook” that sports organizations draw on time after time to respond to sexual assault allegations and investigations. This playbook includes tactics like convincing victims to stay quiet, just shrugging it off, and focusing on “moving on.” As a communication scholar, my primary interest is the ways in which the culture of collegiate sport and organizational identity is communicated by administrators, coaches, players, and fans – the members of university sports institutions. Their communicative “playbook,” to use Luther’s concept, can be both preemptive and reactionary, and usually involves bolstering values (and myths) of sport participation through their handbooks, public addresses, and promotional materials. This communication can be unintentional as well as intentional. Like Luther, I hope to point out some problems regarding institutional responses to sexual assault investigations and suggest some ways that student athletes in particular can use their voices to change, instead of perpetuate, the status quo in college football.

Let’s reflect on the recent case at the University of Minnesota, where ten players were accused of sexually assaulting a female student in September 2016. Since then, two separate investigations came to different conclusions regarding the matter. Though the legal details of the case and the well-being of the victim are of utmost importance here and in all cases, I want to focus on a particular moment in December 2016 and its rhetorical impact on the culture of collegiate sport both for the Gophers and for the NCAA more broadly. Following a players-only meeting, Minnesota wide receiver Drew Wolatarsky announced that the team would be boycotting all football activities, including the upcoming Holiday Bowl game, to stand in support of their teammates. Their reason? The ten players in question were “denied due process,” and the teammates wanted to make a public statement of condemnation. Wolatarsky said the following:

We the united Gopher football team issue this statement to take back the reputation and integrity of our program and our brothers that have faced unjust Title IX investigation without due process. We are concerned that our brothers have been named publicly with reckless disregard and violation of their constitutional rights. We are now compelled to speak for our team and take back our program.

The phrase “take back our program” should be concerning, as it implies that the “threat” posed by a Title IX investigation is more important than achieving a football culture free of sexual violence. Later on in Wolitarsky’s statement, he rhetorically transformed the athletes in question into victims when he said, “These kids’ reputations…have been ruined.” This is a familiar tune used to defend athletes accused (or found guilty) of sexual assault, and it minimizes the acts at the center of the investigation.

The choice to boycott drew controversy. Minnesota head coach Tracy Claeys initially decided to support the players’ proposed boycott, tweeting “Have never been more proud of our kids. I respect their rights & support their efforts to make a better world,” and was subsequently fired. The Athletic Director, Mark Coyle, and University President, Eric W. Kaler, instead defended the suspensions as being in line with the university and team’s values. Eventually, the team rescinded their boycott threat. Wolitarsky conceded, “It’s clear that lifting the ten suspensions was not going to happen.”

This exchange is important for a few reasons. First, when athletes use their voices, people tend to listen. What they say matters. Sociologists and communication scholars have highlighted the importance of “activist athletes” in public life. High profile athletes can wield political influence. Think Colin Kaepernick, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and John Carlos/Tommie Smith, all standing up/kneeling to send a message of social justice. The players at Minnesota, meanwhile, chose to defend their “brothers” who were “denied due process” instead of attempting to support an institutional culture that is committed to the well-being of all its students. It was a tone-deaf response, even if unintentional.

That leads me to the second reason this is significant. From the perspective of the audience, the intentions of the speaker(s) often do not align with the effects of their speech. Communication is not one-directional, and the context – everything from who is listening, to what else is being said, to the social conditions surrounding the message – can have a bigger influence on the meaning than the intent or purpose behind the rhetorical act. In rhetorical studies, critics adopt this stance to evaluate public discourse according to its social consequences. In other words, that Wolitarsky and the team “didn’t mean” to sound like they were condoning sexual violence does not matter. Regardless of the intent, the team’s statement minimized the importance of sexual assault.

Third, this moment reinforces a point Jessica Luther makes about rewriting the playbook institutions and their members often use in these cases. Advocacy is a powerful tool. We should teach student-athletes about the problems in college football and how to be advocates to change a culture that often condones sexual assault. Athletes’ voices have the power to shape the present and future of college football. This threatened boycott, however, missed the mark. As representatives of the University of Minnesota, student athletes should exemplify and advocate for the principles the institution claims to stand for.

Though the case at Minnesota has faded from broader public scrutiny since the firing of Coach Claeys, we should keep in mind that collegiate sports organizations have an ethical and rhetorical responsibility to enact the values and ideals of sport and drive meaningful change to the culture of sexual violence through their discourse.

Rebecca Alt is a doctoral candidate in Communication (Rhetoric and Political Culture) at the University of Maryland. She is interested in the communication of collegiate sport culture, organizational rhetoric, and identity. You can follow her on Twitter at @rhetorbec.

As NFL fans gear up for Super Bowl LI between the New England Patriots and the Atlanta Falcons, some fans are apt to feel more included in the broadcast than others. Advertisers, as critics have long noted, tend to assume that American football fans are straight men. Many long-awaited and expensive Super Bowl ads tend to be, well, pretty sexist. While the most egregious examples of sexism in Super Bowl broadcasts and advertisements seem to be decreasing as the NFL tries to acknowledge the presence of women fans (at minimum as a new marketing demographic), many women continue to feel left out of the Super Bowl spectacle.

Secret, a deodorant line with a history of taking on important social issues in ads, is trying to address that in this year’s ads — taking direct aim at sexism within sports fan communities. One of the company’s ads, titled “NFL—Red Zone” (subtitled “Ain’t No Party Like a Teachable Moment Party”), features two men shouting at the TV encouraging the quarterback to “throw the ball.” A woman standing nearby interrupts and explains, to the shock of the two men, why their calls to throw the ball are wrong and that the team should run the ball instead. In another Secret advertisement, titled “No Love At First Sight” (subtitled “Throws Before Bros”), a woman watching a game in a Pittsburgh Steelers jersey stares longingly as a handsome party guest enters the doorway, while the camera pans in slow motion between the two of them exchanging eyes as her windswept hair blows and he basks in a sunlit glow. This “love at first sight” moment is quickly extinguished, however, when he takes off his coat to reveal a New England Patriots jersey, which prompts her to not allow him to sit on the same couch.

While I don’t look to advertisements to bring about revolutions, they are nonetheless emblematic of the appetite among women sports fans to be taken seriously, which the majority of other commercials that actively or passively exclude women, do not satisfy. The two Secret ads are emancipatory in an extremely limited and specific sense, in what Andi Zeisler calls a “marketplace feminism” that is based on consumption (of deodorant, in this case) rather than collective social change. But even more, their challenge to dominant norms of fandom doesn’t go nearly far enough. My own research on women who are fans of men’s sports, which I recently published in the Sociology of Sport Journal alongside Cheryl Cooky and David L. Andrews, shows that defining the quality of one’s fandom by criteria like these—knowledge of the game, unwillingness to pay attention to men’s bodies—also serves to exclude those who do not fit those criteria.

Gendered Sports Fan Stereotypes

The first ad discussed above illustrates a situation that many women who love sports are familiar with—being greeted with low expectations for knowledge and needing to prove people wrong before being accepted. The second ad challenges the stereotype that women become sports fans in order to impress men, which may suggest that women are not serious as fans or that they are not fans for the “right” reasons (such as being initiated into the local team in childhood by a father figure and loving the team forever no matter how bad they are). A belief that women’s fandom is guided by heterosexual attraction, whether it is attraction to other sports fans or to the players on the team, is all too common.

While many feel that sports can bring people together, it is important to ask who is excluded from the definition of a sports fan, and how this exclusion creates the boundaries that reaffirm others fans’ membership. When I interviewed women who strongly self-identified as sports fans for the aforementioned study with my colleagues Cheryl Cooky and David L. Andrews, I quickly discovered that the women knew those stereotypes very well. One participant was frustrated that when she goes to the sports bar:

People don’t talk to me, they talk to my boyfriend. … And I don’t always know how to answer sports questions, but it’s just the fact that people always talk to my boyfriend who is a man, who is a sports fan, as opposed to a girl.

While everyone I interviewed felt that the stereotypes were unfair, their explanations for this unfairness differed. For some women sports fans, stereotypes were unfair because they excluded all women whether they fit the stereotypes or not. The women that conform to dominant ideas of what sports fandom is, they argued, should be included. This was explained by one woman I spoke with, who responded to a question about gendered stereotypes:

[Being subject to stereotypes is] not fun but [the stereotypes are] true. I’ve seen it. … I thought of someone I work with who’s a really annoying Blackhawks fan, and his girlfriend claims to be a Blackhawks fan because of him, so it’s all really annoying.

In this quote, the participant is stating that if gendered stereotypes about a woman are true, then she is not a real fan. Conversely, others felt that women should be included as fans regardless of whether they fit the stereotypes or not. As one participant put it:

I feel like I’m living the definition of what it means to be an actual sports fan, female, male, whatever, doesn’t matter. …For something like, I think, you know, A.J. Pierzynski is hot, you know, to kind of disqualify… or somehow cheapen my sports fandom just really irritates me.

For her, the belief that women are not legitimate fans if they engage in any of the stereotypical fan behaviours—regardless of any other aspect of their fandom that might be deemed more serious or appropriate—is unfair and frustrating.

I think there are two important but slightly contradictory points to take from this. On the one hand, stereotypes that women sports fans are driven by heterosexual attraction, that they are not knowledgeable, or that they are not passionate about sports, need to be rejected. These assumptions serve to exclude women and to solidify sports as a heterosexual and masculine preserve. But on the other hand, sports fans should broaden their understandings of what counts as a “real” fan. Why is it wrong to get into sports because of a significant other, or to be attracted to the players? Why is a large amount of specialized knowledge about a sport the bar that we set, when everyone has to start somewhere? Why can’t people be fans in the way that they want to be fans?

Sports can be a very meaningful part of people’s lives, and exclusion based on gender or any other facet of identity is harmful. Super Bowl broadcasters and advertisers would do well to acknowledge the diversity of fan bases and to scrap sexist programming. But the work of creating more inclusive fan communities cannot be limited to teams and broadcasters. Fans need to personally challenge sexist stereotypes when they encounter them; strict definitions that exclude others (especially women) should give way to more inclusive and welcoming sports fan communities. The inclusion of women as sports fans should not be dependent on their ability to meet specific criteria, or worse, by rationalizing one woman’s deservingness of being accepted by marginalizing another. There are many ways to be a fan, and fan bases are stronger when they include everyone who wants to be a part of them.

Katelyn Esmonde is a doctoral candidate in Physical Cultural Studies at the University of Maryland. She is interested in gender, sports fandom, digital technologies, and theories of physical culture. You can follow her and her Toronto Maple Leafs commentary on Twitter at @phylliskessel.

Each year, universities in the United States spend millions of dollars and college football coaches invest countless hours in an effort to lure top players to their schools. The recruiting process culminates with “National Signing Day,” on which high school seniors are officially able to sign National Letters of Intent that bind them to attend a particular university. As National Signing Day 2017 approaches this Wednesday (Feb. 1), millions of people will visit recruiting websites, such as rivals.com and scout.com, to follow who signs with which school. College football fans will alternately experience joy when a top prospect commits to their favorite team and devastation when a recruit goes elsewhere (this is often how I’ve felt as a fan, at least).

One popular outlet for fans to express their joy (or vent their frustration) are the message boards attached to recruiting websites. Initial research on the demographics of college sport message board users suggests an online community that is primarily composed of middle-aged white men with relatively high levels of education and income. In contrast, more than 80% of the Rivals top 250 high school football prospects are black. So, what happens when a group of mostly older white men gathers in a virtual community to discuss the decisions and actions of predominantly young, black men being recruited to play college football? Well, my colleagues Bianca González-Sobrino, Matthew Hughey, and I examined this question in a study that will appear in the Sociology of Sport Journal.

Based on a review of 3,800 posts from college sport message boards that we systematically collected and examined in the study, we found that fans seldom mentioned race overtly. Rather, message board commenters used forms of “color-blind” racial rhetoric that invoked racial meanings without the explicit mention of race. Message board users tended to rely on several common racial assumptions, expressing beliefs in the natural superiority of black physicality, doubts about black intellectual ability, and expectations about whites possessing skill, technique, and mental capacity. For instance, 66 comments in our sample expressed concerns about or insulted a player’s intelligence; of these comments, 64 were directed toward black players compared to two toward white players. Notably, message board users frequently voiced doubt about the ability of black players to qualify academically for entrance to a university. In contrast, 15 comments in the sample offered praise of a player’s intelligence or character, nine of which were directed toward white players compared to six toward black players.

In general, we found it somewhat surprising that relatively few comments on college sport message boards mentioned race overtly, since racism is often rampant on the Internet. While harsh, Jim Crow-style racism has declined in public settings during the past few decades, many people are still comfortable making racially deprecating remarks in private areas with others of the same race. Similarly, the anonymity offered by the Internet allows people to be comfortable writing racist comments they wouldn’t ordinarily make in public settings. Even in the context of sport, researchers have found that overt racism is common on English soccer message boards.

So why do message boards devoted to college sport teams remain relatively free of overt racism? One factor may be that a unique sense of community exists on college sport message boards, which leads users to temper their discussion similarly to how they do when speaking in public settings. In our observations, many message board users perceived themselves as “representatives” of their universities, and it was not uncommon for them to express fear that negative comments would reflect badly on the university and, in turn, harm a team’s recruiting efforts. Therefore, if a user were to write comments that others perceived to be racist, it could jeopardize their status in the message board community.

Ultimately, the persistence of common racial assumptions on sport message board sites—including beliefs in the natural superiority of black physicality and athleticism, doubts about black intellectual ability, and expectations about whites possessing skill, technique, and mental capacity—show that our society is anything but “post-racial.” In other words, we may have witnessed a declining tendency for people to speak openly about race in public, but we have seen little change in dominant ideas about race. While it may be tempting to think of comments on sport message boards as being trivial, such discussion (and the ideas it reinforces among privileged groups) can work to reproduce white superiority and rationalize racial inequality in subtle, yet important ways. During an era in which we are seeing a rise in white nationalist groups, online sites serve as important fields in which the very meanings of race are contested and reproduced.

Adam Love is an assistant professor in the Department of Kinesiology, Recreation, and Sport Studies at the University of Tennessee. His research investigates racial and gender ideology on the Internet and in sports media. To read more of his research about college sport message boards, click here and here. You can find him on Twitter @AdamWLove

As Donald Trump assumes his new role as President of the United States after a bitterly divisive campaign, it is increasingly relevant to examine the ways in which politics intersect with sport. While much attention has been given to the proliferation of national anthem protests by athletes and spectators, and the modest group of NBA coaches speaking out against Trump’s rhetoric, no examination of politics and sport would be complete without discussing how this intersection is brought to bear on those who report and/or comment on sporting news for a living.

Although sports journalism has long been viewed as the “toy department” of the mass media, rarely reporting on serious topics such as political corruption or healthcare reform, sports journalists play an important role in society, working to meet the demands of a seemingly insatiable appetite for sports news. In spite of this appetite, sports journalists and sports media personalities are increasingly discovering that some of their patrons don’t want the extra side of politics that sometimes comes with the sports news entrée.

“Stick to sports” has become the rallying cry of sports media consumers who prefer apolitical sportswriters and sportscasters. Nowhere is this more apparent than on social networks such as Twitter, which gives sports media consumers unfettered access to those who work in the sports media industry. On November 9, 2016, the day after Election Day in the United States, many sports media personalities took to Twitter (and, in some cases, the airwaves) to voice their opinions vis-à-vis the election result. In response, however, many men and women in the industry were told by some of their followers to “stick to sports,” as seen in the examples below. In many instances these commands to be apolitical were accompanied by threats to click the dreaded “unfollow” button.

Where does this phenomenon come from? Little scholarship exists on media consumers’ desire for apolitical sports coverage. However, an interview with Dave Zirin conducted by sport sociologist C. Richard King for the Journal of Sport and Social Issues in 2008 offers a few potential explanations.

Zirin, a self-proclaimed “radical journalist” who maintains an online column/blog called The Edge of Sports, professed to King an increased social and political awareness during the 1990s that coincided with a disenchantment with sports. As athletes such as Mahmoud Abdul Rauf—an NBA player who refused to stand for the national anthem, a la Colin Kaepernick—found little support from their mostly-conservative team and league administrators, Zirin saw a void which needed to be filled, that of political sports commentary.

For Zirin, what made sports journalists (and, perhaps their audiences) resistant to a having their work politicized is the fact that sports journalism, widely viewed as the “toy department” of the news machine, is very seldom taken seriously. This is perhaps because the people covering sports have not taken themselves seriously. “For far too many people, politics is what the people with the bad haircuts do on CSPAN,” Zirin said in the interview.

Exacerbating matters, and perhaps striking closer to the heart of the “stick to sports” moment, is the fact that, as David Theo Goldberg has argued, the sports media industry (in Goldberg’s case, sports talk radio) has been a bastion of dominant, conservative ideals, despite the increasing number of women and people of color employed in the industry. These values, which tend to ignore issues related to race, gender, sexuality and socioeconomic status (to the extent they don’t impact the privileged), have long had an effect on the ways in which “old-school” sports journalists have viewed the world, their work, and the intersections therein. Additionally, inasmuch as the sports media have conditioned their audiences over the years—some people watch the Super Bowl just for the commercials, after all—the average sports media consumer has come to expect sports coverage that is relatively apolitical or, at the very least, socially indifferent.

But the landscape of sports media coverage and politics has changed in recent years. According to Zirin in 2008, as sports journalism became increasingly democratized thanks to the web, “old-school” sports journalism and sports journalists were being challenged politically, often called out for ignoring their social privileges. But now the roles have reversed; sports media personalities have become more outwardly political, particularly online. In a sense, sports media professionals have played a significant role in making sports journalism more democratic, which has coincided with the increasing demands placed on sports journalists to build and maintain active presences on the web. These changing demands have been evidenced by research conducted by Pamela Laucella, Mary Lou Sheffer, and Brad Schultz in Routledge’s Handbooks of Sports Communication and Sports and New Media, published in 2013 and 2014, respectively.

Thus, what we are witnessing in the current, “stick to sports” moment is a perfect storm that is the result of competing political views within the sports media industry and sports journalism’s web-driven democracy. Given the fact the web fosters more nuanced sports commentary, and the divisive political environment in which we currently find ourselves, it’s no wonder sports media personalities have been more inclined to express their opinions online, despite repeated calls by their audience not to do so. Also, due to sports journalism’s lack of any “official” connection with Washington, sports journalists are free to provide personal political commentary. Thus, any inclination to provide political commentary would appear to be natural.

A cursory look at the Twitter profiles of sports media personalities suggests many of them have taken notice of the “stick to sports” moment. For example, Toronto Star sports columnist Bruce Arthur and Comcast SportsNet anchor and reporter Trenni Kusnierek both tell their profiles’ visitors, to varying degrees, that they will not stick to sports. Atlanta Falcons online writer Jeanna Thomas’s pinned tweet, which remains affixed atop her timeline, warns her followers that she does not stick to sports. An accompanying trademark superscript following the phrase suggests Thomas’s awareness of the phrase’s increased prominence.

As Donald Trump assumes his new role in White House, bringing with him inflammatory rhetoric, many sports media personalities will be disinclined to stick to sports. To expect otherwise would be unrealistic. “[P]olitics are of course the food we eat, the air we breathe, and yes, the sports we watch and play,” Zirin said in 2008.

Because of the web and social media, sports media personalities are no longer required to stick to sports and their audiences will have to grapple with, and/or enjoy, this new reality.

Guy Harrison is a doctoral candidate in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. His research examines constructions of gender and race in the sports media. You can follow him on Twitter @GuyMHarrison.