Episode 141: IOC’s anti-protest policy, Sky Blue FC’s Alyse LaHue, and NWSL news
This week, the whole gang's together again! After talking about the turbulent week that was in women’s college basketball, [6:48] Amira, Lindsay, Brenda, Shireen, and Jessica turn to the IOC’s latest move to squelch political protest at the Olympics. [27:01] Then Lindsay sits down with Sky Blue FC’s General Manager, Alyse LaHue, and they talk about how LaHue’s turned around the franchise’s fortunes, what her week looks like headed into the NWSL draft, and what she learned during her year working at the WNBA. [44:30] The gang then goes over all the big NWSL news from the past week or so. [56:29]
Of course, you’ll hear the Burn Pile, [1:09:55] the Bad Ass Woman of the Week segment, starring, once again, Claressa Shields, [1:12:57] and what is good in our worlds.
Links
UConn Loses to Baylor, and Home Winning Streak Ends at 98: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/sports/ncaabasketball/uconn-baylor-women
Does UConn deserve to be the No. 1 women’s college basketball team in the country?: https://www.sbnation.com/2020/1/9/21057204/uconn-baylor-womens-basketball
Opinion: International Olympic Committee's ban on political protests is the height of hypocrisy: https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/columnist/nancy-armour/2020/01/09/tokyo-olympics-ioc-political-protests/4424333002
The IOC’s own history makes its new Olympic protest policy problematic: https://sports.yahoo.com/how-a-2016-olympic-controversy-exposes-the-io-cs-new-protest-policy-as-problematic-232814904
Sixty Years Ago She Refused to Stand for the Anthem: https://zora.medium.com/sixty-years-ago-she-refused-to-stand-for-the-anthem-cf443b4e75c
The conundrum of political neutrality in sport: https://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/108823/political-neutrality-in-sport
Laura Harvey leaves Utah Royals to become USWNT U-20 coach: https://equalizersoccer.com/2020/01/03/laura-harvey-leaves-utah-royals-nwsl-pursue-us-soccer-uswnt-opportunity
Commissioner hire will shape the NWSL’s future, for better or worse: https://equalizersoccer.com/2020/01/10/nwsl-commissioner-hire-shape-future-interviews-update
Goleiro é vítima de gritos homofóbicos na Copinha; árbitro relata em súmula: https://observatorioracialfutebol.com.br/goleiro-e-vitima-de-gritos-homofobicos-na-copinha-arbitro-relata-em-sumula/
Column: Recent events show why sexual harassment in sports media must end: https://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2020/01/sexual-harrassment-sports-media
Agnes Keleti, oldest living Olympic champion and Holocaust survivor, turns 99: https://olympics.nbcsports.com/2020/01/09/agnes-keleti-oldest-living-olympic-champion
Ayesha McGowan becomes first African-American female pro cyclist: http://www.aquickbrownfox.com/blog/2020/1/6/oh-haii-im-a-pro-cyclist-now
Trans footballer makes history by signing with premier league women’s team: https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2020/01/15/argentina-mara-gomez-villa-san-carlos-trans-footballer-womens-team
Egypt’s 12-year-old table tennis star becomes first African player to top the Women’s Single ITTF Cadet World Ranking: https://www.egyptindependent.com/egypts-12-year-old-table-tennis-star-becomes-first-african-player-to-top-the-womens-single-ittf-cadet-world-ranking
Claressa Shields rolls to one-sided victory, becomes fastest boxer to win titles in three divisions: https://sports.yahoo.com/claressa-shields-rolls-to-onesided-victory-becomes-fastest-boxer-to-win-three-titles-050449391
Transcript
Jessica: Welcome to Burn It All Down, the feminist sports podcast you need. I’m Jessica Luther, freelance journalist and author in Austin, Texas. And on today’s show I’m joined by Brenda Elsey, an associate professor of history at Hofstra on Long Island; Shireen Ahmed, a writer, public speaker, and sports activist in Toronto; Amira Rose Davis, an associate professor of history and African-American studies at Penn State University, and Lindsay Gibbs, the creator of Power Plays, a no-bullshit newsletter about sexism in sport that arrives right in your inbox three days a week.
Right at the top of the show we want to say thank you to our patrons whose support of this podcast through our ongoing Patreon campaign make Burn It All Down possible. We are forever and always grateful. If you’d like to become a patron it’s easy – go to patreon.com/burnitalldown. For as little as $2/month you can access exclusives like extra Patreon-only segments and our monthly behind the scenes vlog.
On today’s show we’re gonna talk about the International Olympic Committee’s most recent efforts to curb political protest at the Olympics. Then Lindsay interviews Alyse LaHue, general manager of the NWSL’s Sky Blue FC, about how she turned around the franchise’s fortunes, what her week looks like headed into the NWSL draft, and what she learned during her year working at the WNBA. And then we’ll talk about the flurry of NWSL news that arrived this week. And of course, we’ll cap off today’s show by burning things that deserve to be burned, doing shoutouts to women who deserve shoutouts, and telling you what is good in our worlds.
But first, before we get into all of that, what a week in women’s college basketball! On Thursday night alone SIX teams ranked in the top 25 lost, including #9 NC State, #10 Texas A&M, #11 Florida State, #17 Maryland and #24 Michigan, and then Baylor, ranked sixth at the time, went into Storrs. They beat UConn, the #1 overall team. That win ended the Huskies’ 98-game home winning streak. Holy shit. What a wild week. Lindsay, what are you thinking this week about all these upsets?
Lindsay: I…love it. The more chaotic energy the better. I’m pretty obsessed with everything that’s going on with women’s college basketball right now. It’s just going to be such a fun few months. Really the biggest surprise to me is how up and down Oregon look, I mean they are in the most difficult conference, the Pac-12 is just brutal. So in that way I understand them having some off-nights. But they are just so good and I so want Sabrina to win her national championship so I hope they get it together. But you know, it was fun. I gotta say, it’s just fun!
Jessica: Yeah, ’cause I should say, Oregon was #2 and they lost on Friday.
Lindsay: Yeah.
Jessica: So they also lost. And Oregon State, they’re probably going to move into #1. They just beat Arizona, #18 Arizona, at Arizona, also on Friday night. I think I’m correct that Oregon State and UCLA are the only unbeaten teams in Division 1 women’s basketball right now.
Lindsay: Like I said, Pac-12. It’s ridiculous.
Jessica: Yeah. Amira, were you keeping up with it this week?
Amira: Only slightly, now that Lex plays in the big time. I’ve been mostly watching that in my oodles of spare time. I think this season is really intriguing, even for lay-watchers of the game, which is amazing. There’s so much competition and talent, which is what everybody who always follows women’s college ball has known. I think that we shouldn’t overlook the fact that when Baylor goes into Storrs and hands UConn a loss like that it also works to kind of dispel the idea that UConn, that we know is a myth, that UConn is the only good team. They’re not the reigning champs. That was some of that discussion of “should they be #1” but I think for laypeople of the game who always like to complain about UConn’s dominance or like rest on these myths about the fact that there’s no parity. This season very visibly is debunking any kind of lingering ideas about women’s college ball.
Jessica: Yeah, absolutely. I mean that’s the thing that we’re always hearing, that people don’t care about women’s ball because UConn dominates. So, I’m excited for all the people who now will care. Because we don’t have that domination at all. That is great news.
Lindsay: That is a great idea for a Power Plays article. Let’s keep going. Writing it down!
Jessica: Bren, do you wanna get in here at all?
Brenda: I mean, I just agree with everything that’s said but I had a question for those of you that follow it more closely than I do – is something going on besides…Okay, it dispels myths, but I’m also wondering is there something substantive going on with scouting or investment or player distribution that this is sort of reflective of?
Jessica: I have no idea. That’s a great question.
Lindsay: Yeah, I mean look: it’s a little bit of yes, and. I mean, obviously whenever you have a dominant team, coach Cheryl Reeve said this, she said a lot of this has to do with UConn being so great for so long, you know? Other teams have to step up. Other teams had to get better. Now that there’s not like a Breanna Stewart, one player who’s dominating, there is more talent spread out in more places. There are more teams that are able to compete. So yeah, I think that the whole game is developing in a more robust way.
Jessica: Yeah. I don’t know this at all, but I do wonder if as the profile of the WNBA continues to climb, you hear a lot that women’s college ball is the end of a lot of…That’s the big prestigious moment that everyone goes to Connecticut, right? To have that big moment in their career. As the professional game gets bigger and bigger too you see the spread of talent. They aren’t all feeling like they have to go to Connecticut to get that moment…I don’t know if that’s true. I think there’s probably a ton of things. It’s very exciting, we’re gonna stay on it of course, as we move towards March. But now let’s get into the other fun stuff.
Okay Amira, please tell us what the IOC has been up to.
Amira: Sure. So flamethrowers, as you you, I was in Lausanne a few months ago at the IOC headquarters, and you might’ve seen my stories where you walk up the endless amount of stairs. Overlooking Geneva is the Olympic torch and a bronze statue of Pierre de Coubertin. If you walk into the Olympic museum there’s five hanging balls that have the colors of the Olympic rings, promoting their ideals of peace and whatever bullshit they decided to etch in stone. Here’s the thing: this is the idealized version of what the Olympics pretends to be or sees itself as, and the problem when you have this kind of unrealistic version of what you’re doing as an organization is it leads you to all different moments of hypocrisy.
This week we have a stunning moment that many of us saw coming just because of the way that officials of mega sporting events have been trying to trample dissent. But it has lead us to a three page document from the International Olympic Committee that is banning protest at the Olympic Games, which includes: wearing armbands with messaging on it, putting your fist up, taking a knee, banners…Many forms of protest that we’ve seen at the Olympic level in the past, but also recently in various countrywide competitions in the United States. Of course at the Pan Am Games you had Gwen Berry and Race Imboden put up a fist and take a knee. This is a response to that.
But their policy goes even beyond just the fields of play. You have to quote unquote “stick to sports” and not have “political, religious or ethnic demonstrations,” not just in the field of play but in the Olympic Village or during medal ceremonies. The one area in which they’re allowed to continue to express their voice at all is on social media or during interviews that take place outside the Olympic Village. It’s just so blatantly hypocritical, taking this idea that sports, especially the Olympics, are apolitical is just the most laughable thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life.
In the Olympic Charter, part of their idealized version of themselves says that they, quote, “want to play sport at the service of harmonious developments in humankind.” They want to promote a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity. Here’s the thing: almost immediately it became political, because of course it’s political. It’s an entire international competition that has been created and sustained by people using it to drive their own politics, whether that means refusing to show up to games like when we boycotted the Soviet games in ’80 or when the Soviets refused to come to LA in ’84, that’s political. Whether it’s the Olympic Committee refusing to invite Japan and Germany to the Games following World War II.
Or remember that time when they didn’t want to invite Israel because the Middle Eastern countries said that they would boycott, and so they conveniently said “oh, well the paperwork that you put in in February you called yourselves ‘Hebrew-Palestines’ but now you’re going by ‘Israel’ so the paperwork doesn’t match and you can’t come.” That is all political. When people put their fists up because the Olympic state is the only place in which they have a voice to confront propaganda in their own country, or they nod after a gymnastics routine, or they put their arms in the air to talk about genocide on the home front. They’re using the only space they have in many times to be recognized. How when people are slaughtered in their beds at the Olympics Games, we can’t pretend that this isn’t political.
All this is doing is trampling dissent in a way that works for the Olympic corporate sponsors, works for them to promote an idyllic image, but it cuts off, it stifles at the throat the very voices of athletes themselves who often are using it to advance human dignity, right? And fans who are holding up signs to say hey, let women into Iranian stadiums! This has been a platform for people who don’t have voices in many other places. And this is not crippling the political voice of Olympic sponsors, it’s certainly not doing anything to harm their pursuit of greed and corruption, but it is hurting the athletes and I’m sorry that I’m ranting, it’s irritating beyond…I don’t have words to properly tell you how irritating I find the IOC. I don’t know how you’re feeling about it but that’s where I’m at.
Jessica: Well, if you follow me on Twitter you probably have an idea how…I did my rant on there when they first published this stuff. I mean, it’s infuriating. I read, like a good researcher, I read the three page document last night, and I was just so angry the whole time reading it, and I want to quote from it just to get a sense of the language that they’re using.
So they say, quote, “there’s a need to respect other athletes in their moment of glory, not to draw attention away from that in any way with demonstrations on the field of play, at the Olympic Village, or during the official ceremonies. The dignity of the competition or the ceremony in question is destroyed for all the athletes concerned when an individual makes their grievances, however legitimate, more important than the feelings of their competitors…[Laughs] Sorry. The competition itself, the unity and harmony, as well as the celebration of sport and human accomplishment are diminished…” This language is unreal to me.
This is how it all ends: “In conclusion, these guidelines have been developed with the aim that each and every one of you can enjoy the experience of the Olympic Games without any divisive disruption.” It blows my mind that this is real. It’s so condescending. People are talking about their lives, right? I mean, the marathoner who threw up the ‘x’ across his chest to bring attention to genocide in his country…The next Olympics are going to be in China for goodness sake! Where they’re rounding up Muslims and putting them into camps right now. Just the idea that bringing attention to racial injustice is “destroying” and “diminishing” and is “divisive” is…What do you even do with this?
I feel for these athletes who now have to make this major decision in their live about how they’re going to use this platform which they worked very hard for, when they also are just out there advocating for people’s lives. What’s being diminished and destroyed here is the reality of how the world works and the IOC, like Amira said, just wants to keep making all their money. The fact that this whole thing is based on nationalism? That alone is so political! Nationalism is so political in every single way. As soon as you divide us up into countries and give us flags and identities that way, it’s already political. Okay, Brenda, your turn.
Brenda: Yeah, just to jump off your last point, “divisive disruption…” I mean, it’s a tournament based upon competing nation by nation!
Amira: Right.
Jessica: I know, I know.
Brenda: So silly. But the only thing to say is for me, I thought to myself well, A) great, because this is gonna get a huge conversation going about how ridiculous this is, and B) there isn’t really any difference in the policy. This was the policy anyway.
Jessica: It’s the same thing, yeah.
Brenda: The IOC punished any sort of expression like this from the get-go and when they didn’t then the national Olympic committees did the job for them. So I mean, I think it’s awful and I think it’s typical shitty of the IOC but it also didn’t rock my world…You know what I mean? In terms of the policy. The one thing I’ll say though is that to put it out there like this, I don’t know how they can continue to have observer status at the United Nations, like how can you…
Jessica: What does that mean that they have observer status?
Brenda: Well they’ve always had observer status. So they get a seat at the table.
Jessica: What?
Lindsay: At the United Nations?
Brenda: Yeah, and have for many, many years.
Jessica: Well, I have just learned something. Now I’m angry…er.
Brenda: Good. I’m glad I could…
Jessica: Wow.
Brenda: I’m always good to make it worse. So for me, that United Nations thing is a big deal that they’re recognized as body that is consulted and has a voice there. How can you do that when you’re clearly suspending any rights of expression. I mean, the United Nations, you’re talking another hypocritical organization, okay, fine. Okay, fine fine fine. But I do think they should have something to say about it. I found that really disturbing. I also don’t know…Did you all see also the reiteration that they’re going to use male pronouns to incorporate women?
Jessica: Yes, Meg had a thing about…Meg Linehan had a tweet about that. But I didn’t see it beyond what Meg had said.
Brenda: Yeah, it’s another beauty, just to throw out there, where they wanted to say “By the way!” That’s what they want us to know. They’re gonna use male pronouns when they refer to things like ‘sportsmen’ and we just should be cool with that. Just to put us all in the know that they are gonna continue to only squash any legitimate expression of human rights protest or awareness building, but they are also going to continue their patriarchal language and they hope that we can all accept that in advance. I thought that was amazing.
Amira: And the other thing is they also are continuing to stamp down on the way athletes can have their own sponsors on display or invoked, which cuts off profitability for individual athletes. But Brenda, I wanted to go back to what you said about the policy changes, and I actually think there is an important difference in this policy. By naming it they put up the three levels of discipline starting with the IOC, so when the IOC passed it off to their individual national committee, there’s some national committees that aren’t as strong or don’t enforce in the same way.
But when they’re putting in that they’re the first line of discipline, this is what prevented them before from, say, taking Tommie and John’s medals – that’s a misconception that their medals were revoked after the medal stand protest in ’68 because they actually didn’t have the power to go into the Olympic Village and take their medals. And so I do think it is important that the IOC is souping up power in order to say, actually, we’re the first line of discipline and also your national IOC and your sporting government body all can invoke punishment on you. I think that is actually a significant development, even if none of us were surprised by this.
Brenda: I mean I hear you, but don’t you also think like…Okay, so I get that, and I can see how it could be used as a substantive change, but I do think de facto that existed already. You’ve been to the archives, you can see the pressure of Brundage and things like that on national Olympic committees, at least in the case of South America, they have basically-
Amira: Oh no, of course. But my point is that I think there’s still something to be said about taking something that has happened and under somebody like Brundage, okay. But what happens is as leadership changes now this is something that is institutionalized, I guess, is my point. I completely agree with you that the fact that this puts on paper something that has been in practice. But definitely we should still pause at the fact that this is how things become institutionalized while also perpetuating this idea that all these things they label are somehow political and what they do is not, despite the fact that when you’re creating a Korean team under one flag that’s literally the height of politics, I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Brenda: Yeah, I could see that.
Jessica: Yeah. Okay, Lindsay.
Lindsay: Yeah, I mean every single thing about the Olympics is political. Let’s just talk about…We had the NOlympics people on the podcast last year and highlighted them in the best of interviews and they are trying to get the Olympics stopped in LA because every single thing the Olympics does in LA is about manipulating political power in order to get what they want at the expense of all the actual people who live in the cities. We’ve seen the destruction that the Olympics left behind in Rio, we’ve seen it time and time again. Atlanta, name the place. They come in, they manipulate local laws to sweep up homeless people, they use exceptions to the building codes and the environmental codes to build their stadiums, to sweep up this propaganda, to get all this taxpayer money, get all this local funding to build these massive stadiums and this housing, temporary housing.
And then they leave, and they leave a wake of destruction and debt in their place. If you’re saying that’s not political then you’re wrong. Every single thing about that is political! The IOC should be focused on sustainability, the IOC should be focused on…ending sex abuse, maybe? Actually punishing organizations and federations that enable sex abuse. The IOC should be focused on gender equality. There’s still a big lack of gender equality within the sports.
Instead the IOC is wielding its power to really sustain white supremacy in this way, to squash these protests. I just echo what everyone else is saying. It’s infuriating. As Nancy Armour wrote in a great column for USA Today, it’s the height of hypocrisy. I know it’s exactly what we expect from the IOC but I think it’s so important not to be numb to these things and to continue to call them out as they happen, because they’re not gonna shock us into numbness and into silence, just because they’re so bad that they set the bar so low.
Jessica: Yeah, thank you. Shireen?
Shireen: I was actually in a panel yesterday here in Vancouver and Bruce Arthur said something that was really interesting, he said “The higher levels you go of sport in terms of federation or whatnot, the more political it is.” Meaning that the highest levels in the world are purely based on power. That really resonated with me, I was thinking about that. That made a lot of sense to me. Even this argument that we need to keep sports…It’s very much this control piece on dissent, and that’s what it’s always been for me. We know, and I’ve talked about it on the show, that athlete activism is not a new thing. Amira’s work is exactly that, it shows us the history of it. And this is something that in addition to control on money and power, how they almost want to whitewash history. That really disturbs me for different reasons.
I love looking at Jules’ work and we had NOlympics on Burn It All Down and this is really important, because the way that the IOC is still so committed to their corruption and their control is really incredible to me. They’re so hell-bent on making sure that nothing goes awry because then that cash money doesn’t end up in their pockets. It’s so powerful and it’s really scary at the same time. And I struggle, I know we’ve talked about this before on the show, I struggle with the Olympics as another mega-event also in terms of…It’s one of the only places I can see some types of women’s sports, the only time I can see women from central Asia weightlifting. But at the asme time I hate everything about it. I’ve never seen such a diverse series of women. The Paralympics, I love seeing that, I can’t see that outside of the Olympics and the Paralympics. So that struggle continues for me, but at the same time I literally want to burn it all down.
Jessica: Yeah, absolutely. I just wanted to mention very quickly, Henry Bushnell at Yahoo! Sports brought up the fact that even with all of this writing that the IOC did and put out, that it’s still not clear what actually counts as political and I just want to quote something that he wrote, quote: “What if an Australian athlete, whose family is devastated by wildfires back home, wears wristbands honoring the victims? Surely he would not be punished … but what if that same athlete criticizes politicians for failing to protect the forests, and criticizes world leaders for failing to curb climate change? Does that give his wristbands new meaning? Does that make them political?”
I just think that’s such an interesting point about what is actually political and who is making those decisions? We know, it’s all those people in power who don’t actually care about the things that we care about. I thought that was a really good point. Amira, you wanna bring us home?
Amira: Yeah, and also I have to say that they know part of the vague-eties…Is that a word? Vague-ity? Vagueness!
Shireen: It is a word now.
Amira: Part of the vague-ity of what is “political” is to give them the power to define what’s political for their own uses. They also know what the hell’s happening. I would just like to remind people, I don’t know if I’ve said this publicly, but when I was there the IOC and their literal goon squad of enforcers tried to hold me under questioning because they thought I was launching a cyber-attack against their archives because they’re under constant hacking attempts from Russia and China. So obviously they know that they’re not an apolitical space. It’s just ridiculous but I return to the fact that the brunt of this policy and the power and control that they’re exerting is borne out by individual athletes.
To end it up, I think we should return to the voice of the athletes. You have people certainly like Megan Rapinoe who say we will not be silenced, but I want to close this section with Gwen Berry who was a hammer thrower who put her fist up at the Pan Am Games in the fall…Over the summer, rather, and when confronted with this she said it very plainly, she said, quote, “This is a form of control. We sacrifice for something for four years, we should be able to say whatever we want to say – for our brand, our culture, the people who support us, the countries that support us. We should not be silenced. This is a form of control.”
Jessica: Up next, Lindsay’s interview with Alyse LaHue, GM of Sky Blue FC.
Lindsay: Hello everyone, I am here with Alyse LaHue, the general manager of Sky Blue of the National Women’s Soccer League. Alyse, thank you so much for finally being on Burn It All Down. We’ve wanted to have you on for quite some time.
Alyse: Hey Lindsay, I’m so stoked to be here finally.
Lindsay: So, you bio is long and I could read it all out but I’d rather you talk a little bit about your journey to get here. I know you’ve been…You were with the Chicago Red Stars for quite some time, and then you actually left to spend some time with the Seattle Storm of the WNBA before coming back to the NWSL. Why did you leave the Chicago Red Stars and what made you kind of want to go over to the WNBA to see what was happening there?
Alyse: Yeah, let’s not bore all the listeners this early in the conversation with a full bio but I can give a quick rundown. I had spent eight years with Chicago over two different leagues and I spent five years as the general manager there. It was obviously an incredible experience, I’m really proud of what I built in Chicago and the work that I did there but it just came to a point where I felt like I needed something new, for me personally. For my career but also just from a personal standpoint. I’ve always been intrigued by the WNBA and I’ve always been intrigued by looking at other women’s sports leagues and seeing what we can learn from them and what we can take from each other. I think that’s something that we don’t do enough is looking at the learnings of other leagues, and the WNBA has been around for a really long time. I’ve always been a fan of the league and some of the things that they’ve done so it was always on my radar to consider that as a possibility.
So yeah, I left a role as a general manager and went into a sponsorship manager position with the Storm. They were a team that I’ve always looked at from the outside. I love that they’re an all-female ownership group. It was a different kind of market – I had always worked in larger markets like Chicago and LA, so it intrigued me, the opportunity to work in a somewhat smaller market. I lept at the opportunity to go out there and spent a year with the Storm, learned an absolutely tremendous amount; it’s incredible to work for that ownership group, and also for their president, Alisha Valavanis, it was really exciting to work for her as well and to learn from her. So I look as much as I could from that experience before I ended up…I like to say I accidentally came back to the NWSL
Lindsay: So accidentally, I mean…People have been listening to this podcast, it’s not secret, the last time that we talked about Sky Blue was not in very positive light. There were a lot of problems going on within the organization, a lot of reports of players being unhappy, of housing trouble, and general troubles with travel allotments and things of that nature. It got to the point where some of the, I believe, two of the draft picks last year decided that they didn’t want to come and play for the team and decided to take other options. As with any decision, there’s always a few factors that go into any person’s decisions but it wasn’t a good place. And now where we are is Sky Blue is one of the teams to watch.
I know you’re not gonna toot your own horn too much but the way you have turned things around here is pretty remarkable. The team’s gonna be in Red Bull Arena next year, the excitement is through the roof, and it seems like what seemed once was a dire situation is now a franchise that looks to me like it could be, in a few years, one of the standard-bearers for where this league needs to go. So my first question is just what attracted you to Sky Blue? You said it was an accidental partnership, so how did that come about?
Alyse: Yeah, you know I had worked with Sky Blue’s former coach Denise Reddy years ago in Chicago, we’d always stayed in touch and she’s somebody that I admire and consider a friend. When she came into the head coach role at Sky Blue and she asked about me coming out, and they really didn’t have a role and, to be fair, I had worked in the league for a long time so I knew the challenges of Sky Blue and some of their previous reputation around the league so I wouldn’t suggest it was necessarily a destination I was looking for at the point in my career, but I actually ended coming to Sky Blue in 2018, I don’t think a lot of people know that. I sort of worked behind the scenes, and that was really Denise’s doing.
I was really looking at things from a revenue standpoint and working behind the scenes on more revenue generation means, but a couple weeks after I arrived it really blew up in the media what was going on at Sky Blue, so I lived through that and obviously I came into the GM role in April, 2019. I’ve really only been in the job as leader of the org since April and obviously I’ve done what I can to push things as quickly as possible forward, because I do believe in this club and this market. I believe the New York City/New Jersey market should be one of the preeminent destinations in this league for players in the US and around the world. I believe we have the opportunity to do that. It’ll take us a little time but I’m really happy with some of the progress we’ve made thus far.
My partnership with Tammy Murphy who’s really the managing director, one of the owners, she came in around the same time I did into a leadership role, and being able to work with her and her understanding of my vision of where this was to go has been crucial in pushing us forward, to do things like playing in Red Bull Arena.
Lindsay: Yeah, so when you’re trying to change the direction of things, how do you even go about that? What is the first thing? Is it…I know a big thing you did was re-establish trust and connection with the fans, doing a lot of grassroots stuff and reaching out to them. It seems like you have to do both those smaller grassroots-level work as well as the big picture. How did you kind of prioritize those things?
Alyse: Yeah, I think you hand out free beer. I learnt that was a good starting point for when you have any troubles…No, I say that jokingly, but I think you answered it. Our biggest goal when I sat down with the staff that was here when I took over was that we needed to rebuild the trust with the fans. They didn’t trust this club anymore, they didn’t trust us. You can’t survive. The fans really, they own the team. It’s their team, it’s the community’s team. We’re just the conduits for it. So that was crucial for us.
And what does that mean…For me, it’s being as transparent as I possibly can as a leader. It’s not always easy, but I share as much as I can. I try to remain as honest as possible, I think I’m a straight shooter. I never wanna say anything or over-promise something that I don’t think I can deliver on. I think being transparent and honest with the fans about where you’re at…I joked about the free beer but that all started from a place of transparency. We realized that the university had let the liquor license expire and it was something that we weren’t prepared for-
Lindsay: This was at Rutgers.
Alyse: Yeah, that’s correct. So it came out of the blue, it was unfortunately right before our World Cup return game where we were expecting really big crowds. It was one of those things where I had an option, do I suck it up and just tell the fans what’s going on or do we keep quiet and they show up and there’s no beer garden. I just said there’s no way, I have to tell everyone. So we just put it out there and went into repair-mode and figured out what we can do, but that all started from a place of just being honest and I realized fans are really forgiving of you if you’re honest and transparent with them because the fans of, I think, women’s sports as a whole but women’s soccer specifically, they are incredible. They’re so incredible and they’ve been with this league for so long, a lot of these fans, and have followed it through all the ups and downs. They’re really forgiving of us as long as we’re honest and open with them. So that for me was my starting place.
Lindsay: And what you did is you went shopping and you bought a bunch of beer and just brought it to the arena, right? And just-
Alyse: Yeah I can’t, for liability reasons, can’t publicly say that I did that but I did maybe take orders of what types of beer people were looking for. So we’ll just say…
Lindsay: Gotcha. Don’t wanna get you in any trouble. I was just kidding!
Alyse: It’s all good. All good. I took orders, let me put it that way.
Lindsay: I think everything will be okay. All will be forgiven. So we’re in a really…I think, both exciting, and for me as a fan and someone who’s trying to kind of watch from the outside a little bit of a scary point in the National Women’s Soccer League where they’re trying to kind of negotiate it’s independence from US Soccer, but not complete independence. Can you update us on where that relationship stands right now, the relationship between NWSL and US Soccer, kind of what has happened this offseason?
Alyse: Yeah, basically US Soccer’s oversight as the administrator of the league was expiring, the agreement was coming to an end at the end of 2019, so that was up for re-negotiation. Essentially what’s come of that is that US Soccer has agreed to stay in their administrator role for another year, essentially while the NWSL and them work out the details of what it’s going to look like moving forward. So I think all in all it was a good compromise to the situation where it’s at right now. I’ve been around the owners and I’ve seen from this league and the previous league…I’ve been around for a really long time. I actually think I’m one of if not the longest-tenured employee in women’s pro soccer right now, so I'm a bit of an old hat in all this, I’ve seen a lot of ups and downs.
But I think what I’m seeing right now from the owners is really initiative, and that’s where all of the new changes in rules around the players have come out recently, in terms of raising salaries and providing more year-round stability for the players. That really came from the owners and their commitment to this league and pushing NWSL to its 2.0 version so I think for me personally I have a lot more excitement than fear. There’s been a lot of changes and obviously we hear a lot about how European leagues are really on the come up right now, they’re offering a lot more money to players and honestly the competition is great. To see our sport be pushed like this and to be pushed by other countries, I think it’s great. I’ve always been an advocate for doing more for the players and as much as we can do. So I think to have that level of competition is really good for women’s sports as a whole.
Lindsay: I agree, I mean you’re not gonna get anywhere for it unless there’s a little push.
Alyse: Yep.
Lindsay: Always. It can only be a good thing. So the draft is coming up, and this episode will drop a few days before the draft. Now, I know you’re dying to tell us who you’re gonna pick but I’m guessing you’re not going to, so…
Alyse: If I only knew! To be honest, I would tell you. I know this is gonna be a couple days before the draft and we’re talking a little bit before that but yeah, I couldn’t tell you right this minute.
Lindsay: There’s so many trades and stuff happening, it’s already been…I’m already behind on NWSL news and I’ve been away from my phone for like an hour, so…
Alyse: Yeah, I think I won’t be able to talk about it for when you drop this episode but I think probably by the time this has come out I’m sure Sky Blue will have been involved in a trade or two as well.
Lindsay: Love that. Well what is…What does your day look like right now, in the lead up to the draft? I was hoping you could give our listeners a little bit of an inside look at the life of a GM and the preparation that’s going into draft day.
Alyse: Yeah, I have a whiteboard that looks like a tornado and that probably is representative of my brain right now too, to be totally fair with you. You know, we’re in a good position at Sky Blue. We’ve got the #2 and #3 overall pick which is exciting, but we also have some assets as unfortunately you mentioned earlier, we had a couple picks from last year that didn’t end up coming to Sky Blue. So we actually hold their rights-
Lindsay: Ooh!
Alyse: -and those rights were in high demand, so for us having several assets that we’re able to put out in the market, we’re a team that obviously, again…I’ve been in this GM role less than a year so I’m moving as quick as I can here. I have dreams of taking this team to the playoff and I don’t want it to take three or four years, I want to move now as I keep saying to people we’re not trying to move up just one spot per year. We went from last in the league to #8 this past season. I’m not gunning for #7 next year, I wanna be up there in the mix and be competitive. So we know we need to make some big changes and shake things up a bit, so we’re definitely out in the market.
So yeah, day to day for me it’s probably my phone being plugged in because it’s always dead because all the time I’m constantly getting calls. I think I talk to pretty much every team in the league on a daily basis right now. There’s a lot of movements and, as we’ve seen, a lot of trades going on amongst other teams, so there’s a lot of action right now in the league. So, a lot of conversations. Every team’s a little bit different in terms of who manages their trades – you might have a technical advisor, some teams it’s the head coach, some teams it’s an owner, so you’re talking to a lot of different people on a daily basis. Obviously keeping up with my Freya Coombe, my head coach here at Sky Blue. She and I are probably talking 10 to 15 times a day, it’s constant in terms of that communication.
We’re also navigating with the allure of Europe and them offering them quite a bit of money, they’re a question as to whether a lot of our college players are going to come into the NWSL or if they’re gonna forgo a year to go play overseas, to go play in France or England, for example. So, you really have to do your homework now because we don’t want to end up in a situation again where we draft a player that really isn’t looking to come into the league, so that requires obviously a lot of homework, whether you’re talking to their college coaches or most of them have agents already. So having those conversations ongoing…So yeah, leading up to the draft it’s a lot of conversations, a lot of navigating. It’s a little bit like a puzzle – you’re trying to move one piece and figure out if you can move that for another piece and a lot of ongoing conversations along the way.
And then you know, for me, that’s only part of my day job. I’m running the whole front office so for me it’s keeping up with my staff as well. We launched season tickets not that long ago for our first year at Red Bull Arena and I’m excited to report they’re going really really well. We have a big goal this year but things are going really well on that front and obviously I’m in the process of hiring and rounding out our technical staff as well. The day to day looks different every day, which is what I love so much about doing this work. But a lot of draft content right now, for sure. Yeah.
Lindsay: I can only imagine. How many other female GMs are there in the NWSL right now?
Alyse: There’s one other, Stephanie Lee in Utah. Now, their head coach Laura Harvey just left for a job at US Soccer which is fantastic, great to have her with our national team. But that was currently, as of recording, the only other woman head coach in the league outside of us. So as it stands right now Sky Blue is the only one with the one-two punch of female GM and head coach.
Lindsay: Well, I can guarantee you that you will have a lot of Burn It All Down listeners rooting you on this season, and at the draft. I will be at the draft so hopefully I’ll have lots of inside info for our Burn It All Down listeners there. Alyse, we’ll have to have you back again because I have so many more questions, but thank you so much for coming on Burn It All Down.
Alyse: I love it. No, thanks for having me. I think I’m pretty transparent out on the interwebs so if anybody wants to catch me on Twitter or Instagram and ask questions I try to be as responsive as possible. I encourage anybody listening to reach out anytime, no matter what the question is.
Lindsay: You just announced a new event where like, adults can get coached by NWSL players?
Alyse: Yeah!
Lindsay: What is happening?
Alyse: It’s fantasy camp, it’s like live your dreams as a pro player! We’re having a camp coming up, mid-January here, for anybody 21 and over. We’re gonna have our players just do some coaching. You don’t have to have had any prior soccer experience. They’re skilled, they’re gonna teach you, and we’re super stoked about the response thus far. It’s been really good. I think I’m gonna run it again because I know a lot of reporters like yourself are down in Baltimore for the draft and they’ve told me they’re upset they’re going to miss this. I think we might do another one later, we’ll definitely put all you reporters through it.
Lindsay: Alright, I think we should figure out how to do a Burn It All Down live show around that so we can get all of the co-hosts there.
Alyse: I love it.
Lindsay: Although I actually…Shireen and Brenda are so good, I really don’t wanna be in a camp with them!
Alyse: Oh, come on. It’ll be fun.
Lindsay: They’re gonna take it way more seriously than I will, but that’s part of the fun.
Alyse: Right, let’s do it. I’m in.
Lindsay: Sounds good, thank you so much.
Alyse: Alright, thanks Lindsay.
Jessica: So, Lindsay recorded that interview last Monday, over a week ago. Then a ton of new stuff happened with the NWSL. Brenda, let’s get into soccer. Where do you want to start?
Brenda: Well, I’m just going to throw out a bunch of stuff because it feels like a whirlwind of things happening and see what y’all wanna talk about. The NWSL is headed into its 8th season and this week on January 16th, on Thursday, there will be the 2020 college draft. And then the past week there’s just been a number of really high-profile trades, movements; it feels like everything’s very much in flux. I do wanna say I’m so excited, because I am going to be there at the draft-
Lindsay: Me too, Brenda!
Brenda: Oh, yay!
Jessica: Yay!
Lindsay: Great!
Brenda: Things you find out on this show…I’m going to be presenting to the independent supporters council for Fare on anti-homophobic and anti-racist work in soccer. So it’s really cool. Anyway, I’m excited about it, and that’s happening in Baltimore this week. But then there’s been a bunch of other stuff. So just throwing it out there, and if people wanna follow, one great place is of course Meg Linehan, friend of the show. Also @NWSLmedia and Stephanie Yang @thrace on Twitter, and Equalizer forever and ever who, I believe the quote is, “will be tweeting about women’s soccer after the apocalypse.” I think that’s Stephanie Yang on The Equalizer.
So, couple of things: just breaking is the idea that perhaps the Reign is going to hire Farid Benstiti to become the team’s new head coach. I burned his behavior towards Lindsey Horan for body shaming on episode 106 of this show. He’s coming from the Chinese women’s super league. That leads to a whole discussion about how we are down now to only one woman coach in the NWSL because the Utah Royals coach Laura Harvey is going to US Soccer. So there’s only, I believe, Sky Blue’s coach remaining. There’s a whole discussion about coaching changes as well, and of course another piece of big news is that after a year the president of NWSL, Amanda Duffy, has resigned to go work with Orlando Pride. Now that means once again the job is open to BIAD co-hosts…I encourage the NWSL to think really carefully about where it might go with that.
But that was a shocker for me, because she was just giving this press conference outlining the things about the league in December and it all felt like, interested or comfortable or whatnot. No, it’s crazy. And then there’s trades, there’s just plain trade talk and for me I was interested anyway in the Portland Thorns getting the overall 2020 pick from Orlando Pride in exchange for Emily Sonnett, the defender from the US women’s team. And the rights to Australian Caitlin Foord, so we can talk about other trades that you all were interested in. I should just mention…because I do think the MLS had some interesting things, but just that they had their super draft last week and then the next rounds are coming this week. At some point on the show we should probably talk about some interesting issues with race and inclusion in MLS, but NWSL is more interesting for now.
Jessica: Okay, thank you. Shireen.
Shireen: NWSL is always more interesting. But I was following the trades because as an obvious Portland Thorns stan. I started to get very anxious: Midge Purce was traded, and I was like, what! And obviously that matters to me as one of the few Black players in the league. I love her and I love her on Portland and when anyone is stripped and taken away from their family and this beautiful environment it really upsets me. I also just was really stressed out because I love…Portland just reaffirms how wonderful it can be when people appreciate and respect women’s soccer.
So just the tweeting about it was making me really stressed, when they said thank you to Caitlin Foord, when they were like Emily Sonnett, I’m like, are they going to take Tobin Heath?! It was a lot for me, I was so extra. Come on, I haven’t recorded for a long time. I need to be extra. So there’s all those things, and then Laura Harvey, I was like, what drama! At the same time I was also catching so many feelings because the tragedy in Iran was unfolding at the same time as this was happening and I was like back and forth and all these feelings…I’m okay now. Tobin Heath is there, Christine Sinclair is as sort of cemented as Providence Park herself so it’s just…There’s all these feelings about it, obviously.
I’m very interested in Sky Blue now in a positive way, and Lindsay thank you for doing all the work you’ve done on that because I feel like you make me not hate them, and that’s important. I’m just really eyes wide open watching Brenda and what she’s gonna say about the Royals in terms of…Sorry Brenda, did you say it was Seattle getting the…? Just sort of keep our eyes wide open about how that’s gonna pan out. Also the Portland Thorns is sort of persona non grata in my books.
Jessica: It’s great to have Shireen back. So I just want to throw out a question because I don’t totally understand all of this stuff. So, Amanda Duffy was the president, she’s now gone, but they’re also looking for a commissioner, correct? I remember being confused about the leadership of the NWSL, so I’m sort of wondering where all that stuff is with them. Lindsay, what were you thinking this week as things unfolded?
Lindsay: Yeah I think with Amanda Duffy, honestly, it’s a good thing. I think that while she was a steady hand I don’t know that she was a fearless leader and I know that’s going to sound more insulting than I mean for it to be, but I think that the NWSL is really headed into…It’s got this one more bridge year as you just heard me talk about with Alyse LaHue. It’s got this one more bridge year with US Soccer as kind of the main owners, then they’re trying to go forward and I think it needs a really big, visionary leader as its commissioner to take it to this next big step and I don’t think that the owners of the NWSL, this has been the reporting that I’ve seen from people like Caitlin Murray and Meg Linehan, it seems that one of the big deals was just that the owners, Amanda Duffy didn’t have the confidence of the owners to be leading the league into this next big step. And like I said, it’s a very important year for the league.
It made sense for US Soccer to kind of bridge this gap, to stay at the helm for one more year, but after that the league has to figure out a way to be more independent if it wants to continue to grow because the good thing is: overseas, the competition just keeps getting better and better and better, you know? You’re getting more competition from leagues in Europe, from Australia, and that’s great news. That means there’s pressure on the NWSL to keep up. So I think that for me, everything I’m hearing is good. I’m excited about all of these moves. It’s great to have a team like Sky Blue back on the right track.
I really hope that the Orlando Pride can really step it up because they have so many of the big stars in the league on that team, but have really been floundering. But overall I think what’s most distressing to me right now is the fact that there are two female general managers and one female head coach and that’s it in this league. That’s of course a much bigger topic of conversation, it’s one I’m going to be reporting on some this week on Power Plays. The Utah Royals are still hiring a coach because Laura Harvey, their head coach, just left to go work with the women’s national team. She’s going to be their under-20 head coach. So there’s still a possibility that there will be a second female head coach but those are not statistics that make me happy.
Jessica: Yeah. Amira.
Amira: This is all really exciting, it’s times like these that make me wish, hey, wouldn’t it be great if I could turn on my TV and have coverage of this? It’s in the moments in which you see leagues really making moves…Like on Twitter, you certainly see everybody on this beat was so on it and it doesn’t translate into any kind of hard media coverage on websites or on sporks talk shows or whatever. It’s so interesting and it’s in those moments that I have to beat that drum again, especially into an Olympic year for better or for worse where women’s soccer still has a platform, the kind of transition of leadership is really something I’m keeping my eye on, to think about how they kind of seize these moments. It was so reactive during the World Cup where they should’ve already had a plan in place so I’m interested to see in a moment that looks like there’s all of these really interesting moves happening for the league how this translates in terms of leadership.
I think Lindsay’s point is about power dynamics in the front offices is one to keep an eye on as well, that’s a really good point. So yeah, I just wish I could not have to go down the rabbit hole in search of news about the NWSL.
Jessica: Yeah, that’s a good point. Shireen?
Shireen: I just wanna draw attention, and also piggybacking off of what Amira just said, Jonathan Tannenwald with The Enquirer is really, really good and I read some stuff by him while this was happening in post trades and stuff like that. We’ve mentioned our favs, the obvious Meg Linehan and Steph Yang, but I’m starting to see more stuff about it out there which makes me really happy because this is going to be…I feel very positive about NWSL because this is one of the first years that I’ve been…Hopefully this won’t be as gong show-ish. What these women come up and they do is incredible considering sometimes how few resources they have. I’m really looking forward to it, I’m really pumped about this season.
As much as there’s so much respect and progress within the NWSL there’s so much work to be done still for these players. We see other players going to Europe still and with Sam Kerr leaving and starting with Chelsea, they’re tweeting about her and she’s getting picked up in this super luxurious car at the airport, you see all that and it hurts a little bit because you want that here, you want these opportunities for everybody here. That being said I’ve always wanted a domestic league in Canada which does not exist, but at the same time the NWSL is critical to that type of development. I’m really, really looking forward to this year and discussing it with y’all.
Jessica: Now it’s time for everybody’s favorite segment which we like to call the burn pile, where we pile up all the things we’ve hated this week in sports and set them aflame. Lindsay, what are you burning?
Lindsay: I am burning ABC 13 Houston’s, to be very specific, headline which says, “Houston Dash trade JJ Watt’s fiancee to Chicago.” And it’s got a photo of Kealia Ohai, JJ Watt’s fiancee. I really really actually thought that we were done just referring to women in headlines by their relationship to men. Like I thought the 2016 Olympics that was thrown on everybody’s burn pile time and time again had put us over that hump, but apparently not. This was a local Houston affiliate who is tweeting about a Houston Dash player being traded to Chicago like the only thing that’s important about her is who she’s engaged to. I gotta give JJ Watt – I know, Shireen, we don’t give cookies but I did like his tweet – it said, “This headline is trash. Kealia Ohai (which is her name by the way, since you didn’t even bother to mention it) is incredible entirely on her own merit and deserves to be treated as such. Be better than this.” ABC 13, once JJ Watt tweeted that, apologized to JJ Watt-
Jessica: Oh my gosh, stop.
Lindsay: -Practically Ohai! They said that they were going to miss being able to cover her and Steph Yang, our friend, did a good little Google search to see how many times they had actually covered her! Turns out, not much. So burning a couple of things here, burning both referring to women just by their relationship to a man, and burning the lack of coverage overall for women’s soccer. Burn.
Group: Burn.
Jessica: Okay, so I’m gonna go next. Mine is really short and it’s a solidarity burn this week. Madeline Coleman, a senior sports writer at The Daily Tar Heel, the University of North Carolina’s student paper, she wrote a column this past week wherein she called out sexual harassment in sports media. Coleman is the only female senior sports reporter for The Daily Tar Heel, and she felt compelled to say something after another woman in sports media, Jasmyn Fritz, a sports radio host and content producer for The Sports Shop, tweeted out screenshots of a UNC beat reporter sending her disgusting, unsolicited, inappropriate, gross, sexual DMs. They’re so gross. I was showing them to Aaron last night and he was like, I’m sorry, someone actually said this at some point? Bless his heart.
Fritz and the man who sent her these messages are on the same beat. This is her peer and her colleague. So this is one of those things that is both unbelievable and unsurprising, however that works. I feel both of those things all at once. Grown men are a mess. Coleman’s piece goes on to chronicle other female sports reporters’ experiences with harassment, both from other reporters and from fans. It’s a familiar story that will never not make me see red. It’s especially painful to see someone so young like Coleman write, quote: “When I stand in a press box, I try to ignore the sexual innuendos and degrading words that sometimes echo around the room, all because of my gender.”
Like all of us, at some point in this work Coleman asked, quote, “at what point do we stop saying it’s not okay and start doing something about it?” Seriously, men. At what point? So standing alongside Coleman and all the female sports reporters who deal with this shit. I am burning sexual harassment today, so burn.
Group: Burn.
Jessica: Alright, Brenda, what are you burning?
Brenda: Well I…I’m sorry, I don’t mean to laugh. It’s not funny, it’s just that I feel that…It’s that broken record feeling where you’re like “Here I am again!” “Here I am again!” “Here we are again!”
Jessica: Uh-huh (affirmative)
Brenda: I am burning the homophobic behavior that has taken place in the major Brazilian soccer tournament Copa São Paulo de Futebol Júnior which involves under-20 players. This week it was a match between Sport Club do Recife and Audax SP and basically the p-chant that happens when goalkeepers touch the ball in Mexico has spread, and this has particularly spread since 2014. It’s not that there wasn’t homophobia before but there was something about that Brazilian World Cup that really spreads it throughout Latin America. It’s become pervasive and the official at the time Thiago Luis Scarascati deserves a big round of applause for – I know, he deserves cookies for this one – for stopping the match many times, two times officially, because of the constant homophobic chants that were being thrown at the goalkeeper. I just want to say this could be anywhere, it could be all the time, but I’m extra extra burning this because THEY’RE KIDS. You’re chanting at kids!
It also needs to be taken in context that this is also a week in which in a major São Paulo tournament, another one of then Clube Português of São Paulo racially abused players of CSA which is the northeastern team, calling them slaves.
Shireen: Oh, god.
Brenda: These are children! I want to burn the behavior but also the doubt that it generates in me that if we get rid of all of this shit, this racist and homophobic stuff, that these fans won’t even continue to love the game. Which I don’t really care about quite honestly, but I genuinely if sometimes part of the passion for soccer at least in Latin America where I study isn’t based upon being able to express this discriminatory opinions and behavior. So I wanna burn all that.
Group: Burn.
Jessica: Alright Shireen, what do you wanna torch?
Shireen: Y’all know I don’t do the baseball that much so…Fucking fuck off, Aubrey Huff. Now for those of you that don’t know who Aubrey Huff is, and I’m just going to preface this saying this is not a week for anyone to fuck around with Iran. It is not a week for this. It’s never a time for this, especially this week. Aubrey Huff, for those of you that aren’t familiar with his unimportance, ignorance and racism, is an American former baseball player. I think he played, Amira correct me if I’m wrong, for Tampa, Houston, Detroit, some other places. Maybe because none of the places really wanted him and he was shifted around everywhere, that’s what I’m gonna assume, but I’m no expert!
But what ended up happening was because of the situation unfolding in Iran I saw on Twitter, Jashvina Shah friend of the show also tweeted in horror, how he quote-tweeted someone that said, this person said – you’re gonna love this, their Twitter handle was “patriarchywins” – they said, “We should invade Iran and take their bitches. Persian girls are hot af without the headgear and they know how to act right, makes you think.” Then Aubrey Huff quote-tweeted that and said, “Let’s get a flight over and kidnap about 10 each. We can bring them back here as they fan us, feed us grapes amongst other things. 😈😈”
Now first of all, just for clarification, there’s a lot of thins I want to say about this. It’s not going to surprise you that the first thing I thought of was ‘Persian girls are hot af WITH their headgear on also!’ but that’s not what I wanna focus on here. What I wanna focus on is literally the terror, the inference that sexual slavery and kidnapping is fine, and how violent this is, how enraging this is. It’s Islamophobic, it promotes imperialistic violence, and I was furious. So I’d like to burn that.
I’ve made a new resolution for 2020, and Lindsay I appreciate you saying that I don’t give cookies. I’m okay to give out graham crackers. So I feel like for you and Brenda, they can have graham crackers because I don’t want to be unfeeling and unkind, right?
Lindsay: Never, never!
Shireen: It’s part of my growth, but this…I’m also committed to being very clear how fucking angry I am. The world is reeling. Communities, particularly in Canada but all over the world are reeling with devastation and loss for the airline crash in Iran and all the complications that stem from it and where it’s come from. This was not a good time for Aubrey Huff to fucking come in here and comment. So I’m going to burn that, all of it. While like I said some people can have graham crackers some people are just very happily been thrown in, multiple times metaphorically to this burn pile, and he is one of them. So burn.
Group: Burn.
Jessica: Alright. Amira, what’s on your burn pile?
Amira: I wanna do a preemptive burn. A future burn. I hope I’m wrong about this burn and that it never needs to be done but I have no optimism. That’s because what I want to burn is the inevitable use of sports to further US imperialism and fanning the flames of war under false ideas of patriotism. We’ve seen this playbook before, we’ve seen it happen before, particularly around football. After September 11th, that was the season the Patriots won their first Super Bowl and I don’t know who all remembers the quote “We are all Patriots” or the kind of paid patriotism surrounding the games, but if you don’t remember it featured a half-time show with quotes about war and patriotism, it featured montages about supporting our troops, it featured displays linking fighting a war on terror and avenging the deaths on 9/11 to what was happening on the field.
It’s a playbook we know was replicated under “paid patriotism” when the Department of Defense gave millions and millions of dollars to teams to support things like ‘Military Appreciation Night’ where teams like the Patriots and the Ravens and all these teams pocketed thousands of dollars from government officials to do those heartwarming troops-return-home videos and military appreciation nights that the Department of Defense correctly identified sporting events, particularly football, as the ideal recruiting ground for new recruits. I think that it’s necessary to remind everybody that the same six states that are most likely to produce NFL players are the same six states that are most likely to produce soldiers. They’re also the same six states that are the worst poverty on the poverty index. That’s not a coincidence. This is the land of false choices. I saw a tweet that I so believe that like if hackers want to take out the US Military they should cancel student loan debt because then there would be nothing for the military to incentivize many of their incoming recruits with.
But the way that football is bound in this, I fear, is about to be played out as 45 will be present for the national championship game Monday in New Orleans as LSU takes on Clemson. I think that this is just the beginning of so many displays at sporting events that are seeming tied to furthering violence, furthering unjust conflict and war, furthering pain, furthering death, furthering US imperialism and doing it under the banner of gladiator events where you can buy a ticket to Military Appreciation Night and feel like you’re doing your part in an effort that is unjust and unfounded. I hope that I’m not right but I just want to preemptively burn the way sports are going to be used and tied with nationalism to further promote an image of US imperialism on the home front as we continue to harm abroad. I hate it, and I just want to burn it.
Group: Burn.
Jessica: After all that burning it’s time to celebrate some remarkable women in sports this week with our badass women of the week segment. First up, our honorable mentions.
Happy Birthday to Agnes Keleti, the oldest living Olympic champion who turned 99 this week in Budapest. Keleti has won 10 medals including five gold and is also a Holocaust survivor. We wish her a very happy birthday!
Hup! Hup! Hup! The most watched TV broadcast in the Netherlands in 2019 was the Women’s World Cup final match between Holland and the USA. A record-breaking audience of 5.48 million tuned in to support the Oranje.
Congratulations to past BIAD guest, cyclist Ayesha McGowan, who wrote the following on a blog post this past week, quote: “I’m happy to announce that I’ve signed on for another year with Liv Cycling. According to the contract I signed, I am a professional road cyclist. I did it. I am here!” We are thrilled for Ayesha.
Vanessa Arauz has been hired as the first woman head coach of the women’s football section of Club Colo Colo, a top Chilean team.
Villa San Carlos Club contracts the first trans player, Mara Gomez – she’ll be the first to play in a first division women’s league tournament in Argentina.
Asisat Oshoala was named African Player of the Year for the FOURTH time. She joins only three other African players in football history to achieve this.
12-year-old table tennis player Gana Hoda become the first Egyptian, and first African player, to top the women’s single ITTF World Rankings.
Congratulations to Karolina Pliskova for winning the title at Brisbane, defeating Madison Keys in the final. Hsieh Su-wei and Barbora Strycova won in doubles.
Congratulations to Serena Williams who won in Auckland. This is her first title in three years and her first since becoming a mom. She’s now won titles in four different decades, stunning. She also donated her winnings to victims of the Australian wildfires.
Can I get a drumroll please?
Our badass woman of the week is boxer and former Burn It All Down guest Claressa Shields. On Friday night Shields defeated Ivana Habazin on Friday night and claimed the world title in her THIRD weight class. She got those 3 titles in just ten matches, making her the fastest boxer ever to win titles in three weight classes. And this was the first time Habazin went down in her pro career AND the first knockdown in Shields’ pro career. A stellar night all around for the back-to-back gold medalist. She also did this amazing walk out to Beyonce’s Who Run the World that included choreography. If you haven’t seen it you have to go find it on Twitter, I’ve watched it about 100 times so far. And for all those reasons, once again, Claressa Shields is once again our Bad Ass Woman of the Week. You can hear Shireen’s episode with her on episode 36 so go check that out!
Okay. What is good with y’all? Lindsay, what is good?
Lindsay: Being here with you all! It’s been a rough start to the year, I’ve been super sick and had my wallet stolen at the beginning of the year. It’s just been like one thing after the other, but there’s always a new day. That’s what’s exciting and yeah, just excited to be here with you all. That’s it.
Jessica: Well we’re excited to be here with you too! What’s good in my world, can I say my dog again? I said Ralph last week but I want to say Ralph again!
Amira: Yes, yes.
Jessica: He has just been so good for me. He is so friendly and lovely and just likes hugs. Ralph just likes to hug, man, I feel like it’s really good for my mental health. He and I go on long walks every day and I didn’t realize how much I would miss that part of it when Bailey passed away in August. I’ve really enjoyed taking him on these long walks. I’ve been reading all the time and I’ve been listening to books on tape, or – god, I’m so old. I just felt like a grandma.
Lindsay: “Books on tape!”
Amira: I listen to books on tape!
Jessica: Okay, thank you. I’ve been listening to audiobooks on my super-computer-phone that I carry around with me and-
Lindsay: That made you sound younger.
Jessica: Thank you, I know.
Lindsay: Computer-phone, that’s good.
Jessica: My computer phone. Brenda, what’s good with you?
Brenda: I got to see Amira at the American Historical Association-
Group: Aww!
Amira: Yay!
Brenda: -one week ago, and we had two great panels and that was really exciting. That said, another thing that’s good is that that conference is over.
Amira: I was about to say…
Brenda: So I can now focus on catching up on all the backlog of the last decade of work that I didn’t do before classes start. As I mentioned earlier I am really excited to be in Baltimore this week on Thurday/Friday/Saturday hopefully getting to see Lindsay, and I am presenting to the independent supporter’s council for my Fare work, so that’s pretty cool. And yeah, hearing all of you is really super gratifying and nurturing and whatever those words are about caring and feeling better.
Jessica: Yay. Shireen. I feel like Shireen has some things that have been good, because we haven’t heard from her in-
Shireen: I have, yeah I do, and thank you. I’ll try to make this less than 27 minutes. No, like – they’re like oh my god, she’s serious! I was overseas, I went to Turkey and then to Pakistan, Turkey was just a layover. I ate a lot of good food like I literally ate my way through two different countries. I hadn’t been back to Pakistan in five years so I went with my parents and my son and I had an absolutely amazing time, just loved being there and loved seeing my family. I got to reconnect with family I haven’t seen in a while and some aren’t super active on social media, so it was just lovely, you know, that moment where you hug someone and you don’t realize how much you have missed them until you’re physically hugging them. That happened to me numerous times. I also was incredibly fortunate to travel with my parents: it was my mother’s 50th reunion of her medical school graduation and she and her classmates got together, University of Peshawar medical college, and I live-tweeted a little bit of it because I thought it was amazing. These people are all in their seventies now, and my mom is one of eight women in a class of 120, and about 4 or 5 of those women were back together. They were giggling like schoolgirls, I have this absolutely beautiful photo of my mom and her former classmates giggling and gossiping. We’re talking 50 years of gossip they have to make up for! So that was pretty fun. Another cool moment was when we went to the actual campus I found out that my mother was fined 10 rupees back in ’67 for wearing a very brightly colored shirt. You weren’t allowed to do that, you had to wear plain colors under your lab coat. My mother trying to avoid General Akram who was the principal, she dove over and lunged over bushes, basically hurdled over bushes to avoid him and did a dramatic roll into the garden. But he saw her!
Jessica: This explains so much about you, Shireen. This explains so much.
Lindsay: I know! What do they say about the apple and the tree?
Amira: Doesn’t fall far from the tree!
Shireen: So I just found out, and I’m sitting and reminiscing and actually eating this amazing…What’s known as barbecue, it’s called charsi tikka in Peshawar, and just listening to these people reminisce. It’s just that I was so fortunate to be there and hear how happy they are and the ways their lives have changed, gone in different directions. They’re all over the world. It was so special to be there, it was my mother’s hometown.
That was wonderful. And of course that led right into January, the most important month in history ever, always, because IT’S MY BIRTHDAY MONTH y’all, and that is very exciting. I’m doing a She’s4Sports panel with Brittni Donaldson of the Toronto Raptors, Dr. Jen Welter, Kayla Alexander, next Wednesday at Ryerson University. She’s4Sports, please sign up. I was also very fortunate – I’m in Vancouver right now, going home later today by the time this airs – but I did see the Canadian men’s Olympic team play this weekend, which was really fun.
Jessica: Volleyball.
Shireen: Volleyball, yes. It was really fun because I got to see them with my best friend Eren who’s here visiting as well. I also got to meet Sharone Vernon-Evans the Canadian absolute wunderkind in volleyball and got a photo with him. My son who plays volleyball, Sallahuddin, he couldn’t deal with how great that was. But I got Sharone to write an autograph that said ‘Listen to your mother!’ That was really great. He’s lovely and he’s 6’9” so that’s – he’s such a lovely young man, beautifully-mannered, his mom should be so proud of this young man. He’s wonderful.
Then I got got to see Puerto Rico go play Cuba and I’m gonna send y’all some Slack photos because y’all need to see that joy. That’s about it. Joy, you know what I’m talking about, joy! It was a lovely match.
Jessica: We got it, yes.
Shireen: So that’s my what’s good! Also, I just wanted to say I missed you four so, so, so much. I did a little bit of work while I was away and it all kept coming back to you, there were moments when I’d think of all of you and be like I need to say this, I need to show this, I just miss you all. And Ralph, so happy to see Ralph in the family now.
Jessica: Awesome. Thank you Shireen. Amira, what’s good with you?
Amira: Yes, first I want to send all my love to Puerto Rico. The island is still feeling the effects of Maria, it still over the past week has been rocked by earthquakes that just keep coming…I’m sorry, they just keep coming. I’m really sick of the media blackout around this, I’m sick of US imperialism, I’m sick of constantly texting family to see if they’re okay. So I wanted to start by recognizing that and recognizing that between fires and earthquakes and wars and plane crashes that world is very much feeling like a very terrible place a lot of days, and it’s very hard to grasp the joy, but my what’s good is family, it’s friendship, it’s seeing you all, it’s colleagues at AHA. I vision-boarded…I did arts and crafts, it never has happened before in my life but that was fun, and it’s about grasping the joy and holding onto it for however long you can and for all it’s worth.
So in that spirit I do have three things that have made me very happy and that I’m looking forward to this week. The first is that with Alexis in the big ten it means she has to play Penn State so she’s coming up here to play this Thursday and I’m really excited about the fact that I don’t have to travel to see her play. And that she’s back on the court. It’s been a really long year and I’m just really excited to watch her ball in person.
I also want to shoutout my mentor Marcia Chatelain, who is brilliant and bold, and her book Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America just came out. You can read a great review of it in the New York Times, she also has a brilliant interview in Vox about it. The book explores the complicated relationship between McDonalds and civil rights and Black power. She starts with a discussion of the McDonalds in Ferguson during those protests a few years ago and takes us through a history of how McDonalds has been wrapped up in civil rights struggle in the Black community. The book blows your mind, it takes something that you think you know about, that’s always there, and just gives you a powerful unknown history that will never let you see a hamburger in the same way. So Franchise the book, it’s out now.
The last thing that has been my what’s good is The Circle on Netflix, which is a wild show. I saw a tweet where one person said they saw one episode and then all of a sudden binged the whole thing. I was like, that’s not going to happen, let me just see what it’s about. Let me tell you about my Friday, oh my gosh. This show, it’s like a cross between Big Brother and…it’s like a social media show, a reality show, and everybody’s in an apartment and they only can interact over this big social media platform that they’ve built called The Circle. You can decide to catfish, you can decide to be yourself…I can’t explain it, it doesn’t do it justice. Let me just say there’s big personalities, there’s lots of drama, it’s really kind of Black Mirror-y, it gets you to think about social media. But it also is just fucking charming. If you need something to make you feel good I would go run and watch The Circle. So that’s what’s good in my world.
Jessica: That’s it for this week’s episode, thank you all for joining us. You can find Burn It All Down on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. If you want to subscribe to Burn It All Down you can do so on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Play and TuneIn. For information about the show and links and transcripts for each episode check out our website, burnitalldownpod.com. You can also email us from the site to give us feedback, we love hearing from you all. If you enjoyed this week’s show do me a favor and share it with two people in your life whom you think would be interested in Burn It All Down. Also, please rate the show at whatever place you listen to it. Your ratings really do help us reach new listeners who need this feminist sports podcast but don’t yet know it exists.
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