Episode 155: The Future of College Sports, Vanessa Cordoba on Sexism in Women's Soccer Leagues
On this week’s show, Amira, Brenda, Jessica, and Shireen first talk WNBA Draft reactions [1:15]. Then they dive into what college sports might look like after the coronavirus [4:51]. Brenda interviews Colombian national soccer player Vanessa Cordoba about the sexism threatening to end women's professional soccer leagues [25:30]. Finally, they talk about reimagining what sports would look like if they were in charge of rebuilding [46:29].
Of course, you’ll hear the Burn Pile [57:19], the Bad Ass Woman of the Week segment, starring Miranda Elish [1:10:08], and what is good in our worlds [1:13:05].
Links
Coronavirus | Spring sports shutdown deals blow to high school seniors seeking college scholarships: https://www.dispatch.com/sports/20200413/coronavirus--spring-sports-shutdown-deals-blow-to-high-school-seniors-seeking-college-scholarships
Colleges Worry If Sporting Event Shutdowns Will Affect The Big Moneymaker: Football https://www.npr.org/2020/04/12/832230443/colleges-worry-if-sporting-event-shutdowns-will-affect-the-big-moneymaker-footba
Sports are on the chopping block as colleges seek coronavirus relief: https://www.axios.com/college-sports-cuts-coronavirus-e71d375b-1257-4eda-b534-ed5f938c8e7a.html
EA Sports calls racism on NHL 20 offside, promises to improve filters: https://theprovince.com/sports/patrick-johnston-ea-sports-calls-racism-on-nhl-20-offside-promises-to-improve-filters
Tokyo Olympics could cut ‘extras’ in face of soaring costs: https://apnews.com/8cdda4c3683d50727068bc465bb85975
WWE deemed 'essential business' in Florida, resumes live shows: https://www.espn.com/wwe/story/_/id/29031903/wwe-deemed-essential-business-florida-mayor-says
NBA's Silver, NFL's Goodell among those advising Trump on sports restart: https://nationalpost.com/pmn/health-pmn/sports-nbas-silver-nfls-goodell-among-those-advising-trump-on-sports-restart
SKATEISTAN AMONG WINNERS AT IOC WOMEN AND SPORT AWARDS 2020: https://www.olympicchannel.com/en/stories/news/detail/skateistan-ioc-women-sport-awards-2020/
WNBA Draft 2020: All 39 picks. https://www.swishappeal.com/wnba/2020/4/17/21225857/wnba-draft-2020-every-pick-all-three-rounds-nos-1-36-sabrina-ionescu
2020 NCAA Player Of The Year: Miranda Elish: https://www.softballamerica.com/stories/2020-ncaa-player-of-the-year-miranda-elish/
Transcript
Amira: This week’s episode of Burn It All Down is dedicated to Husain Bhayat, aka Babu Uncle, who died on April 13th of complications due to COVID-19. He was a pillar of the Muslim community in Mississauga and he will be very greatly missed.
Hi flamethrowers, Amira here, and I’m running this show this week. I am joined by my co-hosts Brenda Elsey, associate professor of history at Hofstra University; Jessica Luther, author of the forthcoming book Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back, in Austin, Texas; and freelancer extraordinaire, sports reporter, Shireen Ahmed, from Toronto, Canada. And today we’re gonna discuss what college sports might look like when we come on the other side of this. Plus, we will reimagine sports in general, and think about what we might want to see different as we start to rebuild. Also, Brenda interviews Colombian national soccer player Vanessa Córdoba on the struggle to keep women’s professional leagues alive in face of rampant sexism and in the time of COVID. But before we get into that, we know the WNBA draft was on Friday – me and Lindsay have a hot take on that if you want a larger discussion that is available now, check it out – but I wanted to quickly quickly ask the rest of my cohosts, a quick hit reaction moment for the draft? Shireen, I think I know what yours might be.
Shireen: I love New York Liberty, but I really appreciate how the WNBA created this day for me and for my love of UConn. So, Megan Walker going to Liberty because it’s just…It’s so lovely. I was very happy. I was very happy about everything. I’m very happy.
Amira: Jess, what was your…?
Jessica: Yeah, I don’t have any hard WNBA analysis as far as what this means for the team. I just wanna mention that Satou Sabally had the most amazing blazer and background fabric on her live feed. She just looked phenomenal. I also want to say that Jocelyn Willoughby from Virginia, she was drafted 10th by Phoenix and has since been traded to the Liberty for Shatori Walker-Kimbrough. Jocelyn Willoughby was wearing a sleeveless black dress, and her arms were phenomenal. [laughs] So those two things really stood out for me, Satou Sabally and Jocelyn Willoughby just brought it with their fashion. And arms.
Amira: Now Brenda, I know you didn’t watch, but you saw some of the reactions? As somebody looking at it from the outside a little bit, what was your takeaway based on the reactions other people were having?
Brenda: Well, on the one hand I loved all the reactions and I loved how much people knew how much they cared about it. So like, Lindsay had a thread on Power Plays and then I was following you on Twitter and Instagram and everyone else and so I was just like, this is a great thing, I’m learning, I know there’s a lot going on with the Mystics! [laughs] And so I felt excited, the fact that everyone’s super psyched about New York Liberty made me think I might get some visitors when the season happens.
Shireen: Oh yes!
Brenda: So I was like, “Yay!” The fashion was beautiful, the pictures are beautiful of how excited they were, so yeah, it was cool following the reactions for sure.
Amira: Yeah, I had a great time watching it and talking to friend of the show Courtney Cox, tweeting through it. Me and Lindsay do a deeper dive on this – we definitely shout out Satou’s entire aesthetic and general awesomeness. We also dive deep on both the production grade for the draft – I’ll give you a clue, it’s a tale of two drafts, you know, starts strong then trails off. Then we also do a team by team breakdown before talking about some other takeaways. I gush about the Ivy Park swag bags that the W delivered to the people, which is why they all randomly had all 12 hats.
Shireen: All 12 hats! Yeah.
Amira: So if you wanna check out a deeper conversation about the WNBA draft, again, check out me and Lindsay’s hot take, it’s out now. I will warn you: we are both ADHD geminis, so we have a lot in our heads, a lot of connections– [laughter] –that made a lot of sense to us, but it’s a journey, fair warning.
Brenda: Listen immediately.
Amira: Alrighty. So of course we are still in this time of uncertainty and that is throwing a lot of things into flux. Certainly we talked last week about college football coaches being super eager and super sure that that season is going on, and we appropriately torched that, but I think that it opens the door for a larger discussion about what do college sports even look like coming back from this. What’s happening here? And so we want to do a kind of deeper dive on the current atmosphere in college sports, the consequences, and what might the future hold. So Jess, I’m gonna kick it to you.
Jessica: Yeah, so I think everyone should just prepare for there to be a lot less college sports. I’m not sure though…One of the things I’m thinking about is that most of it will be non-revenue-generating sports. We’ve talked about our fears about women’s sports getting cut. I don’t know how much the public will actually see this because the front-facing college sports are basketball and football, right? For men, some for women. So I think it's gonna be the sports that people forget about generally and I’m nervous about that. I did want to talk about the University of Cincinnati in particular because this week they cut their men’s soccer program, and they’re just such a good example of how all of this financing works and how these non-revenue sports get the brunt and the burden in these moments, even though I don’t think they deserve it. One thing I wanna point out is after they announced this “Title IX” was trending on Twitter in the wake of the announcement because people always immediately blame women’s sports for this, which is so ridiculous, because what school was Title IX to begin with? And that often has nothing to do with whether or not finances are equally shared, and so the idea that women’s sports are somehow taking up all the money is such bullshit.
I actually think the real culprit here is big time revenue sports, and so I’m wondering what those will look like on the other side of this. I’m just gonna say, when ESPN reported this they said Cincinnati men's soccer lost $726,000 last year, but Cincinnati spent $68.8 million on sports, and the thing about it is that there’s this great piece from April 2018 from the student paper The News Record in Cincinnati: “Between 2014 and 2017, the athletic department’s deficit totaled almost $102 million.” A lot of the way that they tried to deal with the deficit is they kept upping student fees, so if you went to the University of Cincinnati you’re paying over your four years something like $5000 just to sports, just to try to make up this deficit, right? Which again…I know Brenda will get into this, but what’s gonna happen to college in general moving forward? If they don’t have the students’ money, what will happen to college sports? The thing that really gets me is in this article, I’m just gonna quote it, so in this same article about finances from 2018, “The head coaches of the football and men’s basketball teams and their 16 assistants received a shared total of $8.76 million in 2017 — an average of $486,674 each, according to UC’s NCAA Revenue and Expense report. By comparison, the university’s 381 student-athletes received scholarships totaling $9.31 million — roughly $24,442 per athlete.” But also, “UC’s athletic department spent $2.1 million in severance payments in 2017 alone. Approximately 90 percent of payments went toward one person — former UC head football coach Tommy Tuberville” – who Amira recently burned on this podcast, because he sucks. He was also a shitty coach, he went 4 and 8 when he was there.
And so the idea that the men’s soccer program lost $780,000 last year, put that up against what they paid Tommy Tuberville – who wasn’t even a coach there! – $2.1 million, right? And so I understand that football and basketball bring in a bunch of money, but schools and willing to sacrifice so much money for their revenue generating programs. So, just the final thing: Cincinnati is a member of the American Athletic Conference and it’s one of five major conferences this week that’s petitioned the NCAA to relax requirements to participate in the moneymaking Football Bowl Subdivision. If you didn’t know, to be in the FBS which is essentially what Division I college football is, schools have to sponsor a minimum of 16 sports and maintain a certain football attendance requirement, you need a stadium that can hold at least 15,000 people. You’ve got to spend the money to make the money, as they say. And schools are willing to do that, right? They’re asking them to relax it, and if the NCAA agrees I feel like what they’ll agree to is relaxing the 16 sports requirement rather than attendance stuff. So I’m wondering what that will mean for these major schools. I know they’ll take it all out on these non-revenue-generating sports, and I’m just really nervous about what that means for all of those programs. So that’s where I am with this.
Amira: Yeah, certainly. I think this is a good segue because that’s really the institutionalized and programmatic side of it, but it also trickles down and has major consequences for aspiring college athletes. Shireen?
Shireen: Yeah, thanks. I actually have a senior in high school and one who is an aspiring athlete, and is showcasing and had her heart set on a school across the border. So as a parent I’m reluctant to send her to the United States at all at this point. There’s also the very real possibility that schools may not even open. She plays a summer sport, or it’s called a fall sport, so her training camp would start in the beginning of August. But now universities, and it’s actually been reported by CNN, that Boston University has cancelled all summer on-campus activities and is now in discussions about not even resuming until January 2021. Why on earth would my child register and not even play? Yeah, maybe she wouldn’t use up the one year of eligibility for the NCAA, but still. Why would she do that when playing soccer is all she wants to do? And she’s not committed anywhere, and part of me is very grateful she’s not committed because then we have the flexibility for her to not enroll online. The whole thing is like, maybe take a year off, maybe work or train at home, something, because these are the discussions we’re having now, you know? The implications of this…Many of her teammates are going through the same thing. What do they do at this point? Particularly the issue of sending her to the US is just not something I feel like I want to entertain, it’s a discussion for a different time. But I think that…I’m not even letting her go to the corner store right now, so sending her to the United States is really really far off.
But you know, this is something that we have to talk about too in terms of the mental health supports and emotional supports for athletes, amateur and student athletes as well. She’s worked her whole life, like, this is really hard. I’ve been helping her achieve this goal since she was four. And we’re here. And I can’t begin to tell you how difficult it is, and with how much dignity and grace she’s handling this. Like, if my prom was cancelled I’d be real upset, y’all. She’s just focused…I think it’s also the way that it’s happening. I’m waiting for this moment where it gets to be a lot and it blows up and we all cry, that’s usually what happens. But she's just steady and she’s focused on continuing training. I just want to shout out all those students out there, if you’re in university or high school. This is a very uncertain time. We see you, in solidarity with you as well, and I really hope things settle for you to figure it out because the ideas of schools not starting until January 2021. There’s so many questions, and this is an unprecedented time where there is no road map, which is even more difficult.
Amira: Yeah, certainly. I kind of want to piggy back on that just to talk a little bit about the impact on current athletes. There are certain things that I feel like are gonna be overwhelmed as a system. I think the NCAA who is always a clusterfuck is just gonna have such a mess on their hands. They’ve already announced of course that folks in spring sports that were cancelled get another year of eligibility. The trickle down effect of that is that it’s gonna create a bottleneck for the incoming people because you have a holdover for eligibility, so you have way more talented folks than you have spots and scholarship offers. It’s unclear how schools are gonna navigate that. One of the big things that I have my eye on is transfer portal rules, but if you’re an athlete and you need to transfer then you need to sit for a year, which…You can apply for an eligibility waiver usually on the basis of injury, on mental health, on being run out or having some extenuating circumstances at your current program.
And one of the things that’s really hard about that is that first of all one of the only ways that this gets approved is if your program that you’re leaving signs off on it, which makes it really hard to transfer and apply for a waiver if you’re saying, “The coach bullied me, and therefore this is why I need to leave…” We saw this for instance happen last year with Evina Westbrook coming from Tennessee to UConn where it felt like this was for sure gonna be approved, and then it didn’t get approved and the appeal didn’t happen. And so what we’ve seen over the last few years is the number of transfer waivers going up and NCAA approving less and less and less over the years. So, three years ago it was like 78% were approved and that’s down to mid-60s, and so it’s a mess. One of the things that’s been happening in this moment is there’s a lot of shuffling happening because people are trying to get closer to home, or they're already home and deciding that maybe they wanna stay a little closer to family members who are ill or dealing with loss and grieving due to COVID, people who just feel more secure playing this out at home. And so I think both the transfer portal and generally the scholarship allotment are two places where we’re gonna see a bottleneck, we’re gonna see overflow, and I for one do not trust the NCAA at all to sort through this mess. So I think it’s just gonna be a complete mess and I’m not looking forward to that. Shireen?
Shireen: Yeah. I just have a quick question about what you all think about how flexible and dynamic the NCAA will be in terms of relaxing and just for players that may want to come back another year or extending eligibility or know that winter sport athletes will get another year but the fall ones won’t, correct? Now what does that mean for incoming this year? I just wonder what your hopes are, and I mean, Amira, I know we don’t look to the NCAA to be a beacon of light or hope. We don’t do that. Because this is unprecedented, do you think there’ll be an opportunity for them to try to be a little bit more understanding?
Amira: I have the thinnest of hopes. In June there’s set to be a vote that would expand transfer eligibility, so one of the things that's a little uneven now is those transfer rules that I laid out are specifically targeted towards men’s and women’s basketball, football…There’s certain sports that are controlled by it, and other sports that are not. And one of the things that’s up for a vote is doing a kind of blanket automatic 1-year approval for anybody for a first time transfer. So if it’s your first time transferring anywhere no matter what sport you’re transferring from, you automatically can go there and play. So this vote is set to happen in June – it was already scheduled for that, but I do know that some of the people arguing for this rule to go into place have used these extenuating circumstances to bolster their argument about why this is needed. I certainly have my eyes on that because I think that might be the one area where we see the possibility of change around these transfer rules, but I think the people who try to keep power working as it works are crafting arguments to say basically it will be a mess and people will just use it as an excuse and, you know, they’re terrible arguments. So yeah. And maybe that’s a good place, Bren, for you to jump in?
Brenda: Probably – lack of faith and pessimism is sort of my wheelhouse. [laughter] I don’t know if I care at all about college sports right now, because what I can tell you is that I’m teaching four college courses that I’m also asked to Zoom into faculty meetings and I’m also asked to homeschool children. I’m also asked to continue with my research as planned but without any budget guaranteed. And yet, and yet, with all of that, my students miss the university so much. They show up and they just talk, like…If I open it up for them to talk and discuss their experiences they cannot stop talking about how they can’t believe what they took for granted about a university community and being on campus and the way that it felt having face to face learning. So a lot of institutions of higher education have looked at this as, like, a wonderful petri dish for figuring out about online distance learning. And bottom line: it sucks. I can say anecdotally from their perspective, and you’re gonna find it out empirically. It’s absolutely not the same thing, it’s not the same mentorship.
It’s not that it doesn’t serve a purpose when it needs to, but that is not the fundamental building block of the community that produces the type of citizens that you want to deal with in a pandemic in 20 years that comes again, right? So that relationship between faculty and students is the only essential mission of a university. That’s it! There’s nothing else. Sports is part of that experience and we all love it and we can all enjoy it and it’s good for students and I certainly don’t want to get rid of it, but I also just don’t give a fuck. It’s like, seriously? I care about the athletes, right, the students. But do I care if I ever see Nick Saban again? No! [laughs] No, I don’t.
Amira: And I think this is really important, Bren, also for folks to know that there’s universities that aren’t going to survive this. I have friends at the University of Arizona in academia, really feeling for them, they’re all being furloughed. Even tenured faculty, right? The most secure people within the institution outside of athletics are being furloughed, and so the university itself is really in a precarious state and I think that’s why it’s also really hard to think about college sports and not think about the college itself because a lot of institutions that we take for granted are just not gonna be here.
Brenda: They’re not gonna be here, and part of why they’re in the position that they are is because of administrative bloat which has happened in most colleges and universities over the last 10 years and athletics is a central part of it. It’s a central part of micro-financing, for example, to say you’re gonna pay $100 million for [x] stadium that you’re gonna pay off in [x] years and stuff like that – not only is it on the backs of student fees but it’s on the backs of depressed wages for faculty, free labor from students, and a buy-in from the community and state taxpayers. So this has nothing to do with the essential mission of the college because you see we’re still having the semester. Nick Saban’s not busy right now, but I am! So one of us is essential and one of us isn’t.
Shireen: I’m hearing you and I appreciate everything you’re saying, but for someone like me who’s watching a child whose idea of college and university is completely wrapped around sports, it’s really hard to divorce that. And I’m a brown parent, like, obviously education is everything, but it’s so hard to separate that when my kid has been falling through a system which is the only system that exists and that she knows on how to get there with sports. Do you know what I mean? So I totally–
Brenda: Of course, of course I’m sympathetic, of course I’m sympathetic to dreams dashed–
Shireen: I don’t know what to do. I wanna burn everything down.
Amira: I think the thing that that raises is the point that I kind of wanted to raise about what this is gonna mean for colleges that really market themselves completely tied to their sporting identity. One of the only times you see commercials for schools are during March Madness, right? Or college football playoffs.
Jessica: College football games, yeah.
Amira: And I’m like, oh my god, we have a commercial? Who knew! But that’s the only time you see it, and the other part of that to your point, Shireen, is that Penn State for instance understands itself, the mythology about themself, just all through sporting moments. When they recruit they recruit people through these kind of sporting congregations around football or women’s volleyball or whatever. They recruit people around this community sporting culture. That’s the buy-in. That’s how they tell stories about themselves. So what does it look like if we for so long have been wedded to a model that for many schools – not all of them, certainly, but for many schools the entire thing that they’re going on is about what sports will give you once you’re in this space. Paired with the fact that people are receiving way more instruction into how to get into these spaces via athletics than through book learning, than through testing, whatever, because it opens doors that often times are closed off to other people. So I completely empathize with what you’re saying, and I think that’s just an indictment of the system itself. And that’s kind of where we’re at with it, that under this moment all of that’s crumbling down. Bren?
Brenda: Yeah, as I said, I’m so sympathetic to dreams dashed and the way in which young people have worked so hard and are gonna be so disappointed. I am equally feeling that for students that had, for example, their first semester was supposed to be a semester abroad and they worked so hard for the last 12 years to get the language and to do the IB programs and to do the things that would allow them to do that, all the dreams dashed are valid and heartbreaking. But it’s also a moment, I just can’t help but argue, that the essential mission of the university is not to provide a space for people to play sports. It’s part of the community, it’s great, it’s wonderful, it’s beautiful – when it’s not exploitative. But it is. And it’s time to re-think it altogether because right now administration is going to start to make cuts to faculty and it’s going to be argued that they’re in this crunch and thus there has to be less teaching. To call a student athlete a student athlete with “student” in it first has been ridiculous at some of these schools for so long. And it’s a moment I think instead of trying to like hobble back and see what we can do with less, to say no. What kind of a college do you want? Sports for me is just not the central mission.
Amira: Next up, Brenda interviews Colombian national soccer player Vanessa Córdoba on the struggle to keep their women’s professional league alive in the face of rampant sexism.
Brenda: It is my pleasure and honor today to welcome Vanessa Córdoba to Burn It All Down. She is joining us from Bogotá, Colombia. She is a professional fútbol (soccer) player representing the Colombian national team and is also playing professionally for La Equidad. She has been advocating for the last few years around issues of gender and equity in fútbol, so thank you so much for being here today Vanessa.
Vanessa: Hi Brenda, hi to everyone who’s listening around the world! Thank you so much for your invitation and I’m very happy to be here with you today.
Brenda: So, one of the reasons that prompted me reaching out to you was about a little over a week ago I read an open letter that women footballers had sent to the Colombian federation. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about what was said in that letter, how it came to be?
Vanessa: Well, we were struggling a little bit to get our league back this year. We finished last year’s, everything went great…Well, of course after having to publicly express our uncomfort towards the way women’s soccer was treated here in Colombia, not only with our league but within the national team, you know? It’s a worldwide issue and we can see it in different national teams. So we got to our point where we just said everything publicly in a press conference. So after that we got the attention of the government and the federation started to get more on top of it as well. We got back our league because they had said after 2 years of doing it they said, okay, we’re done with it, it’s finished. After all that happened we just said okay, enough. We’ve got nothing to lose, we’re gonna tell what’s going on. So we did it, we got it back, it was good – well, it was only 2 months long. Not enough, but it’s part of the process. So we just did it and we kept playing. We finished the league and then we got to the same point where we didn’t know when our next league was gonna be or anything about it.
So we got to show why we were worried about our jobs because at the end of the day it’s about 400-500 women’s soccer players’ jobs. So we expressed it to the public with journalists and we got the attention again, and they said okay, listen, we’re gonna do it. We started working a bit closer with DIMAYOR which is the entity that governs professional soccer in Colombia, it’s part of the federation. So we got the chance to sit with our president and we told him our point of view. They said listen, we’re gonna work this out, it’s a big struggle, we’ve got no sponsors – “it’s very hard to get sponsors for women’s soccer,” or women’s sports, which I actually don’t believe. But that’s what he said. So things started getting on track and they said there’s gonna be a league, there’s gonna be 20 teams, the teams are gonna start calling their players again to start preseason. The regulations were supposed to come out around the time when everything about coronavirus came out, so a lot of us started preseason without signing contracts because we were supposed to sign it the week the regulations came out. And that week, as I said, was the one that we all had to go into quarantine. So that’s kind of what happened.
We decided to publicly give our opinion because the situation of Independiente Santa Fe came out where they said in their press release that they were suspending the women’s teams contracts, whereas with the men’s teams they were just gonna bring it down to 50%. It made a huge boom here in Colombia because people are aware of women’s soccer and our situation, but this was like…People just went crazy about it. So the team had to go out the next day saying no, people misunderstood what they wanted to say, that women’s contracts weren’t suspended, they were also gonna bring it down to 50%. So it was something good because it opened a door to show the reality of women’s football players here in Colombia, because Santa Fe’s issues were the best of the worst, you know? So a lot of people started talking about it and we didn't say anything about it because we understand the situation we’re at as a society. We decided to come out with this open letter not directly to the federation but to the public, you know? And we practically said, “Listen, we are aware of what’s going on and we wanna help our country in whatever way people might think is the best way,” like, here we are to support our society. We wanted to show our solidarity with Colombia, but besides that we also wanted to point out the situation we were living in and how this uncertainty is not because of the coronavirus, it’s become our constant in women’s soccer, you know? It’s become the common denominator and we think that’s wrong. But again, understanding the situation of the coronavirus and how difficult it has been economically for the teams.
So that was kind of the point of the letter and what we practically said in it. We divided it into three parts – labor uncertainly, which comes down again to we need equal opportunities to play, you know? The reason why teams right now don’t have contract obligations with us is because we didn’t get the chance to even play because we had to spend the first months of the year fighting to get a league, and then it came down to again what kind of working conditions we have. So, for example, last year’s working conditions were all teams had to have at least five professional players, they had to sign five women football players. The other 20 that could be part of the team didn’t have to have a contract. So, can you really call that a professional league? We had to point out those things as well.
Brenda: What are the salaries on average? Even if you had a contract, if you’re one of the lucky people, if you’re fortunate to get one?
Vanessa: Yes…We have no last word on this because we don't see everyone’s contracts, but I would say between 1-2 million [Colombian pesos]. The minimum wage here is 800-something [hundred thousand] pesos. So it’s a little bit over that. But on average, you know? Because we have 2 or 3 cases which go to dollars and they’re good, but in the majority of cases we get the minimum wage to 1-2 million pesos.
Brenda: So in dollars…?
Vanessa: So right now $1 = 3,500 pesos.
Brenda: So it’s about $250? Is that a month or a week?
Vanessa: A month.
Brenda: A month. And Bogotá is not a very cheap city if I remember…
Vanessa: Uh, no. No, it’s quite expensive.
Brenda: [laughs] Wow. That’s difficult.
Vanessa: It is, it is difficult. I would put it as the minimum wage and a little bit more, a few bucks more.
Brenda: So how much…We’ve read a lot and covered on this show a lot the ongoing gender discrimination within the Colombian federation. How much has that affected this process of trying to get this league off the ground?
Vanessa: I think it affects it in every way, socially and as athletes. You know, we can train as much as we want, we can train 20 hours a day, but at the end if we don’t have competition it’s worth nothing. There’s also a different way you go through competition – the entire process as athletes and as a sport in Colombia, it’s obviously limited because of this, and if we don’t get the support in the national team…Like, the last Pan Am Games we got the gold medal, what else do you want from us? How do you want us to be world champions if you give us a two-month league? How do you want us to be world champions if some players before had to buy their own tickets to come to camps? It does, at the end of the day, sum up – which you can see in our game, but even with that in mind we got the gold medal in Pan Am Games. Imagine if we did get the support we needed?
Brenda: Right. Do you see any good allies right now for you?
Vanessa: As athletes?
Brenda: As Colombian women players where are you looking and hoping to find some support?
Vanessa: I think this past year we found support through the government but soccer is such a political sport, it’s just mind-blowing, amazing. Not only in Colombia – many people say FIFA has more power than the UN, and I wouldn’t be surprised, because it moves a lot of people and there’s so many people around this industry. I’ve found…It’s obviously not 100%, but we’ve found some support in the government. But at the end of the day it’s been between us, you know, us women players. We’re not all best friends and we don’t have to be all best friends, but we have found support on each other and we’ve understood that the only way to get this working and on its feet is being together. So I think our biggest support has been ourselves, our teammates – and all the teams, you know, our colleagues, to say only women, because our men colleagues haven’t done much for us. I would say it’s been on us, and we haven’t yet found that one business or brand who has really said, “Okay, I’m gonna support…” Nike has been a big one, they’ve offered their support through free training for professional soccer players that don’t have a contract right now, they’ve found their way around to helping us. But at the end of the day it comes down to us and to keep working for this.
Brenda: The men’s union, the men players, you haven’t gotten much support from them?
Vanessa: The men’s union I would say is our union as well – Acolfutpro, yeah. They’ve been with us since day one of the press conference, so yes, they’ve been very present and obviously they’re part of FIFPRO. So yes, they have, but as the association, you know? Not as men’s soccer. They’ve done their job as the union, but not as men’s soccer. So yeah, from the men’s side, no, we haven’t really had any support. If we have it’s been from players who have retired already because obviously they have nothing to lose.
Brenda: That is a good degree of infuriating. When people listen to stories like this almost always they respond sympathetically when it comes to feminist and sports podcast listeners, and something we always ask is: can people do anything to help? Is there anything if people are looking at this and just furious at the injustice?
Vanessa: I think we’ve found a way to grow a little bit the awareness to us, I think right now yes people have shown empathy towards us but also understanding that there are worse situations in other industries right now. Nonetheless, I think we have found a way to get people into sports and to women’s soccer, and I think that's the big difference at the end of the day between men’s soccer and women’s soccer – we know our worth as activists, as more than athletes, you know? I think the US national team is the perfect example. Megan Rapinoe knows she’s way more than just a soccer player, you know? She’s one of those lucky people that have had the chance to show it on and off the field, and even though here in Colombia we haven’t reached those objectives yet, world champions or anything, we are aware of what women’s soccer means to society and what it means for women, you know? I grew up watching soccer and I never had seen a women’s soccer game live before I played it. So we are aware of this, and people have grown this love towards our game, and they say, “Good for you that are doing all of this!” But at the end of the day what people can do is consume women’s soccer, you know? Talk about it. If there’s no women’s soccer games on TV, ask for it. Mention to your TC cable and say, hey, I would like to watch women’s soccer. Nowadays we have social media, and if you want to keep in contact with what’s going on with your favorite players follow them and ask them questions, you know? I think we’ve grown a very close relationship with people who support women’s soccer because we know it’s way more than just about soccer or sports.
Brenda: Absolutely. So going forward, how are you seeing the aftermath..? This is happening all over the world that COVID probably will be used to cut the most vulnerable parts of soccer. We’ve seen it again and again, and so I know there’s been cuts throughout Latin America – Paraguay, Uruguay, we’ll see the same probably, I expect, everywhere. How do you think we can think about women’s soccer post-pandemic?
Vanessa: I think this is gonna change us entirely, towards which direction I have no idea. I hope the best one. I think again, at least in Colombia, football/soccer had gotten into this place where it was full of violence and it was almost impossible to go to the stadiums without getting exposed to any fight or anything in between the two teams that were playing. So I think with this we have been so much time apart, people are going to want to be back together, and the day we get the chance to be back in the stadium I think we’re gonna have to reconsider our behaviors we were having as fans, talking from the fan point of view. I think women’s soccer has been helping people going back to stadiums as a family, you know? For me it was one of the most beautiful things to see when I was playing, you get to see the entire the family: the husbands and wives with the kid and the baby, you know? You wouldn’t see that anymore in men’s soccer.
So I think after COVID we’re gonna have the chance to keep using that as an excuse to keep women’s soccer alive. I think having the men’s league kind of do the same and try to make that the common denominator again is gonna be huge. So, I think that’s gonna be one of the most important things we’re gonna be able to contribute to society. I think, again, it’s so uncertain how things are gonna work out. I really hope we get the chance to go back to stadiums soon, though probably it’s gonna take a long time. I think it’s gonna help reconsider society and having women in the field sends a huge message which hopefully Latin American countries that are so behind in these topics are gonna value it a bit more.
Brenda: And just a last question: I also miss football desperately, how are you staying ready to get back on the pitch? Are you running around your house in circles? How do you do it? [laughs]
Vanessa: No…We have training everyday through Zoom, so that’s kind of the way we’re still connected as a team. The goalkeepers sessions are different, so we do a lot of jumping. If we don’t have cones or anything to show the limit of our goal we use books and we have to be a bit creative here! But we do have to jump a lot and do burpees and a lot of changing directions, you know. Luckily my position as a goalkeeper we don’t do much running, so I’m not that desperate to run. But I’m telling you, I think these workouts have been worse than on the field, so hopefully this will end soon. This is like a preseason, for real. But it’s been very good to kind of use your imagination to actually do your workouts and try to apply it to the field, you know? It’s something that I think as athletes we’ve started to use but not fully, but when you do exercises actually think on the player you’re training for – so, if you’re gonna jump for a crossbar, clearly here you don’t have a ball in the air so you actually have to imagine your entire play. I think it works a different part of your brain.
Brenda: I feel like you all should post some clips from it, and I’ll try to follow along.
Vanessa: Yes! You know, I haven’t seen many. I mean, I see athletes working out, a couple of players working out, but most of them are men players so they have their amazing gym–
Brenda: Exactly!
Vanessa: –Us, we don’t really get that. So yes, I’ll consider putting some workouts online.
Brenda: Well, Vanessa Córdoba, thank you so much for coming on Burn It All Down, and we hope to have you back again soon.
Vanessa: No thank you, thank you seriously for being on top of women’s soccer, not only in Latin America but in Colombia, very impressive! I’m honored to be here. So thank you, hopefully we’ll get the chance to meet personally soon, and hopefully in a stadium.
Brenda: Love it.
Amira: Alright, we touched on this a little in the last segment, but really what I wanna ask you: we’re in a moment where, like we said, a lot of institutions and a lot of sporting spaces are kind of crumbling down, but it also creates a possibility to think about rebuilding and reimagining a possibility for thinking about what might sports look like going forward, and if you were in charge what would your blueprint be, what would your game plan be? I wanted to shift the tone a little bit and put on our imagination hats. If I gave you all a wand and made you sporting commissioner for whatever, the globe, the world: what’s one thing you would change as we rebuild and reimagine? How might you do it? Bren?
Brenda: I have a really long laundry list of things that I can just say quickly, and it’s mostly about soccer. I would love to see a mixed gender competition…I don’t know what you all think but I would love to see that. In tennis I love that too actually, and the rules are exactly the same for both the men’s and women’s sides, so I don’t know why it wouldn’t be possible. In Colombia they have a game called Golombiao where the first goal actually has to be scored by a non-identifying boy, like…I don’t know how to say that, like either non-binary or female/woman-identified. Then it switches every other goal and you can’t have majority of boys in youth soccer on the offense. There’s ways to do it, you can’t just sort of throw it together, but it would be so cool. Anyway, I would also like All Star games…I don’t know, Shireen might not think that this is a great idea! [Shireen laughing] But I would like it! I definitely love All Star games. I love the basketball ones, I don’t know…I would like clubs to be de-privatized or made back public, and then I guess of course my co-hosts are gonna do more on this but of course I’d like it to be an anti-racist/anti-homophobic and gender inclusive sport.
Amira: Yes, certainly. Shireen?
Shireen: I’ll just say: WOMEN, WOMEN, EVERYWHERE, WOMEN. That’s just my philosophy – in administration, in coaching, in officiating, that’s what I want. I want everywhere from FIFA to NCAA, I want in grassroots leagues, I want in high schools, I want all the time everywhere. We don’t see it…Everything from NCAA having on their website saying that over 40% of NCAA women's teams have a female head coach, this was in 2016, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about only women’s sports, I’m talking about all sports. It is okay for women to coach men – Becky Hammon, hello! Brittni Donaldson, hello! We can do it. And for those that don’t know, Brittni Donaldson is the assistant head coach for the reigning and continuing 2019 NBA champions, the Toronto Raptors, I will just add that. Now, my point is that you – [crashing noise] Oh, sorry. [laughs] I got so excited I knocked over shit on my desk. [Brenda laughing] I get so excited when I think about the Raptors! I’m in a little tent I made on my laptop with my mic and a big shawl over me. I just get so excited over here everyone!
The thing is is that just women, increase them, increase their visibility, increase the opportunities for young girls to aspire, increase mentorship programs, increase opportunities for internships! Because if you’re gonna use fucking student labor at least give them an opportunity to put that on their resume, give them something back! Don’t just take their labor and run away with it, help build it. Women are the pillars for everything in the world. I’m not overstating a fact. This is just reality. I don’t understand why they’re shut out. I want them in the decision making rooms, I literally need women in control of everything. I’ve already decided where I want my co-hosts to be: as queens of the universe. I’ve talked about this in behind the burn, I want Brenda to take over FIFA, you know this. I want Jessica to re-establish the entire NFL, and college football…I want Amira to basically dictate and create policy for everything in terms of college sports. I want Lindsay to do the WNBA; I’ll take over hockey, no offense to Dani Rylan, but you need me out here. See…So, the thing is is that I’ve already put a lot of thought into this. There’s so many people that have so many good ideas that aren’t getting the exposure and opportunity. Again, women women everywhere women.
Amira: [laughs] Jessica?
Jessica: Yeah, so all of that. Anyone who’s heard me talk about my book that came out in 2016, Unsportsmanlike Conduct, knows that I’ve been on the same beat for a long time now, and I have been advocating for a long time that we need to take the big money out of college sports. We just had that entire great segment before this one where we really made the case for why this is such a problem, and people have been making this case for a long time. I do feel like this is a moment where we have to reassess…I mean, the problem with so much around college sports is the arms race for these college coaches that get these giant contracts and then they dump them when they suck at coaching and then continue to pay them millions of dollars even when they’re not coaching. We are paying assistant football coaches at college universities over a million dollars a year to coach sports. That is so ridiculous, and all of the ripple effects of that that are so bad…I could just wave a wand…I don’t know how you’d do it in the current system because the NCAA is set up by the very people who make all the money off of the NCAA so I don’t know the “how” of how you fix this, but if I could do anything it would be like Brenda said before: college football coaches shouldn’t get any more than the professors get paid, like the highest professor salary, or the average professor salary. If they’re gonna be workers at a university, an educational institution, that’s what they should get paid. We should just cut the arms race. We should put that money into other college sports, give it to the women’s sports who so desperately deserve it after all of this time, but maybe just give it back to the school, put it back into the actual educational part of the educational institution–
Amira: Oh my god, libraries! What a thought!
Jessica: Yeah, right? And so I just feel like that’s such a doable thing, at the same time I feel like it’s almost impossible just because of how the current system is set up and who controls it. So that would be one of the first things that I’d wanna do.
Amira: Yeah, so part of that transfer stuff, obviously, and the governance like Jess and Shireen talked on, but a lot of what I’ve been thinking about is youth sports and how youth sports come back – especially thinking, Bren, about how gender segregation in youth sports starts so so early. And it starts early in a way that bears no logic. If your logic in general for gender segregation in sports is that you think there’s a physiological difference and that boys and men are stronger and faster and all that and therefore must play separately, well, that logic doesn’t hold up on the youth level where girls who develop earlier and hit puberty earlier really up through middle school are absolutely the ones kicking ass in sports. So it doesn’t even hold up to that logic, if you subscribe to it. I feel that youth sports, this is a moment not only where we could see the kind of governance of sports change, but I’ve been thinking a lot about exposure to various sports. Some of the things we talk about is how people get trapped into certain sports, so, if you’re a Black kid from Philly you have a set amount of sports in front of you given to you as possibilities and not others.
We’ve seen what a little bit of exposure and resource has done for, say, women’s bobsledding. Elana Meyers-Taylor, friend of the show, personally recruited a lot of Black women to the sport. 7 out of the 9 US women’s bobsled team in the last Olympic cycle were Black women and when they did the #DontRushChallenge for bobsledders across the world there was so much melanin in that video. [Shireen laughing] That is what a little bit of exposure and a little bit of resources did to fundamentally change the face of bobsledding. So one of the things that has happened in this moment is that technology has allowed us to see connections and generosity in ways that were always there, right? If you could always hold a Zoom workshop, if you could always demonstrate…Like, my kids are doing virtual karate. What would it look like to do a virtual karate workshop for people who would never have had exposure to mixed martial arts, right?
Shireen: Yeah, yeah.
Amira: I think so much…When I was a young child Smith College held these ‘women and girls in sports’ days and you would go over to Smith and you’d spend the entire day from 8am until 6pm and you’d have a small group and over the course of the day you’d cycle through a million different sports. It was the first time I ever tried rugby, it was the first time I did crew, it was the first time I even learned about sports that I…I’d never heard of rugby, and the next thing I know I’m being lifted up in a scrum, you know? That– [cheering]
Jessica: I love that image.
Shireen: So do I.
Amira: I was very good, as you can imagine. But I think that one of the things that this moment has showed me is that a lot of the excuses that we tell ourselves about why things are closed off or why information is clustered in various areas has just been knocked down, and so I hope we take this spirit of generosity and the possibility of connection and think about how we apply that and transmit possibilities to youth, and exposure, and all of these things that might just plant seeds that develop into something beautiful. So that’s what I would do.
Alright, it’s time for everyone’s favorite part of the show: the burn pile. We are coming off an epic burn pile from last week which I feel like is still a little bit aflame, so I’m hoping to build on that. Brenda, get us going.
Brenda: I’m gonna burn two things that I don’t know anything about, which is esports and hockey…But I do know about racism, I mean a bit, so I can talk about this burn. I just feel like it needs to be covered. EA Sports has…Do you all play NHL20? So I’m not alone in not exactly knowing how this works on Playstation? But I did some screenshots and it’s a very complicated game and many of the Canadian players have been livestreaming their playing, including Vancouver Canucks goalie Thatcher Demko. Basically, this past week when he got on and started to play, he noticed that the team names/player names/etc were racist slurs. This has been popping up constantly – apparently EA Sports does not have any reporting function for any kind of racist, sexist or homophobic violations that happen on this game, at least the current edition of the game which is, I guess, Playstation 4. There are millions of people – at least a million who play it, anyway – and apparently they also have no explicit policies, though they had said, “We do not tolerate racist or derogatory language in our games.” So basically if you look at it it’s very complicated, and I just wanted to burn: A) everybody knows that people are subject to racism in esports, this has been a story for like a bazillion years, so it’s not like you couldn’t have figured this out, and B) look at the technology that is in this game, how realistic it is, how much work goes into it! You didn’t care at all to make any kind of filter to protect people, especially young people, from experiencing this racism in the game. So I just want to burn the lack of forethought and care and just the blatant racism in neglecting this feature in what is a really complicated game to make. Burn.
All: Burn.
Amira: Jess?
Jessica: Yeah, so I’m bringing the International Olympic Committee, a permanent resident of our burn pile, back to the top of the pile for minute. [Shireen laughing] This is gonna be brief but it deserves to be torched. So, because the Tokyo Games are gonna be pushed back a year, and rightly so, especially because Japan is currently in the middle of a scary surge of coronavirus cases that’s stressing its medical system, there are inevitable massive costs associated with the postponement, right? So on Thursday the Tokyo Olympic organizers and the IOC held a teleconference to talk about some of this but they wouldn't say how much the overall delay is actually going to cost. It will be billions though, with a B, most likely between $2-6 billion according to media in Japan, and I’d just bet on the higher side of that because Olympic costs are constantly outpacing their public estimates. The IOC said that they will be giving out several hundred million dollars in an emergency contribution, but none of that’s for Japan. It will go where money is needed though, to help struggling international sports federations and national Olympic committees.
I’m sure anyone who listens to this podcast will not be surprised to learn that the entirety of those costs for the postponement are going to fall on Japan and its citizens. The IOC has every host city sign a contract, and part of it is that the countries that are hosting, they deal with the financial fallout of a postponement. I think it’s fair to assume most of that’s gonna be public money, based on what we know about the financing so far for these games according to the AP article where I read all of this. “Japan says officially it is spending $12.6 billion, but a national audit says the figure is twice that much. Whatever the total, all but $5.6 billion is public money.” And that’s so far, right? So, like so much of the world, Japan is going to be facing a tremendous economic uphill climb on the other side of COVID-19, whenever that other side comes. That they have also recently paid billions of dollars to host this sporting event and are slated to pay out billions more all with little to no financial help from the organization that’s going to make the most profit from all of it? Well, I wanna burn that, so burn.
All: Burn.
Amira: Uh, Shireenie.
Shireen: Okay, so if the world was burning and things were crumbling, who would you ask to come and consult you? Obviously you would ask the Burn It All Down team. But President 45, Orange Cheeto, President Agent Orange, whatever you wanna call this man, has asked – hold on to your hats, folks – Adam Silver, Roger Goodell, Mark Cuban are among the people who will be advising this man on how to get sports back and sort of upstart the economy. In addition to them he’s asked the Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred, UFC dude and resident twatwaffle Dana White [Brenda laughing] who’s been on our burn pile several times and who Amira did burn metaphorically last week for his absolutely cheap-o greedy – That’s a technical term I use from Jessica Luther – way of managing something and insisting on holding events during a global pandemic; PGA tour commissioner Jay Monahan, LPGA commissioner Michael Whan, USTA’s Patrick Galbraith, MLS commissioner Don Garber, WWE person Vince McMahon, NASCAR vice-chair person Lesa Kennedy, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, then the New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, and of course the Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. No, this is not a comedic Saturday Night Live sketch. This is actually the committee! And you know that other than the LPGA there are no women’s sports represented on this, but I’m not gonna take this seriously, because it’s not as if this is actually going to be an effective body with which they’re going to advise this man. Can you really take Vince McMahon seriously? Can anyone? I can’t. So, this is going to be who’s advising 45 who said, very astutely, “I want sports back. We have to get our sports back. I’m tired of watching baseball games that are 14 years old…” I know that’s a terrible impersonation. [laughter] I’m so fucking mad, y’all.
Amira: [laughing] It’s better than your British accent.
Shireen: It’s better than my British accent, thank you. I read this, and it was from a reputable newspaper. I got this article from the National Post – this isn’t from The Onion or The Beaver. This was not satirical. This is a thing that is happening. This man is real. Part of me wonders why doesn’t he just get Jared Kushner to advise him on everything because he’s as unqualified at doing it anyway! I wanna burn all of this down and in addition to being frustrated and not focusing attention on medical health experts and community leaders who can talk about inequalities in the health system, talk about how brown and Black bodies…You know what I wanna see? I wanna see 45 sit down and fucking listen to Colin Kaepernick, or Rihanna. That’s what I wanna see. I wanna see medical health experts in there advising, but that’s not what’s gonna happen because this is Trump we’re talking about. I want this to go up in mighty high flames. Burn.
All: Burn.
Amira: Alright, I have a quick burn, and then I have another burn. My quick burn: I’m obviously burning Kyle Larson for saying the n-word because don’t do that. He said it with the hard “r” too, and he said it and you can hear the recording and everybody was like, uh, Kyle, buddy, we can all hear you. He was like, oh, shit. They’re like, yep, heard that. And then they were like, guys, just don’t say anything. Well guess what? We all heard it. We all heard it. So obviously you get on the burn pile because that’s just not okay. But also the part of that that I do also wanna draw attention to is that Bubba Wallace as your only Black NASCAR driver should not be everybody’s shield in this moment. He should not be called on to talk. He put out a very lovely statement addressing the fact that he had to be called into address this, but now they’ve used his statement as another shield for fan reaction to what they think should happen to Kyle Larson. He’s fortunately feeling some consequence but all of this was a mess…I meant Bubba Wallace – did I say Bubba Wallace? Okay. Anyways, all of this was a mess and that gets on the mini burn pile.
But what I really wanna burn, to go a little deeper into one component of the committee of awfulness that Shireen just laid out, and that is we need to spend a little time talking about the McMahons. This past week Florida Governor DeSantis [laughs] – awful too – made an announcement that employee at professional sports and media production with a national audience would be deemed essential. Now, who could he possibly be talking about? Oh, that’s right: the WWE. The WWE, set to fight in Florida, was coming down to the wire because they had exhausted all of the taped material, all of their stocks of taped material had been exhausted, and they were about to breach a $1 billion contract with Fox. They were about to lose upwards of $205 million, they needed to tape a live WWE show. And so they leaned on Florida governor to make this essential and now that it’s essential they’re flying people in. At a time when everybody should be at home they’re flying people in from around the country and ordered to do some filming because apparently wrestling is now essential business in Florida.
Now, this is particularly egregious because it’s very clearly due to political connection – the McMahons are very friendly with Trump; as recently as 2 ½ weeks ago Linda McMahon was in a Trump cabinet. But what really puts a cherry on top of all this awfulness here is that after securing their “essential” tag, proceeding with this, securing their contract, and after a pro-Trump pact run by Linda McMahon, America First Action, committed $18.5 million to advertise in Florida ahead of the November election. Not coincidentally also impacting and benefiting DeSantis, the governor. They turned around and furloughed much of their on-air talent: wrestlers, third-party consultants…If you haven’t seen it, Drake Maverick the wrestler did a very emotional video about being fired. He said, “There's a lot of people I'm not gonna get a chance to say goodbye to that I really loved, really cared about. You’ll have my all. You'll have everything.” It’s just so ridiculous! On top of that the WWE paid out to their shareholders a stock dividend which could’ve covered the salaries of all the people that they just released for at least a year!
Jessica: Oh my god.
Amira: Including the fact that Vince McMahon alone would be under this stock dividend payout entitled to $3.5 million which could’ve covered everybody’s salaries for at least half the year. So they could’ve chosen to pay employees full salaries until April 2021 and instead they’d rather cut costs to lower-level employees, people who need the money, cut costs there, kept it for themselves, lined their own pockets, and pumped it into the state of Florida to influence the November election for their buddy who just deemed them “essential” because it’s all a clusterfuck, so corrupt. I wanna burn it down.
All: Burn.
Amira: After all that burning it’s time to shout out some badass women of the week. Let’s start with honorable mentions: last month the IOC announced the six winners of the women and sport awards. All have made remarkable contributions to the development, encouragement and reinforcement of women’s and girls’ participation in sport.
Let’s start with the winner for Africa, Salima Souakri: four-time Olympian in judo who was the first Algerian and Arab woman to participate in the sport at the Olympics and the first Algerian woman to be named a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador.
The winner for the Americas, Guylaine Demers: who is the co-founder of the Conversations on Women in Sport conference and President of Égale-Action (Quebec’s Association for the Advancement of Women in Sport), co-chair of Sport Canada’s working group on girls and women in sport, and Chair of the Federal Minister of Sport’s advisory group on girls and women in sport, all for Canada.
The winner for Asia is Kim Jin-Ho: an Olympic medalist in archery who founded the Myeong-goong Council, which provides free archery lessons and scholarships to children, particularly girls, from the Republic of Korea.
The winner for Europe: Else Trangbæk was the first women to represent Denmark in gymnastics, shoutout to you.
The winner for Oceania: Kitty Chiller, who was among the first women to compete in modern pentathlon at the Olympic Games and, in 2016, she became the first-ever female Chef de Mission of the Australian Olympic team.
The big winner who’s the world winner is Skateistan, which uses skateboarding and education to empower children, and especially young girls. We featured on our show in episode 150, please check out that incredible interview. Congratulations to all of those award winners.
We also wanna send a big blanket shoutout to the WNBA draft class of 2020. It was certainly unprecedented but, all 36 women, kudos to you. Major shoutouts. You are all champions. Shireen also wants to send special shoutouts to the UConn players because she feels like you are the most fabulous and special players of all.
Can I get a drumroll please?
Our badass woman of the week is Softball America’s 2020 National Player, who is the University of Texas’ Miranda Elish. According to Softball America, she batted .370 on the year with seven doubles, four home runs and 19 RBI, while serving as the Longhorns' ace. Her 11 wins were the most of any pitcher in the Big 12, and she ranked sixth in victories in the whole NCAA. She also posted a 1.25 ERA for the campaign with 96 strikeouts in 84 innings of work. If you wanna know what all those numbers mean: she’s absolutely a beast, she’s a badass, and she’s our badass woman of the week.
Jess: Woo!
Amira: Alright folks, what’s good in your world? Brenda.
Brenda: I was gonna say gardening, and then it snowed yesterday. [laughs] So I think I have to re-garden everything. So I’m just not sure about that. But I read this really beautiful piece…It’s good, it keeps me busy, you know what I mean? I might as well go back at it. But I did read this really beautiful piece by accident, you know, sometimes when you’re just scrolling around on Twitter good things come to pass – usually not, but in this case it did. It’s from the Poetry Foundation, maybe some of you have read it. It’s by Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb and she wrote an article called This Was Supposed To Be Beautiful: A Failure. It’s got everything from a micro-history of sequins to her personal dealings with editors – she’s trying to write for a fashion magazine as a Marxist, like, a high-end luxury fashion magazine. It’s just a really really beautiful little piece, so that was at the Poetry Foundation, and I really liked it. This is weird because it’s obviously a sad thing for me to see the furloughing of SB Nation employees including Zito Madu, Zeets, who is a friend of the show and a wonderful writer. But part of what…not enjoying, but what’s good, is all the people who have put out SB Nation writers’ pieces out there again, and I’ve been re-reading those too and it’s just remarkable and I really admire them, and it’s been keeping me going.
Amira: That’s great. Shireen?
Shireen: Okay, what’s good: LEGO. I tweeted this out that I’ve got four kids who have been brought up on LEGO, they love LEGO. They spent much of their childhood playing and creating; my eldest, Saif-Ullah, is very big on following the model, so their each individual personalities came out. My youngest, Mustafa, creates his own designs, so he would build ships and things just based on his own designs. There was a sale recently and I had a gift card, like, when am I gonna use this. Somebody bought me a Toys R Us gift card, whatever. And I got LEGO and we all sat around and we made LEGO and it was really fun. I’m not logical in thinking, mathematician or engineer oriented, but it was actually really fun for me to follow this little booklet with all visuals. I was like, I don’t understand what this picture means! And they’re like, that means don’t throw LEGO at someone’s face. I was like, oh, okay. It was a cool activity and we just sat around. It was like me getting back a piece of their childhood when so much was me running around, getting dinner done, cleaning, managing, and they were engaged in this activity on their own. It was something to busy them while I did all the other labor, so this was really fun.
I’ve also ordered Play Doh because it helps with my anxiety and because I think we’re all gonna sit down – I have four teenagers, and we’re gonna sit down and do Play Doh! So those preschool activities I used to do with them, I’m bringing them back now. And they’re here for it. Also, Belgian waffles. I got my son Mustafa a Belgian waffle maker and I’m perfecting them now. They’re getting really good. I also wanted to mention that Ramadan is starting later this week, so for those of you that are out there in the Muslim community and my friends who identify spiritually, ethnically, community-wise, those of you who may or may not fast for whatever reasons, I’m just thinking of you all and it’s going to be very very difficult because this is the first time in my life that anything like this will happen in Ramadan, when it’s such a communal, beautiful time when community truly gets together, we can’t do it.
It’ll be a huge test for many of us and much of Ramadan is testing us and our resilience and our ability to be part and practice our faith. This is gonna be extra challenging, so I encourage you to reach out to people. There’s community supports in place, there’s online counseling available for people that feel extra isolated. For those of you that are alone anyway in Ramadan, I will be by myself because my kids will go back to their dad’s place for 2 weeks – it’s a very very long time, so if anybody wants to reach out, if you wanna connect, there’s a couple of Facebook groups that I have online, shoutout to them, and shoutout to people constantly constantly making community within this global pandemic, that are creating communities, that are holding communities. I know this is a long what’s good but I feel it’s important to share in Ramadan. I hear you and I see you and I look forward to getting through the month with you.
Amira: Awesome. Jess, what’s good with you?
Jessica: Yeah, well Shireen, I wanna tell you that you should watch LEGO Masters on Hulu–
Amira: YES!
Jessica: It’s a competitive show, but it just makes you love LEGO even more. It’s really cool to see what people can just do with LEGO. I wanted to say one thing that’s great this week: the ACLU is suing Idaho over their anti-trans bill that targets trans girls in sports, we’ve talked about that repeatedly on this show, Lindsay did a hot take about it. I’m really happy to see that the ACLU is taking action. And then I just wanted to list the things this week that have made me happy: my family got a new cooperative board game called Atlantis Rising. It takes a long time to learn how to play it, there are a lot of pieces, and so that part has been a little bit frustrating at times but we really enjoy these cooperative games. We watched Tangled on Disney+ last night, which I had never seen before and despite the fact that the women’s eyes are too big the overall story is lovely and I cried at the end. I’ve been playing Animal Crossing like everyone else on the Switch. I am obsessed with Brooklyn Nine Nine right now, you can watch it on Hulu. And then this week I listened to every single episode of a podcast called Noble Blood that exists – it’s all about royalty all over the world, it’s hosted by Dana Schwartz, and I just found it really compelling. The episodes are like 20-25 minutes and I just really enjoyed it, so that’s Noble Blood.
Amira: That’s awesome. I have to tell you, Jess, when you were tweeting about Tangled, first of all it made me laugh because that was Samari’s first movie in a movie theatre! She was three years old, which tells you…I was like, wow, they were very delayed watching this movie!
Jessica: Very delayed, yes.
Amira: But the other thing that I have to tell you…I was like, oh, I have to tell Jess this story! Me and my sister took her to see it, we were in Dallas, and we took her to see it, and we were like five minutes late to the movie starting, so we watched the whole movie and then at the end when her mom turns out to be the witch, the villain, me and my sister were like, PLOT TWIST. Oh my gosh! How did they hide that?! I for sure thought that was the dopest, like, they really got us!
Jessica: Come to find out it’s the first five minutes!
Amira: They totally…Exactly! I was like, oh!
Jessica: [laughs] They did give that away really fast, yeah.
Amira: Ay, ay, ay. But I will forever think about that movie because of Samari, again, being 3, and we were in the front row and as soon as the first song came on she jumped up and danced.
Jessica: Aww.
Amira: We did not go over proper theater etiquette! But anyways, does that mean you haven’t seen Moana?
Brenda: Nope.
Jessica: No, I’ve seen it.
Amira: Okay.
Brenda: I haven’t.
Amira: OH MY GOSH. Can we do a watch party and experience it with you?
Brenda: Yes, yes.
Amira: I’m putting that on my list. Shireen thinks I’ve forgotten about her promise to watch Avatar with me – I have not! So I’m putting you on my list, Brenda, for Moana. Alright.
Brenda: I also haven’t seen Tangled or any other Disney movies all the way through. So…
Amira: Well I mainly care about Moana and Coco.
Brenda: Oh, I did see Coco, that’s the only one. Okay. Fair enough.
Amira: So, Moana.
Brenda: Yup.
Amira: So, what is good in my life is a little bit random: there’s a new digital escape game that I’m very excited about, I’m gonna play it once I stop talking to you all. Actually, I’m gonna sleep and then I will play it. Then…What else? Oh, I’m having a lot of fun reconnecting with friends, particularly my friends from college. We tend to be on Houseparty a lot together now. I haven’t talked to them in a few years as consistently as this, and that’s been very special. And…Oh, there’s a new Netflix documentary How to Fix a Drug Scandal, which–
Jessica: Oh yeah, we started that! It is…Wow!
Amira: That is where I grew up in western Massachusetts!
Jessica: That’s what I said to Aaron!
Amira: It’s a lot. But it also tells you a lot about the western part of the state which is very isolated from the east and so has very little oversight, which, in this case, not a great thing! But also a little bit about the politics of the valley, so that is something we binged. It was a wild ride. Shireen?
Shireen: Yeah, just wanted to, Amira, say absolutely no, Avatar is available on Netflix for me, I can’t watch it. My kids are very very excited because it’s gonna be awesome. My eldest keeps telling me that I will relate to so many social issues and messages in it, so I’m ready. I’m very very ready for this. I was a bit intimidated because of your enthusiasm and your knowledge which also I’m in awe of, but yes. Let’s do it. Let’s Avatar this shit.
Amira: Well, I’m glad that we’re still planning to watch this show together. I am very excited about that, of course. I had a really good writing week so I just wanna pat myself on the back for writing in the midst of absolute chaos, so that was something. Then I also just wanted to shout out a local distillery here, Big Spring Spirits who is using their distillery to make hand sanitizer for everyone here in the community, and also still keeping up their sales. They delivered a mango mojito pre-mixed big bottle of alcohol to me as well as their version of a Moscow mule, and these are huge bottles that they make and package themselves, and so the fact that you’re delivering alcohol while liquor stuff is shut down while using your distillery to make hand sanitizer is pretty fucking cool, and that’s what’s good.
That’s it for this week’s episode of Burn It All Down. Thank you so much for joining us. You can listen and subscribe to Burn It All Down on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Soundcloud, Google Play, Sticher, wherever you get your podcasts. Of course, feel free to rate the show, share the show – please, we love help amplifying it, sharing it with people who don’t know it exists. We’re on Facebook and Instagram @burnitalldownpod, and on Twitter @burnitdownpod. Hit us up in those places. For more information about the show, links, transcripts for each episode, check out our website: burnitalldownpod.com. You can also email us directly from the site, give us feedback – we love to hear from you. On the site you’ll find links to our Teespring merchandise shop, our Patreon as well. Our Teespring shop right now is running a promotion, so if you use the code STAYHOME20 you get 20% off your order, so if you need to get something to keep you warm – a new hoodie for lounging around the house, or a blanket or a pillow, we have you covered over on our Teespring merch shop. I want to send a hearty thank you to our full BIAD team: our new producer Kinsey Clarke, as well as Shelby Weldon who is our social media/graphics extraordinaire. Thank you to both of you for the work you do on the show, and of course a hearty thank you to our patrons. We could not do this show without you, you make this all possible.
For those of you that are not patrons, a reminder that you can join for as little as $2/month. You’ll be entered in giveaways, you get extra content. Our latest content is a discussion on good sports books and movies, plus Jessica has the latest behind the burn vlog where you get lots of Ralph content with her dog. I highly highly suggest that you come join us over there on our Patreon community. Again, I’m Amira Rose Davis, and from me and the rest of the BIAD team: burn on, not out. We’ll see you next week, flamethrowers.