I read some great news yesterday. Amazon announced that Hannah Storm and Andrea Kremer would become the first all-women team to broadcast an NFL game.
The reactions have been mixed, as you would expect in this day of age. I just don't understand why. Why is everything taking so long?
There are so many gifted female athletes in the world, and intelligent minds who coach them or speak about them on television every day. But there simply aren't enough.
The fact that it took until 2018 to have an all-female broadcasting team in America's most popular sport is astounding, and frankly embarrassing to me. Hannah and Andrea have been beyond capable of calling a game for a long time now, and they are far from the only ones. There are thousands of games each year, and we couldn't let them announce one, all this time?
We need more women on the sidelines, and we need to bring more attention to the fantastic female athletes who are severely lacking it.
I just watched arguably the most entertaining playoff series since the great Lakers/Celtics battles in the '80's in this year's WNBA Conference Finals. The Seattle Storm and Phoenix Mercury battled it out to the end of the deciding Game 5, when Sue Bird and Seattle finally edged out Diana Taurasi and the Mercury.
If we want to abide by "Time's Up", then it's about time we start spreading more love to women in sports. There should be plenty more Nancy Lieberman's, Becky Hammon's, or Jen Welter's coaching in the men's games (check out my interview with Welter here).
I'm not settling for these scraps. I'm glad that Amazon gave this a shot, but this should only be the beginning of a movement to level the playing field between men's and women's games.
Time's up.
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Quote of the Day: "I want little girls to grow up knowing they can do anything, even play football." - Jen Welter
Song of the Day: "Respect" by Aretha Franklin
People like what they like. If they like women doing commentary, they will watch. If they don’t, they won’t. That should be the end of it. We shouldn’t be trying to force people to watch what they don’t enjoy just to fulfill some quota or satisfy our need for “equality”.
Guys watch sports more than women. This is true and neither a good nor bad thing. Guys prefer to watch men play (most) sports. This is neither a good nor a bad thing.
Attempting to engage in social engineering (shoving more women’s sports into the limelight in hopes that it makes people care) doesn’t work. See the WNBA. (But also see women’s tennis and golf. People like what they like.)
So, hey, good for them with their all-women team. If people like them, they’ll succeed. If they don’t, they won’t. No fault, no foul either way.