Dear Listeners,

In the new episode we dig into the origins of this very podcast by talking to Cheryl Cooky, Associate Professor of American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Purdue University.

Cheryl is a co-author of a longitudinal study on the quantity and quality of men’s and women’s sports coverage in media from which the stat 44% of athletes are women and only 4% of media coverage is about women comes. Head over to the Show Notes to find her Ted Talk along with a link to the movie where I first heard the 4% stat, plus, of course, other cool stuff.

A Few Lasting Impressions:
1. You can’t beat Cheryl’s vending machine analogy. Who doesn’t like candy and I’m happy to report that Hear Her Sports ended up as the gummy bears.
2. I’m glad I asked Cheryl about the WNBA coverage because I do follow women’s basketball, subscribe to League Pass and newsletters that cover what’s going on. As a result, it seemed to me that the coverage actually wasn’t that bad. In reality, I was in my own little fan girl bubble. Cheryl set me straight.
3. You can read Cheryl’s research about media coverage of Caster Semenya here.
4. Sports tells us about culture. Don’t miss Cheryl’s explanation of why both sports and studying sports are important.

HOT TAKES FROM THE EPISODE
☄️"Men’s sports are covered ALL the time, right. So, it’s never too soon, too late, too early to talk about men’s sports."
☄️"What can sport tell us about our culture? What can sport tell us about how we think about and how we see men and women in our culture?"

IF YOU LIKE THIS EPISODE, try these:
🎤 Ep43 Colette Smith on women’s football. Listen Here.
🎤 Ep58 Jen Gurecki sporty entrepreneur on media. Listen Here.
🎤 Ep44 Margo Burke, teenage girl who knows about equity. Listen Here.

I'M READING NOW
✶ Scroll down to the ❤️ to find Hear Her Sports in Podcast, The Newsletter. I'm so excited to be included. Lauren Passall listens to a lot of podcasts and knows the business so is able to wade through everything out there and make strong recommendations.
✶ 7 Ways To Improve Sports Coverage of Women's Sports. Types of coverage, value & importance of statistics in women's sports, & jeez, it takes real work to find what little women's coverage there is.
✶ Thinner is not necessarily better. Thinner is not necessarily faster. Thanks to NYT reporter Lindsay Crouse, high school running phenom Mary Cain recently opened up about the abuse she experienced as part of Nike's Oregon Project. (Make sure to watch the video. It's just plain excellent and heartbreaking and crucial to see.) We absolutely need more women coaches and more women in positions of power and influence. This, of course, is true everywhere, not only in sport.

Welcome to Fast Track.
In the latest Fast Track we have Lisa Keller on being an athlete with cancer.
Triathlete, stellar coach, and lifelong Alaskan Lisa joins Hear Her Sports again with this clip cut from the full episode. When we spoke back in the spring, Lisa and I had a terrific and quite long chat so, for sake of length, something had to go. I’ve always been sad about that and wanted to get this section posted somehow, so here we are. Listen Here