Women's football clinics: the reporter's cut

By now, hopefully y’all have read my story on women’s football clinics. Otherwise the ensuing massive blog post will make no sense to you.

I reported this story for more than a month, starting when I first heard about Penn State’s women’s clinic. I had honestly never heard of these before, as my alma mater, the University of Minnesota, didn’t have these clinics when I was on campus. I was intrigued, and will take any opportunity to explore how sports act as a microcosm of society, so here we are.

Obviously, I wasn’t allowed to attend Penn State’s, but Ohio State did let me cover its clinic, and that firsthand experience was invaluable (the epic sunburn and ensuing strange tan lines I took home as a souvenir was not). There were a lot of fun things that didn’t make my final print story, but I wanted to share them with you here.

First, the stripping! Cheryl Cooky (she’s got a great Ted Talk, too), an expert on women in sport, had a cool take on the whole undressing-of-players-for-the-sake-of-learning-how-uniforms-work scenario. She mentioned how Not OK that situation would be if it were reversed, middle-aged men at a clinic for women’s basketball, for example, undressing a 20-year-old woman. But while the age limit made this particular instance a little creepy, the bigger picture shouldn’t be completely overlooked:

“I don’t want to discount sexuality and sexual desire as an important component of many women’s fandom experience. An attraction to players, a sexual desire, I think, is a part of the fan experience for some women that gets delegitimized. … That somehow that component has to be disengaged in order for a woman to be the right kind of fan or an authentic fan.

“Sexual desire gets discounted by men and male sports fans because it brings sexuality into picture, flips the gaze. Because men usually look at women and this challenges that. If women are looking at men and think they’re hot, then men [are] also looking at these hot men.

“I think there’s ways to acknowledge the kind of pleasurable aspects of being a sports fan, in particular being a woman fan of football, whether that be Big Ten college football or NFL football, while also recognizing that there’s some aspects that we might want to raise questions or concerns about.”

That’s kind of fascinating, isn’t it? Here’s Raekwon McMillan, one of the Ohio State players to get stripped, on his first women’s clinic experience:

“Just coming out here seeing some crazy women fans and seeing how they act and seeing how much football they actually know is actually pretty cool because you really don’t think that women would know that much about it.

“It just empowers women, you know. They come out here, and they can do the same thing the men do. … It shows just the passion of women who love football and actually get to have hands-on time with the coaches and the players.

“I would say that Ohio State does it differently, man. We coach them all the same way, so they’re getting coached just as good as us all. The drills they showed you on the stage were the same drills that we actually do in practice, so they’re not going to take it easy just because they’re women because equality is real. … They are coming out here working hard just like we do.”

McMillan also said the coaches usually pick a team captain or someone with a “nice body” to do the uniform demonstration. He said he didn’t know the women were going to strip him down to his boxers, but he just rolled with it. He said it was awkward when he was first up on stage, but he just went with the flow. (Hear this quote and more on the stripping in this video.)

Something else about the uniform demo, Holly Swanson, the woman I spoke to who went to Penn State’s clinic, said she would have loved the opportunity to put on some pads and see how that all worked. So why not just let women put on pads for themselves and eliminate the cringey strip-tease? But I digress.

Swanson said her favorite part of Penn State’s clinic was, “Walking over to the cafeteria … James Franklin and I were talking about bed time routines for our kids and the best way to get your kids to go to bed on time. You were really able to connect with them on a different level than we did at any other event I had ever been to.”

That’s just a cool anecdote, I thought.

Cooky had a really interesting take on women’s clinics within the overall college and even professional football landscape. It was a little too broad for my story, but I think it’s definitely something to consider:

“I would be hard-pressed to say that this is about being more inclusive of women sport fans, that the goal of this isn’t somehow tied to a kind of public relations strategy, in terms of addressing the kind of negative press that the NFL and football in general has been receiving the past couple of years. The Sandusky scandal is one, the concussion scandal in the NFL is another. … For me, I see those as connected. Maybe not as a direct connection.

“I also am a little bit skeptical as well because when we look at the overall context of collegiate football or professional football, and in particular those big-time programs like Ohio state, like Penn State, like the professional league in general, and look at the ways in which women get treated outside of the league or outside of the sport context, in terms of I’m thinking domestic violence and sexual assault. For me, I think, it’s a kind of a contradiction that I can’t necessarily resolve or accept. Ok, so yeah, we’re going to have this space for women. We’re going to include women. We want women to be fans of the sport. We want women to feel included in our team and in this space of football. But at the same time, then when we look at the policies, when we look at the practices, when we look at the pervasive sexism within some of those sports team and how teams often cover up or look away when instances of sexual violence, sexual assault, domestic violence, even violence against athletes themselves in the form of suicide or what have you. When sport looks away from that, then I have a hard time with seeing this as simply a, ‘this is about including women in the game.’

“If it’s being framed by the teams and by the league as, ‘Let’s create an inclusive space for women fans. Let’s educate women fans so we can get more women at the games and supporting the team.’ … Then you can’t say that on the one hand and then when issues that are pertaining to women outside of the field, domestic violence, sexual assault, sexual violence, when those things happen, and you’re turning the other way or you’re victim blaming or you’re giving excuses or you’re giving very lenient penalties or you’re covering up, I’m not buying that.”

While at the camp and in talking to various people about them, I kept running into this same phrase. That women needed to be educated on the sport so they could be better moms, wives and girlfriends — so that they could better communicate with their sons, husbands and boyfriends. I found that pretty disturbing, and here’s what Cooky had to say about this idea of conventional relationships and heteronormativity:

“Women are watching sports because of the men in their lives, and they’re being taught by men for the purposes of enhancing their relationships with other men, whether that be fathers or husbands or boyfriends or sons, which I think is also problematic because it erases the woman fan of football who is generally interested in the sport because of her own pleasure and her own appreciation of the game. So where does she fit into that narrative?”

Shelley Meyer, Ohio State coach Urban Meyer’s wife, also had some more good quotes from our talk, as did Amy Nicol, Ohio State’s coordinator of football administration and special events. Both of them use that women-are-football-fans-because-of-the-men-in-their-lives language. Here’s Meyer:

“I don’t want to stereotype, but men mostly get the game of football at some level. But there’s just as many female fans that are just as passionate that go got the game and spend their money. And just to make them feel part. … It’s a, quote, man’s sport. … It’s a male-dominated sport.

“A lot of husbands get annoyed when their wives are saying, what’s that? What’s that called? What was that? What was that play? … They don’t want to teach their wives about football. So come and learn the game. Get the experience that these young men do and have a little fun doing it.

“We just feel like it’s important to embrace the female population that supports us.

“Anything we do as women, when we do it together without men involved … you feel more comfortable, and that’s what it’s for. The whole day is for women to feel comfortable asking about football, learning it, experiencing it.”

And from Nicol:

“We just found that’s really what our the Buckeye fans are looking for. They really want to be involved. They want to walk away with a piece of knowledge they didn’t have before, and sometimes, I think, they want to be able to say something that, go home and impress their husband when they’re watching TV, watching the game and drop a little bit of knowledge. But they really seem to be pretty knowledgeable and want to learn as much as they can.

“A lot of times, football is a sport that is portrayed kind of like a boys’ club. It’s all men that play and just recently women are starting to coach. But it’s kind of portrayed that way, and it’s just not true. I know, my friends know, we’re really into the game of football and appreciate it and understand a lot of it, and it’s just nice to have an event that’s geared toward women.”

So now that y’all have basically seen my entire reporting process, lmao, email or tweet me with your questions and/or opinions. As I think many of you are after reading my story, I’m conflicted about these clinics. I’d never condemn someone for having a good time and fun fan experience, and I think including women in traditionally male-dominated activities is an excellent step forward. But the way some of these clinics are carried out is problematic, to say the least.

Basically, Stay Woke, Question Everything, Don’t Take Sports For Granted Because They Are Entertainment. Thanks for reading and thinking with me!