Social justice and sports

2015 was a big year for activism in sports, and this year seems poised to be significant, too. Here’s a look at events in two sports last year that suggest more to come in 2016.

Women’s Soccer

Everybody knows the U.S. women’s national soccer team (USWNT) kicked World Cup ass last year. They won the final in phenomenal style and claimed the hearts of American viewers, as confirmed by the highest U.S. TV ratings of a soccer game ever. But almost everyone who watched that tournament also recognizes that the victory was somewhat marred by being played on astroturf rather than real grass. And that’s the thing I want to talk about here: turf.

U.S. women’s team doctors have said playing on the stuff, which costs less than grass to maintain, has increased injury risk for players: falling on plastic chews you up, and playing and running on plastic is less forgiving to joints. Turf may have deeper risks, too: anecdotal evidence suggests playing on crumb rubber fields puts players at higher risk of certain cancers; the crumb rubber that gives the fields their spring is often made of recycled tires–and yes, tires are known to be carcinogenic as well as neurotoxic, thanks for mentioning that. Whatever the risks of crumb rubber fields, the fact is that elite men almost never play soccer on them. So why should elite women have to?

Well, they had to. In the run-up to the game elite players from women’s teams from around the world joined in an effort pressing FIFA to convert tournament fields to natural grass. But FIFA responded nastily, pushing back with a subtext that players ought to have been grateful for even getting to play. It’s safe to say that after the World Cup, the USWNT were decidedly sensitive both about turf, and also about being treated as second-class citizens.

Maybe at this point, if the international and national soccer bodies responsible for oversight of the USWNT’s play had learned their lesson–that is, that neither fans, nor elite soccer players, are happy about top-tier soccer happening on low-grade, risky surfaces–the issue of synthetic turf would have faded into oblivion. Instead, what happened was that the women were sent out to celebrate their World Cup victory by … playing on a field that was booby-trapped, rock-strewn turf. It would have been funny if it weren’t so obnoxiously disrespectful as to seem intentional. Shortly after the USWNT set their eyes on it, they called off the match in the interest of safety.

It was a pretty bold move. (Nearly as bold as asking the most highly-watched women’s national sports team in American history to practice their craft in a figurative minefield–but then again, it’s all a matter of perspective.) Ultimately the U.S. Soccer Federation sided with the USWNT, agreeing their safety concerns were valid and that the match should have been cancelled. If the U.S. Soccer Federation had done its job–it was formally responsible for inspecting fields of play in advance of games, but for unknown reasons hadn’t done so this time–the whole situation could have been avoided. 15,000 fans wouldn’t have been disappointed. The time and energy of the USWNT wouldn’t have been wasted. But that’s not what happened.

And now, with whole artificial turf question raised so many times last year, questions continue swirling around it. Retired U.S. women’s national team player Julie Foudy has been talking about potential health risks of crumb-rubber turf for a long time, but it’s arguably thanks to the incompetence of FIFA and the U.S. Soccer Federation rising the profile of turf by sticking our top women on it, that many more are asking questions. It may just end up that the USWNT’s legacy for this generation is not only the impact it is having on soccer’s rise in America, but also the mainstreaming of the idea turf is a bad idea for soccer–and maybe, for people in general–for a lot of reasons. To follow this story in 2016, follow advocate Julie Foudy; the USWNT and its captain Carli Lloyd; and the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA), the California agency leading a comprehensive study on effects of playing on turf (due out in 2018).

Unfortunately, it’s not just in America where no matter how well you play a sport, you’re relegated to second-class status if you’re not a man. The Australian women’s national soccer team–or the Matildas, to Aussies–were forced to launch a boycott to earn a decent salary. After being paid a base rate of $14,894–about half the average wage in Australia, and much less than the men’s national team that they consistently outperform in global competition–the Matildas had been slated to play two games in the U.S. as a victory tour. But their contract expired after the World Cup, pay talks broke down, and the women went unpaid. While their male counterparts, the Socceroos, ultimately reached a deal, the women’s team did not. The Football Federation of Australia claimed it simply could not afford to pay the women–role models for the biggest team sport among girls and women in their country–any more.

Foudy and other U.S. veterans lent their support and guidance to the Australian team’s boycott, as the USWNT had faced similar struggles for adequate pay and reasonable benefits in the 90s. It’s admirable that the U.S. supported the Matildas, who finally reached a new four-year agreement in November that allocated the equivalent of a whopping $21,028 to second-tier players annually and $28,739 to top players. But can it be considered a victory that the Matildas were given improvements in their wages, when the same collective bargaining agreement promised their male counterparts “a continuation of the high performance environment and sports science resources that delivers a world-class environment?”

Like the U.S. women, clearly the top women soccer players in Australia have more work ahead. Keep an eye on them and on Aussie men’s team, led by stars like Tim Cahill; the men’s team supported the women in their calls for better pay during the boycott, and hopefully will continue to advocate for the Matildas on and off the field.

College Athletics

Last year two teams took historic stands against racism. At Oklahoma University, where video surfaced of an SAE fraternity pledge singing a song tinged with racist references, the football team boycotted practice for a week. The team’s boycott wasn’t the only thing that got the administration to boot the offending frat from campus. But the image of its black and white players marching in lockstep against racism was unforgettable.

Then, at the University of Missouri, players added their weight to on-campus agitation, threatening to boycott a game against BYU–which would have cost the university $1.5 million in contract forfeiture fees–unless the university president resigned. This was in the wake of his egregious mishandling and perpetration of racist incidents on campus that had sparked massive campus outcry.

These two events were both cases where a broader movement or conversation on campus sparked a protest by football players–a rarity in the modern sports landscape. The reason sports and student protest culture hasn’t done a whole lot of mixing before might be that, especially at big Division 1 schools with good football teams, there’s often a wide chasm separates athletes from the student body. Much has been said about how scholarship athletes often feel pressure to perform to maintain their scholarships. Rather than sports scholarships being a ticket into a mecca of learning, oftentimes for recruited athletes they’re a ticket into a top-notch athletic program where academics are incidental.

Because of this difference in perspective, sometimes it’s the case that non-athlete students look down on athletes, perceiving them to be only at school to play sports; or, it’s the case that athletes, some of whom are national celebrities, feel they have little in common with non-athletes. But observers say a new kind of mutual respect is kindling across that great divide, football teams after OU and Mizzou are seeing not only that they stand for the same things non-athlete protesters do, but also that they are uniquely positioned in the media spotlight to effect progress toward the desired change by raising their voices.

And indeed, in some ways, football teams are the ideal incubators for the kind of empathy and respect needed for structural and systemic change protesters are calling for, to happen within U.S. higher education. With so many scandals involving player-perpetrated violence and sexual assault breaking lately, this may seem unlikely. How does football’s culture of brutality reconcile with the emerging narrative of college football teams being allied with the leading edge of the social justice movement of our time?

I think you have to look at the facts. On a football team, you have guys from all over, setting aside their differences, working toward a shared goal of playing well individually and together. Where else in America might a nineteen-year-old from Charleston and a nineteen-year-old from Seattle be thrown together as allies, be crowned as heroes for athletic feats, have their alliance tested and strengthened every day at workouts, then tested and strengthened some more at games?Then, take the fact that even on not-very-diverse campuses, Black athletes are often represented in much higher numbers than in the student population as a whole. So what might seem to be a marginal issue to a mostly-white student body, might affect the majority of its football team.

Once you’re at a certain level of play, the more cohesive a team is, the better its results. So it seems to me that it’s against the nature of a good sports team to be faced with a divisive issue and not want to grapple with it and come to some unified stance towards it. Teams are assuredly grappling with questions about domestic violence and sexual assault today as well. But perhaps those topics, tied as they are to underlying taboos and dark truths about sex, gender and power in American society, are so off-limits that even confronting racism is easy work by comparison.

Going into 2016, fans engaged in the social justice struggles affecting players on the college football they love should keep an eye out for two things.

First, some schools may try to make athlete scholarships contingent on the students not participating in things like strikes or protests; a legislator in Missouri already introduced legislation aimed at this (though he seems not to have realized that he can’t control scholarships at private schools funded by private donations). These kinds of rules would make student-athletes second-class citizens, who would be prohibited from expressing their opinions as is their right according to the First Amendment of the United States constitution. I think we all agree that a first-rate country shouldn’t have second-class citizens. Limiting the rights to free speech and freedom of expression for student-athletes would also be a clear sign that what advocates have asserted is true: that colleges aren’t out to help first-generation college students who are athletes to access education, but rather are profiting off unpaid student-athlete labor, while avoiding investing in their educational futures, thus perpetuating the inequality that can be traced back to the way in the past, and even still today, discriminatory practices or ideas tie to access to economic and social opportunities.

Engaged fans may also keep an eye out for protests on the 76 college campuses where student leaders issued clear, specific demands to administrators, asking them to address embedded systems that either enable or promote racial discrimination. Some universities have sought to work with the students behind these efforts. But a whole lot have reacted with apathy, denial, or a sense of being challenged by an entitled student body that should be grateful for the rights they do have, not asking for more. So it seems safe to say that in the post-Ferguson, #BlackLivesMatter era, questions of race and privilege are sure to provoke flashpoints on more campuses in the coming year. You can follow this at thedemands.org.