I grew up playing ice hockey, which wasn’t uncommon in Michigan, but it was still a unique sport for a girl to be playing. Adults tended to be a little surprised when I told them about my pastime. There was a period of time growing up when I said that I wanted to be a professional hockey player, which people discouraged me from on the grounds that there wasn’t a cohesive professional women’s hockey league for me to play in. Growing up with two older brothers who thought they were headed for the MLB, I didn’t find it all that strange to want to become a professional athlete. But the truth is that women haven’t been able to pursue a viable path playing their sport for most of my life. However, the tides are turning on women’s sports, and not just in hockey. This year was the second-most viewed NCAA women’s basketball tournament of all time this year, and viewership of women’s soccer has increased by 45 percent since 2023. As we enter the age of women’s sports, I can’t help but think about the teams on Oberlin’s campus. What does it mean to be a female athlete at this college?
I don’t think that it’s much of a surprise that being on the sports teams here can be isolating. Oberlin doesn’t have a mainstream sports culture the way that larger colleges might, meaning that there’s not much outreach from non-athletes to athletes; sports can also be a major responsibility that takes up a lot of the opportunities for student-athletes to socialize. Meena Lee, a fourth-year on the women’s soccer team, discussed how much time it takes to be a student-athlete.
“I think that the busy schedule of being an athlete, especially in season, precludes a lot of student-athletes from engaging in certain things like co-ops, clubs, and guest lectures or other department events, since meeting, meal, and event times often conflict with practice or game times,” she said.
Other student-athletes agreed, saying that time was a large limiting factor in getting closer to the wider college community. There are other reasons for that pervasive cloistered feeling, too. At the start of this semester, one of my classmates mentioned how strange it was to be playing a sport at Oberlin. This classmate said he was sometimes embarrassed to tell people he was on a team — sports here just aren’t as exciting to the wider student body as they were in high school.
Because Oberlin is a little liberal arts college in the middle of the sports-crazed Midwest, it makes sense that we tend to reject making gods out of our athletes. Our culture is, in a lot of ways, grounded in being counterculture to the mainstream. Athletics is just one manifestation of that tendency — we also take pride in being counterculture when it comes to fashion, gender, and self-expression. I’ve seen my fair share of men at Oberlin with painted nails and smudged eyeliner, but getting my older brothers to present themselves in such a way would be like pulling teeth. It’s important to Oberlin students that this remains a place where free expression is encouraged and our assumptions about what people are supposed to look like are challenged. Our disregard for sports is rooted in this value.
A lot of people at Oberlin come from places where sports enforce gender roles. A close friend of mine recently told me that her high school field hockey team had required skirts in their uniforms. Lots of high schools encourage their students to fall into stereotypes — popular jocks who hate school and beautiful but mean cheerleaders. The athletes in these stereotypes are men. How often does popular media portray the quarterback who gets all the girls? The cliché is so pervasive that we can accept it as a kind of truth, but what it’s actually saying is that men who look a certain way and exhibit a certain level of athletic prowess are able to earn women. In a lot of ways, sports have been used in the U.S. to enforce certain ideas about what our genders are supposed to mean. Even if this isn’t everybody’s lived experience, it’s an image that is often associated with athletics, and I think it’s part of the reason we avoid pedestalizing them here. However, women’s sports allow women to subvert this ideology.
If you know me in person, you know that I’m prone to expressing exaggerated masculine traits. I like to feel strong and look muscular. This semester, I hosted a dinner party at my home and called it BoyDinner ™. Everybody wore their baseball hats backwards, and we all went outside to throw the ball around. The thing is, I would have had a hard time fitting into the girl-on-the-sidelines trope. I’m a little too rowdy, and I’m not prone to gracefulness, and at 5’11”, I’m just not small enough. I was lucky to grow up playing hockey because it gave me my own counterculture version of womanhood that made it easier for me to exist in my body.
Still, it was frustrating to be compared to the men’s team all the time — to be playing girls’ hockey and not just hockey. We have an incredible opportunity here at Oberlin to change that common narrative. Women’s sports have never been as revered as men’s sports in the traditional college setting. Shouldn’t we want to rebel against that here by uplifting women’s sports?
I asked how non-athletes could show their support, and every student-athlete gave me the same obvious answer — go to games.
“Everyone loves to feel supported by their schoolmates and friends,” second-year soccer player Laney Basom said. “It is great to look at the crowd and see people in the stands cheering for us, whether you’re playing, injured, or on the bench.”
We can’t control the fate of women’s sports in the nation. I’d like for them to continue to grow in popularity, but it’s possible that they’ll fall out of favor again as our culture dictates what it thinks women are for. What we can control is the culture of our college. I’d like to see support for women’s sports become a lasting part of that culture. All that being said, let’s go see the game!
