Trifecta

Highlight reel day!

Voice Post

MCBias writes a blog that is self-admittedly and blatantly biased, as are many sports blogs. However, unlike other sports blogs, the “Moderately Cerebral Bias” blog contains posts not only about major men’s sports, but women’s sports as well. The overall tone of the entire blog, including these posts about women’s sports, is unapologetic, and conversational.

Read the blog!

            In the post titled “Women’s SportsWeek: She is the Champion, My Friend”, the author begins by stating,

            Ah, so much easier to twist the work of another to make a cute title than rather thinking up our own, eh?

            This line characterizes the author’s tone throughout all of the blog’s posts. MCBias readily admits that the title lacks originality, but does not apologize for it. The posts on the blog also involve the audience with a sort of “we’re in this together” mentality:

            Usually, most of us are controversial enough without help, thanks much.

            The author also frequently uses rhetorical questions to bring up seemingly obvious evidence to support main points.

            And what happened? Ask the players themselves. Are you Martina Hingis, the Williams sisters, Anna Kournikova? Well then, you are a marketer’s dream, and you should spend more time on fashion/movies/travel/becoming and entertainment superstar than on actually improving your tennis game…On the other hand, are you Lindsay Davenport? Well then, you should prepare to be made fun of because of your looks, and have your accomplishments ignored.

            MCBias writes for an audience with a general knowledge of sports and pop culture, as seen in this passage. However, this style of writing involves the audience by putting them in the situation being used as the author’s argument. 

So in oh-so-weak retaliation (of the lack of honoring a champion for their achievements), today I am posting pictures of more obscure women champions over the years.     

          The author sees this as a way of striking back, but uses “oh-so-weak” somewhat sarcastically to imply that recognizing these athletes is powerful, not weak, and that the athletes themselves are powerful. However, others may see this as weak.

            In the more recent post, “FortyYears after Title IX, Women Remain Amateurs”, the author concludes that Title IX has “miserably failed in jump-starting a larger interest in women as athletes or creating an equal playing field”. Much like in the first post, the author quickly establishes a strong point of view and states it matter-of-factly at the beginning of the entry. The author then proposes multiple possible solutions in garnering interest in women’s sports, using rhetorical questions along the way and writing in a thinking-out-loud, stream of consciousness type of style, using phrases such as “I was impressed by…”, “I also quite frankly wonder…”, and “It won’t be easy…” to reflect his thoughts.

            Perhaps the true way to fulfill the spirit of Title IX is for a woman to one day play shortstop for the Dodgers.

            At the end of both posts, the author asks his readers to share their own opinions, encouraging more audience interaction. Also in both posts, the author uses hyperlinks to citations and references to previous posts. In all of his posts, there is a liberal use of photos and videos to support his points of view, including a video of an impressive last-second goal by Abby Wambach in an incredible display of athleticism by the USA women’s soccer team, which was still not enough to garner enough interest for a professional women’s league to succeed in the US. The video emphasized the sheer awesomeness of women's sports and MCBias helps bring out how little that is recognized.

Profile Post

                “The Roots of The Game: A Syracuse Lacrosse Memoir” is pretty much what it sounds like. It is a blog written by Frederick Douglass Opie, a former member of the Syracuse men’s lacrosse team in the early 80s. Frederick (I’m going to call him Freddy for short- Freddy, if you’re reading this and would prefer to be called something else, let me know) writes about memories of his participation in lacrosse and comments on the state of lacrosse “back in the day” as well as what the lacrosse is like nowadays.  He also occasionally interviews or uploads guest posts from his former lacrosse buddies.

Freddy in the #7. Photo borrowed from his blog and all credits go to Freddy!

                If you read my blogs (mom and those robot spam advertisers, I’m talking to you guys) and several of my favorite blogs listed in my blogroll over  here ------------------------------------------> you’ll notice that most of us blog in the moment, or soon after things occur. Freddy is awesome because he blogs about the past, present, and future. Yes, you may be thinking to yourself, anyone can do that. But Freddy makes me feel like I’m living in the story with him as he tells it. The real life photos of Freddy’s teams definitely add to the “memoir” feel.

                Although I definitely enjoy reading this blog, I think that judging by the comments Freddy receives, most of his readers are former men’s lacrosse players, mostly from around the time that he played lacrosse. If you can’t tell already, my focus is mostly on modern day women’s lacrosse, so although our topics are both about lacrosse, the subject matter is actually different. I would imagine that our audiences, provided that some person out there in the black hole of the internet actually reads my blog, would be more skewed by gender and age as a result. My blog? I would expect the audience to mostly be lacrosse-playing women in their teens and early twenties. And robospammers.

                Freddy discusses his life playing lacrosse growing up and in college, his personal experiences with pro lacrosse, educating his children about lacrosse, and the direction that he thinks lacrosse is currently taking. He has little sporadic miniseries of blogs on certain topics as well. Most of my favorite posts, however, are the ones where Freddy looks back on the good ol’ days where he played lacrosse in high school, college, and professionally.  Mostly because there are some sweet pictures. In one of my favorite posts, Freddy recalls a deli he and his summer lacrosse league buddies would visit after practice:

I can still taste and smell one of their hot corn muffins wrapped in that white deli paper. I would order one sliced in half and served with butter. The heat would melt the butter making the corn muffin the perfect consistency.

                I can almost taste the fresh muffins. Freddy is also a food blogger, so he oftentimes will use vivid descriptions of food to spice up old memories of lacrosse. Pretty cool right? Everyone loves food! Or at least I do….

Food and lacrosse. What's not to love?

               Other great posts to keep an eye out for are how to make money doing lacrosse-related things. It's no secret that professional lacrosse is not as widely watched as, say the NFL or the NBA. Therefore, the salaries for professional lacrosse players are minimal. However, Freddy explores other jobs related to lacrosse, such as coaching or becoming an entrepreneur. If you love lacrosse, you will find a way to keep it in your life. For Freddy, this blog is a way for him to still be connected to that world he was a part of for so long.

                In general, I found that Freddy’s tone is warm and open. Like an old friend sharing stories about lacrosse. He adds pictures or videos to almost every post to keep things interesting as well. He even does video blogs every once in a while. Definitely a blog worth checking out, if you’re at all interested in the history of lacrosse.


Hello World!

“Oh so you hit people and it’s like hockey and stuff right?” is usually the response I get when I tell people that I play lacrosse. Most of my friends and family had never seen a lacrosse game when I started playing. Just so we get this out of the way- hockey on a field is field hockey and not lacrosse. More on what lacrosse as a game is like later. 

I’m relatively new to the world of lacrosse. I’ve only been playing for about 4 years, first on my high school team, and now on a club travel team. No schools had men’s or women’s lacrosse programs where I grew up in California. I didn’t have any idea what it was; I probably knew more about curling at that point. Eventually, a group of local high schools decided that they were going to start both men’s and women’s lacrosse teams at the same time so that teams in our league could play each other so I decided to join the team my senior year and had absolutely no idea what I was doing half the time. I had been a competitive swimmer since age 6, and had also done track and field, water polo, and volleyball, but no field sports. The programs in that league are now almost 5 years old and expanding so quickly that my high school team had over 50 girls try out for 32 spots. When I tried out, anyone who wanted to be on the team made the team! In fact, I made the varsity team with the instructions: “run fast and chase after whoever has the ball” going into my first few games.

Although I’m still learning as I go, I’ve discovered that the typical perception of lacrosse is that it is a predominantly East Coast/ Midwest Prep School sport. My Californian friends know as much about lacrosse as my New York friends know about water polo (my New York friends after I explained water polo to them: “oh yeah, we don’t do that in New York”). But, in the very short amount of time I’ve played lacrosse, that’s begun to change. More and more West Coast high schools and universities are adding lacrosse programs, such as USC, and schools like Johns Hopkins and Northwestern are gaining national prominence as lacrosse powerhouses. Lacrosse is now the fastest growing sport in the United States and more and more people are at least able to recognize what a lacrosse stick looks like, even if they don’t understand the game.

The amount of media attention lacrosse is now getting is impressive; I even saw a poster for athletic clothing at Target featuring a woman carrying a lacrosse stick. She was holding a men’s stick so the picture was inaccurate, but that’s another blog post entirely. At the very least, Target ads reach tons of households nationwide. Considering the largest Target-shopping contingency is that of families, perhaps this will encourage more parents to enroll their children in a local lacrosse program. 

Lacrosse is a sport that is older than basketball, but it’s only now starting to really spread across the country. Hopefully I can continue to track the growth of lacrosse and how it can increase its prominence, especially on the West Coast. Oh and another fact no one seems to know: lacrosse is the national sport of Canada. Hockey was added later. I’m a huge hockey fan as well- I might even post about it sometime- but I promise I’m not Canadian.