It’s ??? ?@trvisXX x #Hawkeyes pic.twitter.com/EBgWB9IIfn

— Iowa Women’s Basketball (@IowaWBB) March 3, 2024

{*Did you know you can write on Elephant? Here’s how—big changes: How to Write & Make Money or at least Be of Benefit on Elephant. ~ Waylon}
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Boy, there’s been a lot of attention to women’s basketball the last several weeks.

I can’t help but wonder if there aren’t some groups wondering why stories keep getting shared, number 22 Iowa jerseys are flying off the shelves, and older women are emotionally caught up in the moment. So I thought I’d try to capture a piece of it from the perspective of a former athlete to see if my story is what is resonating with others.

I was a small town athlete in the early to mid-90s (well, my whole childhood, really, but my focus for this purpose is high school).

For my entire junior and senior season, when we would play Ashland, a neighboring school, and I held the ball (which was often), I would hear the Ashland fan section chant: “Amazon.” Before you feel bad for me, that was nothing compared to what other female athletes endured. I, fortunately, did not have large breasts but had two separate good friends, both who played for different schools in Iowa, and when they ran up and down the court, the boys from opposing schools would yell things that would now make it onto YouTube or TikTok and ensure the taunters would be kicked out of school, shamed, and possibly even subject to sexual harassment claims.

But being taunted openly in a gym was nothing to compared to the ridicule young women are subjected to now. I’d rather hear the unsettling, meant-to-be-cruel chant of “Amazon” echoing from the student section of an old, small town, sweltering, dirty gymnasium, than be a 16-year-old insecure young woman reading the comments I read now made online about female athletes.

As a lady Dragon in Nebraska, I felt proud to play sports. The boys I went to high school with were my biggest fans—supporting and encouraging. They defended me against the jerks from Ashland (but likely yelled unpleasant taunts to their lady Blue Devils in retort…) and I felt like they had my back. They came to our games, sometimes traveling up to an hour on gravel roads in the middle of nowhere, to cheer us on. I’d get high-fives in the hallways or hear their funny play-by-plays or jokes about having fouled out (which I did too often) and I sincerely, from the bottom of my heart, believed men—my male teachers, coaches, brothers, uncles, classmates, and men in my community—loved women’s sports.

That mattered to me. It built my confidence. And I took that with me as a young women who continued to love sports. An enormous part of who I am was shaped by the confidence sports gave me in those years, which is the reason girls’ sports has been an important and consistent fixture of my entire life.

And then one day, many years ago, I stumbled on a comment section somewhere online. It was likely about the WNBA, but I can’t recall specifically and recoiled in horror. My entire body almost turned inward. I wanted to disappear into myself. To become smaller. No matter how confident one might think they feel, you can always be brought back to that moment in the gym when “Amazon” echoed in your head and you saw the faces of young men screaming.

Trying to make you feel bad about yourself. Trying to tell you to be less. Trying to tell you to step back, to get off the floor, to get out of the action. To be smaller. And there it was, comment after comment. So many of them in so many places.

Since that first instance, I have struggled to stay out of those comment sections. I keep going back. I keep clicking in places I know I shouldn’t be clicking bringing myself back to that chant, to those old insecurities, but I never respond. Frequently, these comments are about women’s size, masculinity, and sexuality. I have big hands of course (I’m almost six feet tall), and there’s a shocking amount of “men” who like to dabble in the shaming of women via their keyboard with tin foil hat-style theories on those of us who are, I would presume, “bigger” than them. I suppose de-sexualizing us somehow makes them feel better about themselves.

Or it’s the constant barrage of how a boy in junior high could beat the female players of the day. Is this what the boys in my high school, who I thought were building me up, were really thinking? When they were celebrating me for ripping down a rebound, were they really thinking to themselves, “but I could have done it better because I’m bigger, stronger?” I just cannot believe they were challenging me or wanting to belittle me, but was I wrong?

There have been times that now, as a professional, successful adult woman I have replayed conversations that were had outside my locker in 1993, or in the parking lot after a game as I started my old Camaro, wherein I have been forced to ask myself if those boys who built me up were really thinking the things I was reading in those horrible comments. But isn’t that the purpose of those comments? To bring women like me back to that place? To feeling smaller, off the court and out of the game?

Fortunately, I have a daughter. She’s 16 now, and taller and bolder than I. Braver too. And she has a level of confidence greater than that which I will ever achieve. But I have seen the men who have coached her. The dads who have cheered for her. The refs who have called her games. And the boys she’s grown up with cheer for her, none more than her own brothers. Through watching good, solid men treat her with such respect, despite my tortured vice of late-night comment scrolling in the dark that makes me question my own value, I know that most men love seeing women succeed.

I may have, at times, doubted them wanting to see me succeed, but with every fiber of my being, I know the men who have cheered my daughter on are good men with enough confidence of their own to not feel threatened by young, strong women and are secure enough to treasure her size and encourage her to embrace it. So many men have held my daughter up.

So for me, and for many of us, seeing men like Travis Scott, a young man with major influence, sit in the front row of a women’s college basketball game as a fan and then taking selfies with Caitlin Clark and the young women on her team, or anyone with influence leaning in to this moment, makes me so grateful. For all the men like Steph Curry and Jason Sudeikis, and the analysts and marketing executives knocking down these women’s doors to pay them, the women of my generation are watching with such emotion.

I keep getting choked up and can’t look away. I keep saying things to my kids that they tease me for—but let them. Thank you to everyone sharing these stories, making Instagram posts, and running with this moment. And thank you to the men who build women up without abandon. Who remind us that women’s sports are incredible, inspirational, and most of all fun.

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