[MUSIC PLAYING – “Merci Kylian” by Laurent Dubois]
Ron Krabill: Hello, and welcome to the Global Sport Lab podcast. I’m Ron Krabill, and I’m your host, as well as the Director of the Global Sport Lab, and a Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell. Listen to the end for a more detailed description of the Global Sport Lab. But for now, let me just say that we would love for you to connect with us at the Lab. You can find us on the web or via email at globalsportlab@uw.edu. Today we are back in Seattle on the eve of the WNBA [Women’s National Basketball Association] 2026 season, a season that we weren’t sure was going to happen, so we’re all very excited that the season is moving forward, and we’re especially pleased to welcome today’s guest, who is one of the foremost academic experts on women’s basketball. Dr. Courtney M. Cox is associate professor in the department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon, and has previously worked for ESPN [Entertainment and Sports Programming Network], Longhorn Network, NPR [National Public Radio] affiliate KPCC, and the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks. She is the author of “Double Crossover: Gender, Media, and Politics in Global Basketball,” which was published last year, and considers how athletes maneuver their lives and labor across leagues and borders, whether in the NCAA [National Collegiate Athletic Association], WNBA, Athletes Unlimited, or overseas leagues, and I have to say, I think double crossover is arguably the best book to come out of Critical Sports Studies in the past year.
Courtney Cox: Wow.
Ron: Thanks so much for being with us today, Courtney.
Courtney: Thank you so much.
Ron: Is there anything else you’d like to add by way of introduction?
Courtney: I mean, that’s high praise. I don’t even know where we’re going to go from there, I think we could just, we could just call it. I think one of the things that I think about in terms of women’s basketball, and how I situate it, is I think a lot of times sports studies scholars, we’ve had to fight to say we study something, like we study something through sport, and I was really intentional, I didn’t want to be pigeonholed, I was deeply afraid of, you know, my advisor, you don’t become the women’s basketball person, and I think the thing that’s so exciting, and I think I love about the Global Sports Lab, and other spaces that are creating really critical research spaces to study sport, and to really say it out loud that they’re doing that, is that I’ve kind of reclaimed the sport studies scholar kind of hat, versus being like, I do study labor, I am really interested in media, but I think there is something to be said about holding the sport as the thing that is worthy of analysis on its own, and so I’m reclaiming that. I’m just putting, I’m putting that out. I’m in that era now of the reclamation and really centering and championing sports studies, because I think there’s both amazing people that made it possible for me to study this, and I think there’s ways we can also show our students, especially students that are also athletes, that this is a pathway for them too, and I appreciate that intro, and just want to say, yeah, sports study is a thing, a thing we should take seriously, and a thing that really is driving how I think about my work.
Ron: I love that so much. It’s such a great way of sort of framing the conversation to come, so, thank you for that. We’re also joined today by Dr. M. Aziz, an assistant professor of African American studies in the department of American Ethnic Studies here at the University of Washington. M., can you tell us a bit more about yourself?
M. Aziz: Yes, so happy to be here with you all. This is a dream campus visit come true with Dr. Cox being here with us. Yes, and I’m a 20th century historian of combat sports, martial arts studies, and the Black Power movement, and thinking a lot of the ways about community self-defense, but also community embodiment, and how adults and youth move through a new era of relating to the mind, body, and soul in the 60s and 70s, and really thinking a lot about racialized gender, colonialism, migration of practices, some of the things that also Dr. Cox grapples with in her work, so just really excited for this conversation.
Ron: Thanks so much, M. And I should also mention, super appreciative of M. for being the co-coordinator of the Critical Sports Studies Research Cluster here at University of Washington. So, I’d like to begin this afternoon with a quote from the introduction of your book, Courtney, where you state that basketball “functions as a critical site of athlete activism, soft diplomacy, and the proliferation of sneaker capitalism”. So, there’s a lot to unpack there, but I wonder if we might just start there by asking you to say a bit more about how you see basketball, especially women’s basketball, playing out in those three arenas of activism, diplomacy, and capitalism.
Courtney: I think for me, I’m not a historian, I’m not trained as such, but I’ve learned so much from the history of basketball, beginning in that now infamous Springfield, Massachusetts gym, we love to talk about the peach baskets. And so, thinking about James Naismith starting this sport within the YMCA [Young Men’s Christian Association], which has its own larger relationship to religion, to coloniality in a particular kind of way to imperialism, I think is really interesting, where it starts this idea of training the body, training the mind into this certain kind of muscular Christianity, I think that’s one piece that’s interesting. But I think what’s cool to me is that basketball, like a few other sports, have this moment where girls and women are brought to the court within months of it being created. And so the idea that Cinna Berenson is thinking about this in the kind of YWCA [Young Women’s Christian Association] space that, of course, is still racially segregated, and we also think about gender segregation happening within this entity, but it also was about the way that missionaries are starting to pack basketballs into their suitcases with the Bibles, and they’re taking it places where people like, we don’t need the Bibles, but we will take the basketballs, right? And so I think about the legacy of how basketball becomes a global sport in a way that I’ve learned so much from football literature, and I’m reading about what’s happening with football slash soccer, and I’m like, basketball is doing something with that as well, and so my work is really informed by people who are thinking about transnational sporting labor, perhaps with professional football leagues, and I’m kind of translating some of that. So some of the movement of people is both about this history of basketball, moving with missionaries, moving across spaces, the rules are changing, people are having conversations, governments are either saying this is the worst thing to happen for girls and women, we should outlaw this thing. This is happening, first ladies are caught up in arms about this, but at the same time, there’s also ways that people are saying this sport is going to do something because it’s more accessible in a way that other sports that require much more space, much more equipment, the ways that people are starting to take the sport up on their own as its own kind of embodied practice. And there’s both the ways that we can talk about basketball as this thing we can create a hoop in here somewhere and we can have this moment, but then there’s also a way that it is this profoundly capitalist thing that has the power to change cities, we think about gentrification, we can think about Brooklyn as one very vivid, more recent example. But the creation of these arenas, these kind of larger entities for sport, but it’s also about the different ways that it travels. We can talk about the NCAA, NIL [Name, Image, Likeness], transfer portal, that kind of form of capitalism, and additional labor asked of athletes today to perform online, perform for brands, et cetera. And so I’m thinking about all this together, and sneaker capitalism is something I always think about. I think there’s very other, there’s very little other places where I can kind of see this relationality between sport and capitalism and basketball through the idea of the sneaker, this idea of a thing that was meant for sport, but it’s also now the streetwear kind of thing, is also this investment, talk about investing in shoes, and these conventions where people are selling these shoes for 1000s of dollars, and I think when we’re talking about that, we kind of start and think about Nike and Jordan. I’m at the University of Oregon, so we know that that’s very much ingrained in how we talk about it.
Ron: Can’t not talk about it there.
Courtney: I can’t not talk about it. The main library on our campus is called the Knight Library, our arena is the Matthew Knight Arena, we have these spaces. And I think my work is very much informed by these different places I’ve been, and thinking about how everything kind of congeals under this sport that I love.
Ron: Awesome.
M.: I’m thinking a lot about your own influences as a scholar, and as a researcher, and as a traveler. And I love sort of the ways in which you set up the book, and you bring in C.L.R. James right away, someone that obviously frames a lot of how we think about blackness in sport, and then also this idea of global and the capital. Could you talk more about some of those influences that bear upon the research, and how you decided to approach the project?
Courtney: Yeah, I mean this project emerges from my dissertation work, and I always want to say that, also, if there are grad students listening, it’s possible you can get out of here, you can do it, you can turn it into a book. I did it, I’m a testimony to that. But my dissertation committee had two folks that profoundly shaped the transnational piece of my work. One is Ben Carrington, very well-known sports sociologist. Ben Carrington was not letting me get out of the University of Southern California, without a C.L.R. James drop, right? And thinking about a leading kind of sports sociologist that’s thinking in this very transnational way in his own work has impacted me in what I read and how I think through it. His own kind of critiques of capitalism and his work inform that. And then my advisor is Robeson Taj Frazier, who was thinking about black and China kind of representations together, and already had that relationship, although a historical one, of thinking about solidarities across borders and social movements, and what it means for all of these black radicals to go to China and kind of have that relationship. I was thinking about what happens in these contact zones, folks get very proud with it. But this idea of people having these kinds of moments of impact and how culture is changing and sport is such a vivid lens to do that. So, that’s my shout out to the committee folks, people that I’m still in community and conversation within the work. And then the other thing I think about is how black feminist scholars are at the heart of what I’m doing, and for someone in sports studies, it’s really important that we think about these other spaces and that are having similar conversations about the body, about performance, are having conversations about how we think about race and gender together, and I have all these various quotes from Bell Hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, but also Moya Bailey is really important for me as a communication scholar, I come out of that tradition. And Moya Bailey’s work and her term misogynoir, so thinking about how misogyny and blackness are kind of happening in this very mediated space, how black women’s ideas, bodies, and even perceptions of them are circulating. And I couldn’t talk about women’s basketball without kind of relying on those scholars as well, who inform how I’m thinking about sport. There’s the sport folks that are very much entrenched there, and I think that black feminist scholarship, Amy Meredith Cox, is really important, no relation that I’m aware of, is really important as an anthropologist former dancer who’s also thinking about the choreography of the body and bodies in space,
Ron: I think connected to that, for me, one of the things your book does so well is reframe women’s basketball, and specifically the experiences of athletes, as labor within a system of racial capitalism. And I’m wondering, especially in this moment, with the WNBA Players Association having just negotiated this new collective bargaining agreement, significant improvement of economic benefits for players really changing the game, and yet also arguably not going far enough in terms of revenue sharing and those sorts of questions. How would you say things have changed since you first started working on the dissertation, and then the book, and today, have they changed? But how have they also stayed the same?
Courtney: I think the shortest answer I can offer, I started working on this project, I didn’t know it was quite going to be this project, but in 2015, I interned for the Los Angeles Sparks. It was the summer after my first year of my Ph.D. program, and at the time I had been really studying the labor practices of sports journalists. I had come from a sports journalism background, I was interested in how new media technologies informed how sports journalists did their work, how newsroom practices. It was a very standard cut and dry, calm journalism space. And then I started to think about the labor of the athletes when I was working for the Sparks, and so that summer I worked for them, I worked under the Vice President of Sales and Service, and we created this initiative together called “#WeAreWomen”. There’s a lot we can talk about with how things have changed in that, this declaration, like we have to be women, we have to declare this. And part of the season-long initiative that I worked on, they created this position for me, was to sell out one WNBA game at the end of the season, against a team that no longer exists in San Antonio, so a lot has changed since 2015. The idea of putting all of that energy in branding, and resources, and people around the city to sell out one game versus what we see just in the sheer numbers for a regular season WNBA game is one, vivid kind of example we can think about in terms of growth. I think the conversations I was having working the sales table at all of the Sparks home games was about how do we sell women’s basketball, what is sellable about it, and a lot of times it was everything but the game. It was this is a group package deal, you’ll have so much fun, a kid’s birthday party, you get to see Staple Center again, another renaming thing we can talk about. So, when you, when that was the whole thing, is like someone sings the national anthem, and we have to lock them in for 50 tickets. Everything was about how can we get people in the building to watch women play basketball? The discourse is so different. Now, I’m at a bar, Chicago, during March Madness, and the women’s games are already up. I was not at a women’s sports bar, I was not the sports bra, I was not, I was at a standard place where people go to have brunch and turn up, and the TVs were already set to the women’s games, and someone had to come in and ask for the men’s game. The men were playing at United, they were, they were playing a regional in Chicago, and there was a group of fans that come in, like, “Can you put the men’s game up?” and they’re like, “I guess,” and I’m listening to, I’m sitting at the bar, and I’m hearing the bartenders being like, “Can you believe they asked for the men’s game”. And I’m watching these two bartenders have this deep conversation about the UConn [University of Connecticut] game they had watched the other day, and “Can you believe this?” and “Do you see the stats?” and did you, and it wasn’t about how do we sell this, but it’s the idea of the most exciting game is already on TV. And when I think about it, I just, I share those two stories as the shift that it’s like, duh, I’m literally wearing a shirt that says everyone watches women’s sports. But before the conversation was, well, nobody watches women’s sports, right? That’s why together and all these things exist to push back on these narratives, and the shift now isn’t about the sell, it’s about what are we doing with the money? I think is a question, you kind of brought up revenue sharing and the new CBA [Collective Bargaining Agreement] as one example, but I’m also interested in how we measure growth. We’re in this moment, not just within basketball, but variety of sports, where there’s a lot of money being invested. But I’m also like, what does growth look like? Who are we still excluding in these spaces? What does this look like? And so, in a moment where we have all this anti-trans legislation, I think that’s one way that we think about measuring growth. We think about the cost of youth sports. I think about how do we measure growth if basketball becomes a country club sport, and travel AAU [Amateur Athletic Union] is so expensive, and I’m interested in both the conversation we can have about, yes, it’s great for people to get those checks, it’s great for more folks to be watching, that’s one metric, but I think I’m also kind of like, where do we go next, or where should we be looking next as well?
Ron: If I can just follow up on that quickly, it’s sort of the classic developmental kind of logic, right? Is that, oh, everything has to follow this one specific developmental model that was built on the men’s game, and that’s what growth should look like, and that’s what the success should look like, as opposed to sort of saying, wait, is this a chance to actually break that mold to do things differently, to do things creatively to bring people along, as opposed to having it be this sort of single model, and for success to look like this sort of toxic masculine version of success, right?
Courtney: I think so. I think the thing about growth, or everyone saying the game is growing, my over time, the book is organized into four quarters, like a basketball game, the overtime argues that the game has grown, it’s been grown for a while. But what comes with these growing pains of more eyes, more people watching. If you’ve been a longtime WNBA fan, you know that the price of everything is going up, the cost of your season tickets when you go to renew, the cost of league pass that still has issues and still needs to be fixed, Kathy. And so one of the things that I think about is what’s going on with the growing pains when we see the vitriol again, the things that haven’t changed, the vitriol that’s really leveraged towards these athletes that are more visible now, there’s more folks coming at them. What does it say when thinking about the racial dynamics of Indiana fever fans, which is the only way I’m going to reference what’s going on there, and so when you-
Ron: I grew up in Indiana, so I’m familiar with the dynamic,
Courtney: Yeah, yeah, so that tells us a lot about specific place, but also a larger kind of societal thing that’s happening. And so, when we look and see who’s marketed, who am I seeing in these commercials, there’s conversations we still need to have that haven’t changed as much as we might want them to.
M.: I’m still thinking about the league pass, because my renewal just went through, Kathy. Which, happy for it to go through, as long as the money is making its way to the places it needs to make its way through to, it would be incredible. I’m thinking a lot about, you’re using a lot of the ‘we’ and ‘I’ statements, and it actually brings me back to one of my favorite parts about this best book of critical sports studies of the year. You’re such a great storyteller, I can tell that you come from a background in which people were encouraged to write in a way that grabs the reader’s attention. I mean it might be the quarter, the chapter on misogynoir, where you’re like, ‘I pulled up to this game and outside the scalpers already there with the tickets,’ and I’m like, oh, I’m here, I’m on the ground with Dr. Cox, or my gosh, the particularly now the chapter about going to Russia, I’m, just wild given that we’re several years out from that, but for fans of “ women’s basketball”, those months where Brittney Griner was in Russia, and having people who just didn’t really understand what it meant for all of these players to play overseas for generations, getting a glimpse into both the highs and the very intense transnational risks. It’s just very wild to be then on the ground with you, and you saying, ‘okay, but I don’t actually speak Russian, and now the bag is lost, and now there’s two black women in this office in this airport, and they’re looking at us,’ and I’m like, ‘Yo, I’m here, I’m eating popcorn, and I’m learning so much’. And you talked about the other amazing black feminist ethnographer, Dr. Cox, Dr. Amy Meredith Cox, what is that, the ins and outs of doing black feminist ethnography as you’re moving around, whether it’s outside the arena in the US, whether it’s at the conveyor belt in Russia, just that lived felt experience of doing it. It just is, it’s amazing to hear you write about it, so, I’m wondering if you could share more.
Courtney: Yeah, that’s incredibly high praise. Thank you so much. I struggled with writing voice. I come from a journalistic background. I am someone that grew up as a certified nerd. I was in the library reading a lot of fiction as a kid. There was a point where I started volunteering as a kid at the public library, because I’m like, I can be in the back with the books, right? I was born for this life. this was always going to be where we ended. And outside of libraries and stacks, gyms are the other place that I feel that intense feeling, like I’m hyper present in my body, and so maybe this was always going to be because of that. But the point that you bring up, Amy Meredith Cox writes this beautiful ethnography of a Detroit girls and women’s shelter, and it is in many ways when she’s talking about the choreography, they know what people, when people look at them and see blackness and poverty, they see their gender, they see this idea of who’s the right kind of girl to support, in a moment of marketplace feminism that’s like the can-do girl. And so I think one of the things that I love is that in every page of that ethnography, it’s rigorous, it’s theoretically driven, but I’m in the shelter with her and those girls, and I know that she’s there with them, she’s not this distanced anthropologist, she comes from anthropology, she’s right there in it with them, we’re in thunderstorms with her, we’re in these spaces where people are looking for money to eat, where people are trying to make it, but they’re also thinking about how they perceive themselves and how the world perceives them. And I was like, if I do interviews, if I do participant observation, I want it to feel like that. I think that takes some time, I had a lot of critiques about my writing in grad school as being too journalistic, It was kind of used as a negative, and I really struggled, of I know that there are ways I could write this, and there are ways that I want to write this, how do I make it where it is taken seriously, but it also is something where I want you to be in it with there’s a way that I want you to be in that rotating conveyor belt with me, and the backstory that you reference, I went back and forth about whether or not to put that in, where that would go in the story, what does it mean to start with me? I was like, the audacity, right? We have BG [Brittney Griner] detained, we have the idea of like someone is incarcerated, why does my little bag even matter? But this idea of this is one inconvenience that’s so small in comparison to how folks have to maneuver their labor, but if I can get you at least to the airport with me, then maybe I can get you invested, because I think there’s a way that I was terrified people would just want to read the NCAA, or they would just want to read the WNBA 2020 season, because those feel like the big sexy things, but the mundane feeling of losing your luggage is something that a lot of us can relate to it’s a vulnerable feeling, you feel like, where’s my stuff, where are the things, and it’s doubled if you arrive somewhere new without that. You get home and you don’t have your bag, you’re like, that’s annoying, they’ll drop it off the crib. What does it mean to travel almost 24 hours and not have that? What does it mean for athletes that travel and start to work and aren’t getting paid on time? It’s like, if we can compound it, we start with something that you’ve experienced, most people have experienced, if they’ve flown enough, and then he can just kind of ramp it up and turn it up, so by the time we get to Brittney Griner, we’re like, this is an impossibly difficult situation, and I think that’s hard, because that’s a story people know, and that’s a story that was mediated in a very particular kind of way. And so if I start with someone you may not know that is still translating her labor constantly, if I start with Cierra, then maybe I can kind of get a world that’s built, that’s my goal. That’s my goal in my dream. With Athletes Unlimited, it’s like, how can I get you into something that you may never have heard of? How can I talk about these things like public benefit corporations? Some of that is really granular business, like nonprofit, PBC [Public Benefit Corporations], corporate social, some of that is some pretty dry language to go through, how can I make it as exciting as possible, so that we can talk about labor in this bigger kind of way? And so I think that’s always, I started writing at first from a defensive standpoint of this matters so much, no one cares, and people should care. And then I started to think about it as a love letter, like I care, and I know other people care, and that changed, earlier iterations would not have felt the same, I don’t think it would be. I don’t think it would be as good, because either way it was very stiff participant observation distanced, which is a certain kind of like Western way of writing the research. And then there was also the way my field notes were saying something so different, about how I was feeling in the moment, or how injury, or a player, one of the other international players, her dad dies, and the team’s like, “You got to come right back, right?”. And so I was like, “How do I, how do I carry the heaviness?”, and then also some of the joy, there were just some incredibly joyful moments too, and so I appreciate that so much, because I struggled with how to make it cohesive across the chapters and contexts, but then also how to bring people along, because some people do want to be along for this ride, and if I write to them versus writing from, these are my ops, these are the haters, that’s not a joyful place to write, and then I also don’t think it’s particularly productive.
M.: And that Cierra you mentioned was Cierra Burdick. I love talking about not writing from the ops, because sometimes when I’m sitting and I’m writing and I rehear the words of everyone that I’m going to slam my book into their face and be like, ‘I did it, I told you’. And then I’m like, wait a minute, but the joy is not as evident when I center their voices, and we’re not getting to the same place, and I love what you just said about it’s a love letter, because obviously, as millennials of a particular identity and background, like, for better, whatever our relationship to the narrative is, we grew up with love and basketball, which is very much a particular type of letter to basketball and to black love. But when I look at the structure of your book, it doesn’t always remind me of an academic book, it reminds me of these amazing peers in other forms of creative writing, like Hanif Abdurraqib, who has this amazing book also on basketball, and he also uses the quarter structure similar to how the movie Love & Basketball is organized around the quarters, and so I just love that there’s something about like this cross genre idea that if you’re going to tell a story about the everyday life of basketball, and about blackness, that organizing it around even the time and the temporality that basketball like calls us into. There’s something so interesting that across different genres, people have made this similar decision.
Courtney: Yeah, so Hanif’s book comes out before mine. I go to this incredible book talk, so I buy the book, I’m reading the book, and the first thing I see, and Hanif, New York Times best-selling author, beautiful poet, beautiful writer. I quote Hanif when I talk about, Hanif has this incredible essay about the crossover that that I knew had to be part of this book. And I have been a big Hanif fan for a long time, and we’ve been in conversation before, and he’s just been very generous and kind with the work, and it’s so funny, I open the book and I see its quarters, and I’ve already sent the, I mean, the book’s done, the book is in production, there’s no.. and I’m like, everyone’s been like, “Look at her, just taking Hanif’s idea”. So I’m at this book event, and I go to have my book signed, and I was like, the first thing, he’s like, “Oh my gosh, so good to see you!” And I’m like, “Hanif quarters, really? You didn’t want to text me to give me the heads up?” And so we laughed about it, and then Hanif’s like, “It’s gonna be fine, your book’s gonna be great”. I was like, “I know, but should I, should I change it? He’s like, “Do not change the quarters thing”. But I think the conversation about how we structure and think about things and how they move and change, I think is helpful. And the Love & Basketball reference, there’s I had to quote Love & Basketball in this book, there’s no way I could get out of it. I knew that, it was also if I was using Sam Shepard’s work, incredible cinema scholar, I was like, I have to do my due diligence and make sure we talk about the scene with Monica playing overseas and her time in Spain. And so that really, if you haven’t followed anything, and before Brittney Griner, a lot of people did not know that there was this invisible labor going on. For most people, that Love & Basketball scene, where she’s playing in Spain, is their only, that was my reference growing up of knowing that overseas play was happening. Before a lot of people, they assume WNBA happens, now everyone has a job stateside, and so I think sometimes even just disrupting that simple narrative is enough. But I think the structure of it, I think also for people that are basketball fans, I wanted to write something to kind of think about them, or even starting with this idea of footwork. When Cierra is talking about footwork and the open step, I was like, okay, I might lose some cultural studies scholars getting into this nitty gritty about the Eurostep, and I was like, I could write a whole chapter on the Eurostep, but I was like, I’m gonna lose someone somewhere that maybe isn’t into sports, but can maybe, if I can get them on this footwork thing, maybe they will go with me. So I just thought about what’s a starting point we can all enter into together, how can I let the athletes theorize about this, and how can I bring their voices together? And so the quarter system gave me that mechanism to create some kind of through line, because otherwise it does feel disjointed to hop around all the time, but that’s also what they’re doing with their labor, and so I kind of wanted to mimic that in any way that I could in the structure of the book, too.
M.: I love that, the idea of mimicking the hopping around in the movement of the game. And perhaps you and Hanif both are sort of descendants of Gina Prince Beithwood, who is behind Love & Basketball, and of course Hanif’s amazing book that you should read together with Dr. Cox’s book is There’s Always This Year on Basketball and Ascension.
Ron: Yeah, yeah. I love that we’re talking about the joy and the sort of embodiment of sport and playing sport, and I think it raises one of the recurring themes we’ve had on the Global Sport Lab podcast, which is that sort of paradox between, on the one hand, athlete labor is exploited in a capitalist system, and on the other hand, it’s also played with joy, with embodiment, with a sense of sort of this is, you know, you often hear athletes say, “I’m so lucky to get to do this”, and one of the things that we often track for athletes is, when does the joy end, when does it become just work or just labor? So, I’d love to hear you talk a little more about how you think about that paradox, and maybe how your thinking around that paradox has changed through all this work you’ve done, talking with athletes, being on the ground with them, and the way that M. was describing.
Courtney: Yeah, so this is a journalistic thing, but I think any good qualitative methods textbook will tell you this about interviews, is how you order your questions really matters, and I always had kind of what I would think of as a softball, sports metaphor, opening question, where I would ask people their earliest basketball memory, so whether they were a journalist, an athlete, advocate of the game, I would start there. And sometimes that was just a space for them to realize that this wasn’t like a press conference, because a lot of times athletes are so media trained that they want to give you the short quotable thing that you’re going to write down or that will circulate, and so I wanted them to always give me the long story of things. And sometimes it would be that conversation of like, hey, I’m not just looking for the sexy sound bite, I want the fullness of the story, and part of it was like, tell me a story, tell me your earliest basketball memory, or describe a time where this happened, and so I wanted them to go along and have the conversations, versus this really like quick people are trying to get you in and out, or move to the next thing, or the next person. And I will say that for me, a lot of thinking about that process has been about getting the sense of where joy came in for them, because a lot of times earliest was that thing of learning something new, or a first bucket, or your first game winner, or the fact your older sibling took you out in the back of the yard, it started from that space that wasn’t, I mean, there was there’s capitalism in going to Target and buying the basketball and setting up the hoop, or whatever, but a lot of times it was about a park, a backyard, or elementary school, and later on, a lot of times when we’re talking about heavier stuff in an interview, they would harken back to, like, it’s not like the backyard anymore, or now I have to think about my labor in a way where it’s not, it started, it was fun at first, but there was a moment in college, or maybe a contract that fell through, or there was a point where they got dropped by an agent, or whatever it might be, that they’re like, oh, it’s not fun anymore.
Ron: Super interesting that that can be specified, like this is the moment, because I’m sure, in reality it’s sort of a more fluid process, but still, that fact that you can identify, ugh, this is when it hit, this is not fun anymore.
Courtney: Yeah, or it became a thing of what is the fun percentage, right? This is a non-fun part, but it’s just this one thing I’m going through, it’s still fun in these other places, versus how they juggle what’s the fun percentage, and when do you hang it up. So, I think the other piece of it is, if you’ve been trained at a high level to do one thing, it’s really hard to let that one thing go when you’re like, what’s next after this, but also, I’m 32. Part of it is there’s so much life left, and so we know from the research a lot of folks have done, in terms of how that affects your mental health, your self-identity, and some of those conversations with more veteran athletes, or even with Cierra, who I’m meeting as a rookie, and now Cierra is the vet, is the leader, is this person that has navigated all these different styles of play, all these different countries, a medalist in a three on three for Paris, for Team USA, and so there’s this leadership piece, but then it’s like, what do I do after this? I’ve got all this life experience, all this basketball experience, and the thing everyone thinks is, but do I want to be a coach, you know? You know, there’s the idea every athlete’s like “I’ll never be a coach”, no one goes into this, like, let me get this for my coach, everyone’s like coaching, you know, this idea of, both in terms, am I at that point in my career, and so thinking about-
Ron: They also probably remember how they spoke about their own coaches.
Courtney: And they’re like, ugh is that me now? So I think the other piece of that is, basketball is still giving you joy, and you know there’s a point where you’re going to be disposable and you still want to be around the game, and so the joy is driving the what’s next, or the joy is driving what they do in their off season, If they get an off season, is often they have their own AAU teams, or they go back to their high school, or they go back and volunteer at their church, and so the joy is so much there that they would do it for free, they shouldn’t, but they are also thinking about giving back to the next generation, which I think is also part of the joy that I hear, and even when they’re hesitantly thinking about coaching, they’re like, “But I get to give back”, or if we look at the numbers in terms of black women and coaching, I mean, we have a WNBA season starting where we will have zero black women head coaches, which is unfathomable. And so I think a lot about that trajectory, and so a lot of time the conversation is like, but it’s really cool if they get to see you in that role, and joy is there, it’s throughout, and joy is not only within the basketball space, but the joy they find in terms of like each other, there’s a way that camaraderie, that shared lived experience, where they’re like no one else understands the grind of playing overseas or playing year round, and there’s a way that they can commiserate with each other, but they can also hold each other down in a way that I find joy to be also really productive.
M.: Well, and it’s so interesting too, because a lot of what happens with the sort of this new term around the parasocial, around social media, and having this unrivaled access to your favorite players, I mean, I can now see what players are doing that I watched, you know, in the aughts, and I’m like, oh my god, my hero is like out here living a full life. But people think about players, and people hypothesize about all these beefs that are happening, the things that we see on the court, do they hate each other off the court? But then we also catch these glimpses of people who have spent sometimes decades, even by the time they’re in their early to mid 20s, like they have played multiple stages of basketball together, and there’s a whole other world that we don’t see. If you’re like, oh, we think that these people have an issue with each other, but here they are playing on the same team again, or they might have played together at the AAU level. And so there’s so much going on around this idea of sociality and joy, even back to something you said earlier about the WNBA, and how we like might think about it differently, even sociality within the NBA [National Basketball Association]. So I’m still not fully thought through what my next question will be about the social aspect of it all, because there is a lot going on now that we get all the reels and the tiktoks, and particularly I want to come back to queerness and talking about how that’s operating and moving and the sort of new fascination with players’ lives off the court, as you’re talking about. But I do want to maybe talk about this idea about the coaches really quickly, because I find this conversation to be so fascinating and important, and you do take time in the book to talk about, particularly again in the misogynoir chapter, about Coach Dawn Staley, shout out to Coach Staley, and to Coach C. Vivian Stringer, and these conversations are just so important, and I’m thinking about core memories for me around blackness and around basketball. And so I’m a Jersey kid, I grew up as a Rutgers basketball fan. My sister went to Rutgers, my entire family are Big East original OG [original] Big East people, I had a brother who went to St. John’s, my dad was a Georgetown fan. So it was real, we were real deep in the culture of Big East basketball, and growing up in South Jersey, right next to Rutgers Camden, but 45 minutes away from Rutgers New Brunswick. And I remember exactly where I was when I heard Don Imus say the words that he said that I won’t necessarily find a way to repeat, but there was a really stark moment of misogynoir, and very particularly against these brown-skinned black players at Rutgers who are coming up at the upper echelon of basketball before this moment where now everyone is having conversations everywhere, when these moments of racialization happen, whether they’re very supportive or not, but it’s so interesting now to jump from that time with C. Vivian Stringer, when Coach Staley had just started her coaching career, and actually I saw her coach at Temple, because I was, I was in a great place for women’s college basketball that time, 15 minutes from Temple, 45 minutes from Rutgers. And so I was like, yes, coaches like black women coaches are so inspiring to see, and now living in Seattle, watching the season come in, we’ve got a great new head coach, but watching Noelle Quinn come in at a very particular moment of transition in Seattle time as Sue Bird is retiring, and then you know really try to keep the team together, and then being let go at the end of last season, there’s a lot going on. Also, then the last couple of months we saw what happened with Coach Staley, and how she was viciously attacked by my life arch nemesis, Geno Auriemma. And so, I don’t know, there’s a lot going on with that transition to coaching, and it’s not just as easy as we think it is, there’s a lot of like hang-ups around, like, do I want to be a coach. But then when you also get there, the opportunities for black women to coach in leagues that are predominantly full of black women, and then when they reach the upper echelon, as we know, the standards being different, and so if you could talk more about these dynamics.
Courtney: Yeah, one of the things I’ll say, there’s a lot of observation sites that I thought would be useful for the book that just didn’t make it. It happens all the time, you have to make decisions, you have this great archival piece, I get this great interview, but it’s.. there’s nowhere it kind of fits, you’re quilting this thing. And one of the things, when you mentioned Coach Staley, especially you mentioned Temple, and that legacy, you were in the right place at the right time, hashtag blessed. I feel like there’s a moment I was going to these USA basketball events, they were having these things called Women in the Game, and at the time, and what became part of the disc that is not in the book was like this critique of, like, I’m working on this campaign called We Are Women, #WeAreWomen, so it’s a hashtag era thing, and then women in the game, and it was about getting more girls, girls and women to see themselves and having these career paths within basketball. So you have a governing body of sport of a sport moving into this space, at least at the US level, having these events, so I was going to these different events, and they had these incredible speakers, Coach Corey Close, now the most recent winning head coach in the NCAA with UCLA [University of California Los Angeles], she, she gave a talk at one of them. Coach Staley was at one, and she was kind of in her capacity there at USA Basketball at the time. And I got to hear her talk about that transition from being a player, I mean, she was playing and coaching, she was like navigating a lot, because she still was kind of in denial about, am I really about to coach, I’m a player, you know, and she’s a player’s player, and so thinking about her being, as I don’t think she would describe herself as a player’s coach, because she will get people together and get people right, but the love and respect and the preparation that you see from South Carolina players when they make it to the league, she’s getting them ready for the next level. I just have so much respect for her, and I just have to say, hearing her speak and hearing her talk about her journey, and being really both confident and, like, this is what I was meant to do, but there were all these moments where I was actively avoiding becoming a coach, also really informed how I was thinking about the players I was interviewing that were saying that, and in my brain I’m like, but you could be a Coach Staley, right? You have that potential of, you’re not doing because you want the shine, or that it’s like a position that’s really calling to you. And I think educating anyone, like any educator, I think coaching is a calling, very few people are out here really doing it for the money, that’s my, that’s why we’re here, and so I think I think there’s a thing about seeing that kind of leadership, and I think it also goes to when we talk about administrators too, at the collegiate or the professional level, I think about that a lot. I recently was at Vanderbilt, and Vanderbilt has a black woman AD [Athletic Director] and there’s a lot of things we can say, I mean, Vanderbilt has moved the meter in a lot of sports recently, and I’m really impressed by what she’s been able to do, but I also know that these routes are not easy, and so the ways that you have this very short window to prove yourself, you mentioned Coach Quinn, and there was a lot happening with those storms, storm teams, that, that’s another, that’s another episode, but I also think about Teresa Weatherspoon, and that very short opportunity in Chicago. I mean, Chicago’s entire front office, their entire leadership situation, we could have conversations about historically how they’ve treated incredible athletes and coaches in that program. But one of the things I think about is this still need to come in and be the best, because otherwise you’re on the cutting block. There are people that are very mid coaches that get to coach for a long time, but I think that we can think about that precarity of the athlete labor that is also the precarity of the coach’s labor too, and so I’m very attuned to that, I don’t have much to say about Luigi.
M.: And let that be the last we do talk about him in this room.
Courtney: But the thing I want to say about that incident, if you watched it, there’s a couple of things: one, we are in a highly mediated environment, and whereas there used to be a lot fewer cameras, this is me with my ESPN hat on right now, a lot fewer cameras were normally allocated for women’s games, that’s changing, and with that, we get to see a lot of stuff, so we have receipts on things, so when you fix your little mouth to say something did or didn’t happen, or you feel disrespect, we can always go back and run the tape, so there’s that. But the other thing I’ll say that I think is really rich about that moment, he does what he does, but when I see his assistant coaches, who are primarily black women, they step in. It reminded me in my work when I would be watching a game overseas, and I would watch black players pick each other up, even if they were on opposing teams, because, as you mentioned, so many of these players have been playing together since AAU ball, they played with or against each other all the way up through the ranks, through college. Some people are like, “I’m still mad about that Final Four we lost to y’all”, I mean, sometimes they hold on to these grudges, and sometimes it’s a moment of camaraderie. So, so many folks, I might be playing against you in Russia, but we play together in the W [WNBA], and so the way that we, they understand each other, the way, so when I’m watching those coaches, who are, a lot of them are former players coming up, and the way that they are relating to Don in that moment, the way they are covering, the way they are doing the work, and that additional labor they’re doing is also part of that kinship that’s happening, and so that relationality that you kind of tapped into before, I’m kind of bridging that with the coaching, I see that, and I also see the limits. We see all these amazing coaches at the assistant or associate level that don’t get the same opportunities to be head coaches, and I know that potential, I know that talent is there, and so that’s really frustrating, and even as I talk to older generations of folks that have worked in women’s hoops, I hear so many stories from them about opportunities that never showed up or interviews they never got. And so I know we talk a lot about the NFL [National Football League], and the NFL is kind of coaching hierarchy and some of the racial logics there, but I want to say the same thing is happening in a different, predominantly black sport. And so I really am, as these numbers grow, as the W, as women’s college hoops become more viable, we’re going to have another, I fear, another iteration of what happens post Title Nine, where it’s more viable, so men are rushing in to coach women. And not that men can’t or shouldn’t coach women, but let’s just let’s keep the same energy when all these amazing coaches can have an opportunity to coach in the NBA, or have the opportunity to be administrators in Division One programs or all these other opportunities, I want to see that. So this new money also gives me that same hesitation when we look at the stats of who’s coaching the W this year,
M.: And I think it matters too just to say what you’re talking about with the assistant coaches and the associate coaches, and just even thinking about our own UW [University of Washington] Huskies, who had an amazing sort of record year here under Coach Tina Langley, but we do have Associate Head Coach Latara King, who herself was a black basketball player at the collegiate level, and so thinking about how not everyone gets to have a black coach that looks like them that can model like this, like you were saying, where can you go after this? And these relationships are very long, it is a different type of social world that we don’t necessarily understand. Maybe, maybe as academics, we’re like, oh, we’ll see each other for the next 20 years at conferences, and maybe we used to be friends in grad school, we wrote together, maybe we had a maybe we dated at some point, and some people know, maybe we do have our own version, but it’s so interesting to think about relationality has to be different. I mean, even from unrivaled back to the W, just people being like, yeah, I’m playing against my teammate, that in maybe six weeks we will be back to practicing at the facility together. It’s just a different world that people don’t have a lot of grace and kindness or understanding about.
Ron: I’m sort of stuck on thinking about that too, because I think the competitive side of it, even just during training, is part of that. You always play against your teammates just in training, so there’s always that combination of competition and camaraderie, so it’s not hard to imagine it translating over. But then when things get picked up in the press, they get turned into these very sort of dichotomous, like, oh, these people have beef, or these people are tight or whatever, and there’s all that nuance of the relationality just drops out completely.
Courtney: We see this also, with the flip side of it is, we see how the media, to use a recent case study, have reacted when people are dating, which, if you follow women’s basketball, I don’t know, ever, you know that we have some professionals that have had to navigate a lot of different situations. And what I find so interesting, silly, annoying about all of this conversation about the Dallas Wings and their roster is that there is just – it’s very obvious who’s new to this and who’s true to this, because if this is your concern, and it’s funny, the best buds, you know, whenever there’s a narrative and a thing they make fun of, like, oh, these teammates are so close, this is like hockey and basketball, especially softball, when you have to get into this,
M.: But it’s like we’re not in 2026, are we still calling people roommates? Like, how’s your roommate doing?
Courtney: Yeah, it’s so, it’s so the logic, everyone’s like, oh, basketball is such an inclusive space, but I’m like, the battles, the things that have that have had to happen, the way that coaches have been installed these like no dating teammates policies, we know this. Pepperdine is the most vivid example, because that turned into a lawsuit, but the idea of, this idea of like, how will Paige and Azzi play together, how could this, and I’m like, do y’all know how long, does anyone actually have the timeline? Because, I mean, if we go back into some receipts, I think we could say they’ve been dating for a very long time, but half that time y’all were calling them besties. And part of it is like the queer reading of the W is something that we don’t have enough of, and it shows itself in these press conferences that are so unfairly about, are you going to be able to do your job, or did you only, you know, did you sleep your way into this, this job, like you weren’t this incredible basketball player in your own right. And what I love, folks have watched Paige’s press conference, where she says, before we get into, let me, let me clear some things, let me tell you what we’re not going to do here. And I really love that as a leader, I love that as a partner, I love that in all these different ways that I think Paige has had to step up and say certain things, it’s also the same Paige Bueckers that you know was at the ESPYs [Excellence In Sports Performance Yearly Awards]. We really aren’t putting enough respect on black women’s names in this league, which I think in many ways may pushed everyone to be like, okay, we’re maybe she’s not our girl, maybe it’s gonna be Caitlin, because I see I saw people turn both after her injury and then also after that moment where people are like I don’t like her as much, but she was the girl from UConn that everyone was gonna love. And I think her queerness on top of that has also been a way that she’s had to navigate this space, and the fact she keeps doing it so well, I’m so impressed to be so young to be navigating this constant media cycle, and what people are saying about you and your partner, and just being like, let me, let me make this very clear. I think there’s something about that that I really respect.
M.: What I love with you, as we say in the vernacular, you, we’re not new to this, it really does it, if you had been watching women’s basketball from when Paige was a rookie, there were a lot of us who knew that she was almost the latest symbolic latch onto of like young cis [cisgender] white women, that in a very weird long afterlife, this is jumping really critical sports studies, but maybe follow me, in a way I think it’s a very, the great white hope of women’s basketball. Every couple years are, oh my gosh, the league full of these unabashed black women, some of whom are black straight women who are just really tapped into their personality and confident, many of whom are very proud black queer women, and then there is a standout white women player, which we know there are – they exist. But I like what you posit, that even before Caitlin, within a couple of years, like Paige and Caitlin start within a couple of years of each other in the NCAA, but there is something about how their narrative shift, and one of them is not an easy symbol for a particular type of political agenda. I will say of a not fan, I’m not actually convinced that these people are fans of basketball, let alone Women’s basketball, but they are fans of a particular political agenda. And I think that we might say it might be the bare minimum, but it certainly is a way to model a type of co-conspiracy, to be like, well, actually, literally, black women raised me, and quite literally, in Paige’s case, because one of her parents is a black woman, so I mean, running around practice listening to gospel, as the one, so you know you can really see, like, when you’re in the work and you respect the fact that you’re in a league, and, you’re saying the labor, or just even the, the education and professionalization to know to say those things, and to be vocal, because I think those are some of the critiques that happen around other players, is that you might hear some of these things, but do you unabashedly shut down the ways in which people are talking about these other players that you’re surrounded by. And it makes me think a lot about, whether Paige and Azzi, whether they’re partners, not partners, whether best, whatever’s going on, there is something very clear that some of you all are brand new here, and these people have to go to work, these 22 year olds, these 23 year olds, I think about all the time, where I’m just like, how wild is it to go to your first big job, and for the conversations to be about your relationship? And people are having these very interesting conversations about, if you have a public sort of relationship, can people ask you these questions about your personal life? And, sure, so that exists, It’s not new. And I think also clearly, for queer fans, there’s something different that’s happening. A lot of queer fans, part of what’s part of the game, outside of it is to see people who are proud and queer, and to get to be excited about queer relationships. But not everybody that is asking these questions in these rooms is necessarily excited about queer relationships, or is queer themselves, there’s a lot going on. But to be a young person showing up to your job and have to answer that, I just, I can’t imagine, going back to its capital. Like-
Ron: Exactly
M.: It’s your labor.
Ron: Yeah. And, in the context of, that’s exactly what I was thinking, as well as, like, as again, in the context of the, being people being super excited about the growth of the W in a sort of racial capitalist system, does it attempt to shut down all of those long histories because it’s uncomfortable with all of it, and so it’s just like we’re going to model ourselves off of this, a very sort of bifurcated world of the athlete, and we’re going to try to rebuild that old school mode that’s not healthy for anyone, including the existing male leagues, it’s not good for them either, but that’s what they’ve grown up in.
Courtney: I want to talk about the not fan, because that’s actually at the heart of where so many of these big discourses come from. I think part of, in that growth piece is absolutely part of where the not fan gets to come in. There are a lot of people that are not fans of basketball, because I hear them talk about the NBA in ways where I’m like, I don’t think you watch the game, I don’t think you’ve watched a game, I don’t think you’ve ever actually shot a basketball, because of the way that you’re talking about these athletes. And I want to say that that’s a general parasocial relationship thing that people have that are only scrolling on Instagram, or maybe watching highlights, maybe. And I think the disrespect that’s sometimes put on not only talent but the personal lives of these humans that perform at a high level is important. And then the other thing I want to think about with the non-fan, just to loop around to Paige and Caitlin and the Great White Hope, whether it’s a Sue Bird, whether it’s a Diana Taurasi, Sabrina Ionescu. Oh, yes, I can’t believe that, you know, honestly, Sabrina was.. if that’s Sabrina, really watch basketball, Sabrina’s really, that girl, she’s really like that, and so, and again, not my Oregon bias, per se, but maybe. But you know, when I, there’s always a similar narrative, and I talk about this in the introduction, we have Sue Bird and we have Sylvia Fowles, both retiring, and they get very different retirement tour energy. And Sylvia says, in that moment where Mirin Fader, incredible, incredible journalist, if y’all aren’t reading Mirin Fader, what are you doing? Incredible feature writer, her work is so important for how I try to talk about athletes as well. And Mirin’s talking to her, like, do you feel snubbed by how all this has happened? It’s almost like people aren’t even realizing the accolades, the levels of work that you’re giving, and she’s like, “Why why would I expect it now when I’ve been looked over for all these awards, all these endorsement opportunities? I didn’t get the shoe, I didn’t get all these things”. And she’s like, “Why would it change now? I don’t have any, any sense of feeling away about it, because this is the way that it’s always been”. And so, when I think about that, I also want to say people have this idea of like, who should be grateful, people, the league should be grateful, because there’s this marketable player. And I really just want to put some things to bed, and I hope that the book does that. That’s one of my hopes, is that when folks are hearing these other discourses, and they’re like, is that really the, is that really the case? I hope that this can be a resource to be like, well, let’s look at the big picture, let’s look at the Kaplan report, let’s look at how the NCAA has had to change legally because they were caught doing a sexism constantly. Let’s talk about how the growth of these broadcast rights deals make it easier for people to see. Some people just turn ESPN on, they just don’t care what’s on, they’re gonna watch it. And so, thinking about if you don’t have to go to ESPN, the Ocho, if you don’t go to ESPN News to find a game, you’re more likely to watch it’s there, you’re like, oh, ESPN decided it could be on ESPN Uno, I’ll watch it here. And so I want to think about how these larger institutional shifts speak to this more than one individual, and the other thing I want to speak of when people are saying, well, people are just jealous, or people just mad. When Paige was crowned initially, coming in, you play for UConn, you’re blonde, the world is yours within college basketball media. When she came in, and then she got injur-, all the preseason, everyone wanted to give her all the awards, she unfortunately gets hurt. And at the time I had been watching a lot of college basketball, like these were old kind of Twitter conversations, communities of people watching women’s college hoops, primarily black women kind of groups, where they were just talking about all the games, all the time. And they were like everyone’s talking about Paige, but there’s this girl at Iowa that is hooping, and I watched all these people that are fans, fans of the game, I watched all these black women watch Caitlin’s ascendancy, and she wasn’t being covered because she played for Iowa, and they’re like, “but y’all, are y’all seeing the stat lines, are you?”. So I was watching when Paige gets hurt, they are these folks that are like, “Well, it really is Aliyah Boston’s world to live in now”. But then the shift that goes into Caitlyn, everyone’s like, well, this is unfortunate now, because we’re stuck, we’ve been celebrating this player over here, but now she’s taken up that seemingly skips who would have been the player for all the awards and all the things. And not to take away, in any way, from either of these players, but the discourse is what I’m talking about, the shift from Paige to Caitlin versus the shift from Paige to Aliyah is telling to me. And then on top of that, it’s this constant, like, well, now you’re just jealous of Caitlin, so then with a Caitlin v Angel or this larger Iowa LSU [Louisiana State University] regional racial kind of reckoning, I think it really erases the fact that the fans always saw what the game was, and saw this as, like, this is the matchup we really want to see. And so, rather than speaking in the same way about South Carolina, and that long undefeated record they had, if that was Geno, if that was Luigi, that would have been a completely different conversation, but the way that Don’s prowess as a coach, as a recruiter, as just an innovator in the sport, isn’t talked about in the same way, the same way that the women that were celebrating Caitlin before Caitlin made it into this larger narrative. I just see a lot of that erasure is also part of this larger question, and the queer erasure too is part of that of like how do we help people bring them along, because sometimes it’s messy. I mean, the mess in the W is also what I’m here for too. And so, sometimes, yeah, people are dating, sometimes people break up, sometimes people start dating each other’s teammates, ex, and I’m also here for that Instagram content, because the real fans, the real fans that I am writing to, writing with, are the people that are comparing Skyline photos and being like, are they in the same room? That’s what I’m here for, I’m here for the fans that see the wholeness of these people’s lives, that can cheer and think about them in terms of what this new CBA means, they can think about the ways that we’re seeing folks get shoes and statues, and the things that their male peers have gotten for a long time. I’m seeing the way that WNBA players are stepping out and standing up against a lot of anti-trans policies in a way that I don’t always see their, their colleagues and teammates in other sports do. And I want to end on a high note of, the not fans are going to do what they do. Stephen A. Smith is going to yell into any microphone, as he also says he’s done more for the W than anyone, or he’s the biggest, whatever he was on that day was wild. But I think the fans know what it is, and they see it, and so I think we will have those kinds of great white hope moments. We have those folks that get lined up, and they get to skip through some of these, these steps to their own shoes and endorsements and recognition and awards. But I think the fans are ultimately serviced by being in community and dialog with each other too, I see that space as really rich, where it can be about joy, it can be about mess, it can be about just loving on the game, seeing someone’s game develop, seeing like there are folks that have, I’m thinking about, like, Alyssa Thomas, like, why does that shot work? It shouldn’t work, you know? This idea of the ways, shoulders, , this should not be, but I think if we marvel at the game, the game is enough. We don’t all have to have all these other things. I want people to feel like the game is grown, the game is enough, but as scholars, there’s so much that we can delve into that is about this entire world out that tells us so much more about not just basketball, but where we are as a society, what do we value, what do we understand to be important, and where do we need to go next.
M.: Well, and I do love this idea of ending on that note, and even just these ideas about, I mean, the question around gender is really one of the right ways to perhaps start wrapping up the conversation, because of where the league has been in terms of having these conversations and where it’s going to go, and we’re really, we talk about it as women’s basketball, but it really is a space where we’re finding a lot of inclusion, particularly we’ve had the first trans and non-binary player in the last several years in the league. And it’s interesting because you open the book, I believe, talking about Cheryl Miller and her fight for Title Nine, and one of the things I find interesting for us as sports studies people, but also just fans, is the way in which Title Nine and this fake, political agenda to protect, “women and girls in sports” by people who’ve never seen it, never shown up, never paid $1 never actually saw someone tear an ACL, and then taken them to, there’s so much wildness around protecting this particular league that’s so, so unserious and disingenuous. But you start with the amazing Cheryl Miller, take us through Title Nine, and now Title Nine is this section where people are trying to push transness and non binary-ness and gender nonconformity out of sport, in a sport that, for a long time, did try to center a particular type of womanhood or vision of womanhood off the court, regardless of what they could actually do with people on the court being themselves, so I don’t know if there’s anything that you could leave us with on that, but it’s, what an important moment.
Courtney: Yeah, it is the moment. I start, so Cheryl Miller, and Cheryl Miller is fighting, is going up with the Grove City decision, and so thinking about this connection to larger, not just within sport, but larger civil rights protections in public spaces, like hospitals and schools. And so Cheryl Miller’s doing this declaration about, I’m a basketball player, and this is important in this space, and she’s just won, she’s won a gold medal, like this is after the ‘84 Olympics, she’s in her hometown, this is her city that she’s won a championship, like she’s done all the things she needed to do as a basketball player, and in her free time that she did not have to do, she’s also going to talk to Congress and being like, we have to have these civil rights protections. And so I started with Cheryl Miller, because she’s highly visible, iconic legacy, but when I found, I was going through some Library of Congress stuff, when I found the transcript of that proceeding, I said, “Oh, I had no idea that she was also doing all of this fresh off of a gold medal”, but that heightened visibility and that representation of the nation there made it align in that way to push back against the Grove City decision. I think that’s really interesting how athletes can be used. Brittney Griner gets used also as a political kind of pawn in many ways by both Russia and the United States, and so I wanted to start with Cheryl, my only kind of historical reference that that is really centered, to kind of say that there’s a lot we can pull forward, and Cheryl’s style of dress, the way that she’s describing how she feels in her body, wearing the tie, why this is the way that, all of that was so important for me to put together, because Chelsea Gray is saying the same thing, right, about how, like, the mixture of men’s and women’s pieces actually are the thing, and so I’m thinking about the inventive nature of that. But then when I get into the intro, I’m talking about AD [Asia] Durr, and I’m talking about Layshia Clarendon, and then because they’re also helping push queer theory forward to me as well, by the ways that they think through pronouns, the ways that Layshia was also even talking about the different ways that transness wasn’t legible to people until they had top surgery, and they’re like, I was trans before this, so I think there’s a way that even fans are being educated in a particular way. And I think the other thing that I think about, even with AD, was just the idea of just wanting to move beyond this entire being like I’m kind of post-gender, I, and thinking about what COVID, as this reckoning with the body also meant for a certain kind of understanding of one’s body in this larger disruption of gender that moves us beyond the binary. So I wanted to start with them, when everyone like reads the intro and they’re like this is a book about black women and non-binary athletes, I added that in, in terms of my own education of being like women’s basketball is a category, but it doesn’t completely encompass the athletes and advocates that I’m talking about and through, and I was like, even that feels limiting, and how I want to, they’re thinking expansively, and I want to think alongside them of what this would look like, and anyway, I bring that into the intro of the book. And the last thing I’ll say, in the fourth quarter of the book, because it was the 50th anniversary of Title Nine, there were all these celebratory moments, and this is going into the 2023 title game, which was that Iowa LSU game, there, where I talk about there’s this, this moment of celebration, and these crazy statistical kind of numbers, in terms of the impact, growth of the game. But then there’s this little, those little ad truck, you see them a lot in Vegas, but everywhere those big ad things that just drive around, and it was this protecting girls kind of this very anti-trans policy group, or whatever, that spent a lot of money to have this truck drive around the entire American Airlines Center. And I’m writing about this celebration, AT&T has this exhibit, it’s like it’s branded, it’s sponsored, you can go look at this this lineage. And then at the same time, there’s this narrative that’s literally driving around the entire space, and there’s no way I can think about the celebration and growth without thinking about there’s someone that hired, that’s not going to the game, not watching the non-fan, the not fan, that is also about talking about this idea of protection, and it’s not about abusive coaches, we’re not talking about systems that are harming athletes. I’m always like, okay, let’s protect athletes, what does that look like? But it’s never that. It’s never about making sure that programs are funded, It’s never making sure that we’re holding people accountable that are that are part of the problem within these spaces. It’s always this anti-trans language that’s circulating, and this in this very paternalistic idea of who needs to be protected and from whom. And so that trend that, I was having this kind of moment of, again, joy of, look at how many people I had, the scalpers are asking me for tickets, there’s that moment, and I’m standing out there, and as I’m sitting, I’m like, what, what is that, what is that truck about? So I can’t, I have to hold space for whatever AT&T is going to sponsor and celebrate, and I also have to think about what it means in this moment when we could be talking about this game, or even Coach Staley is asked during a press conference, “what about trans women playing basketball”, and I think that was supposed to be this gotcha moment. Because Dawn Staley is very vocal about her faith, and she’s like, “Oh yeah, if you identify as a woman, you should be able to play”, that’s that on that. And then said, and then is self-aware enough to say, “You know what, I know people are gonna come attack me the night before we play in this game, but I’m gonna say it like this is how I feel, and so I’m ready for that”. This idea of, what does allyship look like in this moment, and what, what does Coach Staley also give us a blueprint for in terms of thinking about on these biggest stages, this idea of who’s going to come for her, who’s going to come for her within church communities, who’s going to come for her within these anti-trans organizations, but being like I’m gonna stand on business, and this is this is who I am, and this is what I’m about. And so I just think about all those things together. It’s a thread, it’s not its own chapter, but it kept coming up for me in different ways throughout the book.
Ron: I mean, I feel like it, it’s that paradox again of the joy of the game and the joy that the game brings hand in hand with the different forms of sort of violence and exploitation that happen around the edges and in the middle of it at the same time, and it’s really hard to separate those, but keeping the joy in frame is really crucial, and sometimes it’s easy to lose track of the joy in the midst of it. Thank you, both of you, Courtney and M., for such a wonderful conversation this afternoon. really, really appreciate it. And thank you to all of you for listening in to say a bit more about the Global Sport Lab. We are a new collaboration based in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, in partnership with my own school and. Disciplinary arts and sciences at UW Bothell. The lab uses the lens of sport to explore all the big issues of our global world, from migration, politics, inequity, racism, and gender discrimination to popular culture, democracy, human rights, and the economy, to name just a few. We’re particularly focused on the global sport of football, better known as soccer in the United States during the run up to Seattle’s hosting of the FIFA men’s World Cup in 2026 but as today’s episode demonstrates, we’re interested in a wide range of sports, well known and less well known, from the grassroots to the professional levels, and how they all help us make meaning of the world. Special thanks to musician and scholar of global football, Laurent Dubois, and WOTI Production for the use of our theme music, Merci Kylian, available on Spotify and Apple Music. If you would like to join more conversations like this, please reach out to us at globalsportlab@uw.edu We look forward to hearing from you. Thanks, and keep playing.
[MUSIC PLAYING – “Merci Kylian” by Laurent Dubois]
