Women’s rugby deserves equal news coverage

I think all Glory of the Fight, all rugby girls and guys, and people in general should take a look at this article: Women’s rugby deserves equal news coverage. I transcript the article in here. Piaccere.

Last week’s issue of the Word covered the men and women’s home rugby games against Hanover College. While both the Earlham men and women were victorious by significant margins, the Word coverage gave the women’s team about one-fourth of the coverage it gave the men.

The men’s team got two flattering pictures: The largest one, taking up a quarter of a page, was an action photo that showed the fierce faces of several Earlham players. The caption below named all of the players and finished by saying, “After a hard fought game, Earlham emerged victorious, 31-12.” The other photo of the men’s team showed several players doing a “line-out,” where two players lift another player into the air to compete with the other team for the ball. The photograph appears to show an Earlham student being lifted high up, while Hanover struggles to get its teammate off the ground. The corresponding caption to this photograph describes the scene and lists the Earlham players present.

The one small photo of the women’s team shows mostly back and profile angles of the Earlham players. Although the women skunked Hanover, 15-0, the photograph that the Word printed shows a time in the game that Hanover had possession of the ball. The no-frills caption states: “The women’s rugby team looks on as Hanover takes possession. The Quaker ladies outscored Hanover 15-0.” This is not representative of most of the game. No names are listed although several faces can be recognized.

As a member of the women’s rugby team who played in this game against Hanover, I am disappointed at the Word’s decision to favor the men’s team so prominently over the women’s. Don’t get me wrong, the guys played really well and they deserve all of the coverage they got. But so did we. And we deserve just as much as they do.

When I first saw these photographs and captions last week, all I could think was: “WTF?!” We beat Hanover 15-0, that’s a big deal! And it was not an easy game. At one point, we prevented Hanover from scoring just inches away from our tri-zone! This was our only game of the semester. The no-names caption was offensive, especially in comparison to the captions for the photographs of the men’s team. Also, the decision to refer to us as “ladies” without calling the men “gents” or “gentlemen” harks back to another era.

I try not to be too quick to pull out the sexism card, but come on, really? How could people let this go to print? How did nobody think this would be a problem? Maybe the Word didn’t send a reporter to our game (but why didn’t they? They sent one to the men’s team). Maybe no one got any good action pictures of our players (although I doubt that, did you see us?). Whatever the back-story may have been here, the reality is that what ended up on the page was not OK.

Both the men and women’s teams played on the same day and we both won. We deserve as much coverage as the men. Anything less is irresponsible and sexist.

For the record: There were 15 women who played against Hanover on Homecoming. Their names are: Sara Mitchell-Olds, Kristen Georgia, Leah Pope, Jessette Meyers, Erin McKenna, Kelly Jacobs, Merry Faller, Danica Stoltz, Ka Rodriguez, Yusra Saleh, Annie Hamdani, Nadia Robinson, Lauren Hurschman, Laura Brown, and Anne Marie Roderick.

Sara Mitchell-Olds, Merry Faller and Yusra Saleh scored the three tries that brought our team to victory.

Anne Marie Roderick is a junior religion major and can be reached at aroder07@earlham.edu

Salud and may the force be with you.