When Billie Jean King came to APSE last fall wanting to create a journalism award for coverage of women’s sports, the timing could not have been better. A Women’s World Cup had recently ended. Women’s basketball was as popular as it had ever been. A unified professional women’s hockey league had just been announced. A 2022 that saw a rich reporting and writing around the 50th anniversary of Title IX provided momentum for continued investigation into the treatment of girls and women in sports.
Recognition of excellence in coverage of women’s sports was long overdue, of course. But much of the impetus for the award was about the future. The group pulling this new writing contest together wanted, in its own small way, to incentivize this coverage and inspire investment in more of it.
We were thrilled to receive 80 entries for the inaugural Billie Jean King Award writing contest. The portfolios, of four articles each, are being sent out to judges this week. (We were also thrilled with the number of people who wanted to be judges.)
Having peeked at the entries, I’m excited by the variety of sports and teams covered. I saw the names of journalists for some of our largest member organizations who have been covering women’s sports for decades. I saw the names of people who set out on their own – either as freelancers or at startups – to pursue their passion for women’s sports.
I was also excited to see writing about women’s sports rewarded in APSE’s other annual contest. Recently announced winners included Payton Titus of The State and Emily Adams of The Greenville News for their coverage of South Carolina women’s basketball; and Amie Just and Brent Wagner of the Lincoln Journal Star for their coverage of Nebraska women’s volleyball.
There is so much to celebrate in the journalism being produced about women’s sports. At the same time, some coverage has become viral for the wrong reasons. Mistakes were acknowledged. Apologies were made. I am grateful for the conversations these incidents spurred, and the lessons we as an industry hopefully gleaned from them.
I say “hopefully” because there is so much work to do. It’s 2024, and athletes in women’s sports continue to endure sexist language and disrespectful framing, inappropriate comments and questions. Women in sports media, so very outnumbered as we are, are all too familiar with this behavior. Meanwhile, trust in journalists, among those we cover and those who read us, is eroding.
Can APSE’s member organizations rise to meet this moment?
This is not just a question to ask about the athletes and teams we cover. If your shop is anything like mine, you say or hear the word “audience” dozens of times a week. The audience for women’s sports coverage is long underserved and rapidly growing. The well of potential new readers is deep. Are we offering those readers enough to earn their loyalty? Are we writing for them in accessible and welcoming ways to earn their trust? Are we speaking to them the way they want to be spoken to?
Next month, we will see NWSL games, PWHL playoffs and the beginning of the most anticipated WNBA season ever. There will be major tournaments in women’s tennis and women’s golf. Not to mention all the championships coming in spring sports for high school and college athletes. This summer the Paris Olympics will be the first with equal representation for male and female athletes.
I have two months left in my term, a short enough time that I am already ruing the things I have not accomplished. A short enough time to start thinking about what I want to tackle in a post-presidency role in APSE.
As I said when I became president last summer, I have had plenty of offers to leave sports in my career, but so many women are leaving sports or leaving journalism altogether, and I want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. Whatever my future holds, I know it will involve our organization’s most important mission: making our sports departments look more like the communities we cover; recruiting and retaining more women, journalists of color and LGBTQ journalists; and developing more diverse leaders for our future.
An opportunity for action is here. Cover women more, and we’ll get better at it. Hire more women, and our organizations will be better for it.
Upcoming APSE events
There is a lot going on in this organization for the rest of my term. Find about more about these events by clicking on the links below:
- Southeast Region meeting in Birmingham, April 29
- Student contest deadline, May 1
- Commissioners meetings in New York, May 6-7
- APSE scholarship deadline, May 24
- Summer conference, Charlotte, NC, June 20-22
The most recent edition of the APSE newsletter went out this morning. If you signed up for it but didn’t get it, look in your spam folder. If you would like to sign up for it, email Jake Adams at jake.adamstu@gmail.com.
