Adriana Hooper

The phrase “stick to sports” has always been one that frustrates me. We forget that professional athletes are in fact human and go through many of the same things we do. Athletes should not stick to sports and if I had to pick just one reason why, it is because they have the platform for positive change, to change the perception of many different people. People listen (for good or bad) to professional athletes. They have the ability to bring to light situations that we may never know about otherwise. Many of them go through things that I and many other people go through and it helps to hear that.

I will admit that I have become a lot more openly political in this election cycle. And that is because I cannot sit silent and let the injustices of this country continue to hurt many of the people that I care about. On the media side, I do not believe there is any “pure” definition of just sticking to sports. The political side will always be there.

I cannot just stick to sports and I expect the athletes I follow to be human too and express themselves. Sports is an escape for many but the real world still exists. And these athletes go through just as much, if not more, than I do.

Alanna Fairbairn

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received was from an English professor in college. She told me that as a writer, the only thing I was responsible for was putting my work out to the world at the highest level I could achieve at the time. How people reacted to it – whether they hated it, or loved every word – was not up to me. Trying to control the reactions of my readers would only drive me insane. I found that to be true, so I’ve since applied that to all areas of my life, including my involvement with sports. Athletes, being people, have the same responsibility. They put not just their on-field play, but pieces of their personality and beliefs out to the world. They have no ability to control your reactions.

The flipside of this truth is similar; you can never control what other people say and believe. If you try, you’re setting yourself up for failure. You can only control your reactions to what people say. If an athlete isn’t “sticking to sports” and that frustrates you, that is not the athlete’s problem. You get to deal with that, and how you do is one of the true tests of character. Are you going to get mad that someone doesn’t agree with you? That’s a dangerous, exhausting road to walk down. Or are you going to recognize that they are people with the same right to an opinion, and your disagreement doesn’t change that?

Allison Cary

The first time that I realized the power of sports was when I saw a video of Syrian refugees traveling to the tournament opener for the Jordanian team in the U-17 Women’s World Cup in Jordan. Many of these little girls hard lost everything—their homes, their belongings, their friends, even their family. But football brought a smile to their faces. These girls said that playing football was their favorite thing in the world, and that getting to see their new home country play was the best day of their lives.That’s when I realized—we can’t just stick to sports. Sports have the power to change the world. They bring communities together. They lift people out of darkness. And sports can be used as a tool for awareness and action in some of the deepest social and political issues of our time. To simply “stick to sports”—to talk about the game without talking about the people who play it, the communities they represent, the world they and all of us live in—would be irresponsible. So, we won’t just “stick to sports.” Before we are athletes or journalists, we are humans. And that is the most important title we carry.

Jacqui Porter

Im not sure when the phrase “stick to sports” was coined but its one that I completely disagree with. Athletes are human too, so why should they limit themselves to just being that? Those who are in a position to do good for the human race and bring awareness to social and political issues should absolutely take the opportunity. If we as a society stuck to sports, things would not change, perception would not change and in order to truly understand each other we need to have positive influences from people of all different backgrounds, races, genders, orientations, religions and so on. Humanity NEEDS diversity. So when I see or hear the phrase stick to sports it’s frustrating to know that so many people don’t want to see any other side of a story or a different way of life. Athletes and those in media have a unique platform to use and I sincerely hope people understand why Colin Kaepernick and Michael Bennett continue to fight for justice. They are just two breve examples of why we cannot stick to sports. They are doing their part to make this world a better place even when they are treated unfairly; they still fight, they still use their voice, they still are working for this country. It’s a lot of work but if people stop hating and discriminating that would be a good start yeah? Because in today’s political climate where we have an unthinkable amount of uncertainty, we need to hear people’s stories so we can find ways to make it right. Dethrone evil and bring all the good into this world. So NO, I will not just stick to sports.

Lindsay Schwarz

Why shouldn’t I just write about sports? Because it’s impossible. Plain and simple. If I am going to write about sports then I am going to have to write about everything else. Because sports aren’t just about kicking around a ball, or running up a field, or swinging a bat. Sports can be about taking a knee during the national anthem, wearing an equality t-shirt during pride month, or even filing a lawsuit for equal pay based on gender discrimination. And if I were to just write about the stats, and the box scores, and the rosters…well then I would be missing a lot of what sports are all about. They have this ability to touch every issue around them, and it provides athletes a voice to stand up for what they believe in. If I were to only write about the athletic technique that gets put on display, then I have missed the bigger picture.

And I admit that many times I do. I don’t write about the opinions or the social issues or the taboo enough. And for that I apologize. For that, I will own that I haven’t always shown the bigger picture. Because the cross into the box may be note worthy, but so is the personal strife that is happening off the field in our communities. So I promise to do better. I promise to write about more than just sports. It shouldn’t be too difficult though…it’s impossible not to.

Alyssa Zajac

If you look at any of my social medias, you see mainly two types of posts. Sports, and politics. Those political posts sometimes get me into…. passionate discussions with people who disagree with my views.

The easy thing to do, would be to stop posting political things. In other words “stick to sports” – post my hot takes, talk about sports news, and complain about the reffing. The easy thing to do would be to stay silent, but the thing is? Staying silent helps no one. Staying silent draws complacency to behaviors, thoughts, and beliefs that discriminate against human beings because of their religion, race, sexual orientation, or gender identity and expression – anything that is “not normal” or “different.”

So, no, I will not just “stick to sports”. I will not stay silent. I will not be complacent.

I will use my platform and my privilege to speak up. To give those who can’t speak up and have been silenced a voice.

As said by Jennifer Donnelly: “We who have means and a voice must use them to help those who have neither.”

Charles Olney

For many people, sports is an escape. In a media landscape where everything is contentious and politics seems to infuse every conversation, they savor the freedom provided by sports. As pure entertainment, the only relevant questions are athletic prowess, tactical maneuvers, and whether their favorite team wins. When faced with troubling questions about the intersections between sport, politics, culture, and society, they are resentful. Why can’t coverage just stick to the sports and leave all the rest out?

But when you dig into the question, you quickly discover turtles going all the way down. There is no ‘pure’ version of sport that resides underneath all these layers of complexity. Sports exists within our society, and is therefore a part of that society. If it doesn’t seem political, that’s only because its politics align so closely with your own as to render themselves invisible.

Does it seem ‘political’ when the national anthem is played? It should. That anthem represents a principle of national unity, a collective spirit. It stitches together those who hear it, whether they want to be tied together or not. Someone who challenges that process (as we have seen in the past year from players like Colin Kaepernick and Megan Rapinoe) is engaging in politics, certainly. But it is ‘political’ to kneel during the anthem precisely because the anthem is an incredibly powerful political signal.

It’s political when teams offer salutes to the troops. It’s political when players and teams dispute over contracts. The Kiss Cam is political (just look at what happens when it focuses on two people of the same sex). Who plays? What does the crowd look like? How much does the team invest in outreach to minorities, to women? Why are certain sports taken more seriously than others? Who gains and who loses from this sort of coverage? These are all political questions, and they would remain political questions even if the underlying conditions changed drastically. Sports will always be political, because life is political. That isn’t intrinsically a good or bad thing. It’s just a reality.

So if you enjoy treating sports as an escape, you are certainly free to do so. That freedom exists for many people, as a function of choices that have been made over the centuries, and it is a freedom that is well-relished. But let’s not pretend that this is a matter of avoiding politics. To inhabit a position of privilege and freedom, and to attack those who lack those same advantages simply for mentioning this condition, is the essence of a political position.

Every time I hear or see some version of “You’re just a(n) [actor, athlete, journalist, kid, etc], stick to what you know,” I laugh and then roll my eyes.

I’m sorry, do you not understand how we each are global citizens a) who are affected by the consequences of macro-level policies, decisions, and actions and b) whose actions have consequences on macro- and micro-levels?

Everything I do is political, from choosing to wear my NIKE sneakers (were they made by a corporation that uses child labor, what is the global environmental impact of the company, how do the companies policies affect global and international trade, relations, etc) to choosing what television shows to watch (which companies advertise during the show, what is their reputation for diversity at all levels of production, etc) to which sports and teams I am a fan of (is the sport impacted by environmental concerns, does a league or team reproduce traditional and oppressive forms of existence or advocate for more progressive social footprints, etc) WHETHER I AM AWARE OF IT OR NOT. Every action you take has a political implication, WHETHER YOU ARE ACTIVELY AWARE OF THIS OR NOT.

So don’t come at people who are more awake to their impact on the world than you are.

You want to know why an athlete should speak up about something like, let’s say, climate change?

Let’s go.

First, all sports have roots in our childhoods. We started in a youth league. We watched football with our dads. We saw the Olympics on television and we spent our Christmas breaks making wobbly figure-8s at the pond in our grandmother’s back yard. As global warming increases, the future of childhood is threatened. Higher temperatures make outside play in locations particularly affected (see Australian summers of late) undesirable if not, at some points, dangerous. Drier and hotter climates mean grass is both harder to grow and harder to upkeep, so the lawns and fields of our childhood aren’t as lush for our children and their children. This means that their bodies are subject to different kinds of injuries and stresses. Talk to any soccer player about the difference between a grass field and a turf one, for god’s sake. Not to mention that climate change and pollution affect things like air quality, pollen counts (i.e., allergens in the air), which increases the incidence of seasonal allergies and asthma, as well as the degree to which it affects day-to-day life.

Second, climate change affects play on the professional level. Let’s talk heat, for one, since it’s been such a big issue this NWSL season. Temperatures continue to rise, globally. NASA reports that this past March was the second hottest on record–since 1880.

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Oh, boy, look at the US in that graphic of global temperature trends since 1880–the US is trending anywhere from .5 degrees to almost two degrees warmer. As most people can attest, two degrees can make a big difference when you’re arguing with your dad about how hot the house is and he’s refusing to turn the AC lower because “when I was a kid all we had was one fan for seven people in the main room of the house and we survived” and you’re left there drowning in your pool of adolescent sweat.

Look at Brazil, where some of our most famous global soccer players come from, where the temperature is trending even higher, over five degrees in some places. Look at the Arctic, also trending up to and over five degrees warmer, which is why there is genuine concern about the future inhabitability of coastal areas across the globe.

And now let’s remember that soccer is a game played outside. In all varieties of weather–and in the US, especially in the summertime months. Let’s remember Rachel Daly, who literally collapsed with heat exhaustion under 90+ degree temperatures and 90%+ humidity, earlier this season. As the climate continues to get warmer, these conditions will only become more and more common, and this will affect the play of soccer–of all sports. Already, some soccer pundits are struggling with the idea of hydration breaks, whether they’re truly necessary, how to implement them, how they interfere with the ebb and flow (you see what I did there, right?) of the game. Already due to the ability to and cost of maintaining grass fields, some stadiums are opting for turf instead. Turf holds up longer, doesn’t require as much intervention or water to maintain, sure, but it also takes a bigger toll on the bodies of athletes, on the speed of the game, on the direction and drive of the ball. It changes the game to such an effect that the Men’s World Cup has never been played on it because it wouldn’t be the same game.

I could talk about so much more. About how gun policies affect safety at large public events. About how international policies affect the ability of players to move efficiently between leagues and teams (a big concern after Brexit was the ability of international players to obtain the necessary status to live and play in England; a big concern after the election of Trump has been how the anti-immigration policies will affect the ability of players from foreign countries to come into the US to play, train, and more). Or how military actions fuel anti-Western sentiments across the globe and become radicalized, leading to large-scale public tragedies like the Borussia Dortmund bus bomb on the way to a Champions League quarter-final match against Monaco earlier this year, or the 2015 terror attack in Paris, where three explosions occurred outside the Stade de France during a friendly between France and Germany, or how the nationalist rhetoric of the Right in the US has radicalized a number of white men to commit acts of terror. Or I could talk about US culture, rape culture, domestic violence, and the legal system that in combination with access to guns, spells bad news for everyone, everywhere.

You might think I’m the Woman Who Called Wolf but my point is that these are the kind of things that always happen somewhere else, until they don’t. Until they happen here. [Ask me about the 2012 Sikh temple shooting that took place less than three miles from where I grew up and I’ll tell you all about just how near somewhere else can be.]

I’m not saying the wolf is coming. I’m saying that sports are in every way connected to the political. And every athlete is a citizen of a community, a nation, the world as a whole.

And they have not only the right but the responsibility as citizens to speak up for what they believe in.

If you’re reading this, you probably have an interest in women’s soccer.

So do I.

In fact, I really like a lot of sports, and I’ve been a sports fan my whole life. I love the competition, and to be honest, since I mentioned it, I’ve also been told by countless people that I’m a competitive person. In this moment, as I try to delineate the direction of causality, I’m not sure if sports helped me to develop a competitive personality or if it’s part of my competitive nature that drove me to like sports. The cool thing about humans being complex characters is that it’s probably a little bit of both, right?

Factors influencing the person I have become have likely come from countless directions. People are complex, just as society is complex, interactions are complex, emotions are complex, interpretation of emotion is complex, perceptions are complex, and on and on and on. All of these complexities are woven into life experiences contributing to personal development.

At the risk of severely oversimplifying child development, I will reference my own life experiences and generalize the process of growing up into three stages. We begin as inquisitive children, and without warning emerge as headstrong and confusing adolescents. Then, with what feels like a lightning strike of unwelcomed instancy, we are adult people with opinions, well-developed personalities, and responsibilities.

Some of my earliest memories include watching Detroit Tigers baseball and Michigan Football with my dad. If I wasn’t watching sports, I was at the softball field playing bat-girl while my dad coached my mom’s slow-pitch softball team (she was the best second-basewoman St. Joe’s ever had, and she could bat left- and right-handed). Beginning in elementary school and continuing through high school, I played basketball and softball. In my adult years, I have coached them as well. Now, I’m a graduate student with a passion for women’s soccer.

Between playing, coaching, and spectating, the sequence of events throughout a sporting event have remained relatively constant. Teams warm up, the national anthem is played, there’s some healthy competition, there’s victory, there’s defeat, and then there’s a handshake. Depending on the sport, the age, and the level of competition, this order might change, but typically, this is what those of us who follow and participate in sports come to expect.

For every game I have played, for every game I have coached, and for every game I have attended, I have stood for the national anthem, because that’s what you’re supposed to do. This was not an action I had ever questioned. And then last year, when Colin Kaepernick was excoriated by countless media outlets, memes, radio hosts, you name it, for using the national anthem to make a statement about what exactly it is that the anthem represents, and what exactly it is that we are supposed to be standing for, I thought about it a lot.

I’m from a Michigan town of minimal racial diversity, and privilege is not something I was ever confronted with until well into my adult years. I can see how there are people who have never been confronted with these issues and who believe they’re bogus, but they’re not. They’re real. Many of the freedoms that exist for me because of the color of my skin don’t exist for everyone.

Discourse in my social media circles often cites that silence in times of injustice is equivalent to being complicit with said injustice. Thus, speaking out is imperative. As a white woman who happens to be married to a white woman, I am constantly conscious of my identity and how my participation in anything social justice related might be perceived as me trying to absolve myself of guilt without actually doing anything to make a difference. Then, Megan Rapinoe took a knee during the national anthem following Colin Kaepernick’s action, and I felt like because I was able to more closely identify with her, I could be more confident with using my voice.

It’s no surprise that Rapinoe taking a knee was met with a polarized public response. Taking a knee in a Seattle Reign uniform is one thing, but taking a knee with the USA crest on the chest is another. Last September, following her initial anthem protest with Seattle, Rapinoe tweeted in reply to Shaun King, an outspoken journalist who covers issues of policing, Black Lives Matter, and who helps to lead the #NFLBoycott charge.

King’s tweet has since been deleted, but in response to Rapinoe’s tweet, thousands of people used the opportunity to reply. This space, where anyone with a Twitter account has the platform to direct their political and patriotic ideals at a professional athlete, is where I argue it’s impossible, and even irresponsible for athletes and those who cover them to simply “stick to sports.”

Together, we are learning to navigate through a time where we have access to professional athletes like never before. For some, that access is associated with a sense of entitlement, and when social media platforms allow for seamless back and forth between average Joes and public figures, it’s almost as if we need to be armed with knowledge, facts, and rebuttals to potential arguments like never before. To be a public figure in 2017 means to be inherently political. Even if an athlete or a coach tries to avoid being political, they are being asked to voice their opinions about current events as they unfold.

It used to be possible for people to be athletes, and athletes only without consequence. It used to be possible for sports broadcasters to only cover sports without consequence. Further, it used to be possible for sports writers to only cover sports without consequence, but that’s no longer true. We have untethered access to all of the knowledge that exists in the world, and in turn, we are open to critique from everyone who encounters what we produce. Where we are now, it is nearly impossible to report on a sports team or a sporting event without considering the context within which they exist. That context? It’s complex. It’s political.

So now, when I reflect on those years of playing and watching sports as a kid, I think about the context within which they were played. I might not have understood how sports were shaping my worldview, but I realize now that they did. I think about the athletes I loved to watch back then and how I feel now as an adult when I learn how, for example, they fought for equality. The fight for equality is a gauge for where we are as a society, in many cases, politically. As sports and athletes continue to interact with political issues, it is imperative that those who cover sports provide the context for those actions. Personally, I will continue to arm myself with the knowledge to best interpret complex situations, and it is my great hope that we can begin to accept that covering sports and dealing with issues that are considered to be political is inherently inseparable.