Interview: Victoria Jackson, Sport Historian, on the Current Chaos of Fall Collegiate Sports
In this episode, Amira Rose Davis interviews Victoria Jackson, sports historian and Clinical Assistant Professor of History in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. They discuss the struggle for power in the NIL system, the college football money machine, the mental health crisis in higher education and how the overturning of Roe vs. Wade will impact collegiate athletes.
This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.
Transcript
Amira: Welcome to Burn It All Down, the sports podcast you need. Amira here, and I am thrilled today to be joined by friend of the show Victoria Jackson. Victoria is a sports historian and clinical assistant professor of history in the school of historical, philosophical and religious studies at Arizona State University. You also know she's one of the foremost experts on college sports and all its discontents. A former athlete as well, track and field/cross country superstar. And so I thought no better person to speak about all of the college sports chaos as we are going into the fall season and many sports have already begun. So Victoria, welcome back to Burn It All Down.
Victoria: Thank you, Amira. It's awesome to be here.
Amira: So excited to dive into this. There is no shortage of things to talk about. [laughs] But I guess I'll start with college football, because college football is back. We saw some wild games this weekend, including missed field goals, last minute losses. College GameDay just announced they are coming my way to Austin for the Texas-Alabama game. Like, it's gonna be a game that's competitive. It's baffling. There is so much happening, and you have been busy, and you've already started calling out this season and the continued exploitation of college football athletes, among other things. And so, let's start with college football. On the eve of the season, it was also announced they were expanding the college football playoffs in the coming years to 12. We have all this talk of realignment that really is turning on college football. And then we have the season itself. So, where's your head at? What are you following? What do we make of the state of college football right now?
Victoria: You know, we're in the final stages of the school's reclaiming football money and power from the NCAA and using their conferences to do that. This has been like a 40 year process, and we're in its final act. And whether the schools themselves are gonna lead on recognizing that this is, yes, it's professional sports. We've known it all along. Therefore we're gonna get to work, you know, exploring economic models of how we can pay players and introduce employment status, and then figure out the rest of college sports too. Or are they gonna be forced by one of the branches of government? Because it's clearly a violation of antitrust and labor laws at this point. It's just that those processes take longer. We have more antitrust cases making their way through the courts. And sadly, that's not tomorrow. That's like in a couple of years that those cases start. But yeah, that's where we're at. And the latest big moments in this last act have been this latest wave of conference realignment.
The big TV contracts negotiations as part of that, the Big Ten, you know, negotiating $8 billion over seven years, at least. Like, it could be more, because we could have more schools joining the Big Ten soon. And then the college football playoff presidents potentially kind of pushing back against that. It's interesting. We have different groups of power brokers – university presidents, conference commissioners, a Kevin Warren that's like very much running an NFL model. And this broader competition between the SEC and the Big Ten creating a settling out of the top 50 or so schools where they'll end up if it's, you know, a super league, kind of like what we saw in Europe with soccer, a resettling in that sort of way. Or it's something else. So, I don't know where we'll be or what this will look like in two years. But I do think the next two years are gonna be crucial in determining what this looks like going forward.
Amira: Absolutely. I agree with you. And like I said, we already have Texas matching up with Alabama. Of course, Texas and Oklahoma have said they're going over to the SEC, making folks in the Big 12 really mad. And then over on the west coast, you mentioned the Big Ten. The big news over there was the addition of UCLA and USC. And you mentioned that broadcast deal. One of the things they're touting with it that you mentioned in your wonderful piece that everybody should check out about this is that they're happy because it's gonna provide the conference with “the broadest audience in the country, coast to coast.” Now, that coast to coast thing is what gets me really hung up, because I lived for five years in State College, Pennsylvania. I know how hard it is to travel in and out of State College, Pennsylvania.
And that is hard to travel in and out of if you're on the east coast. It’s hard to travel in and out of if you're in the Midwest, like many of the other Big Ten teams. I cannot imagine doing home and home series with USC or UCLA and the amount of manpower, the amount of time and effort that it just takes to even get there, logistically. That is not in priority of good competition and the players and anything but money. And I think we're seeing with realignment these things happening really starkly. What else should we be paying attention to with realignment? Or is the conversation around realignment…I know a lot of people get caught up in competition, but it feels to me like one of the most glaring examples we've had lately – since the pandemic, which was another glaring example – that it's so nakedly in the pursuit of profit. Like, I don't know, I haven't heard at least, any articulation of an argument for realignment that seeks to defend it on any other merit.
Victoria: Oh yeah. It's football money. It's because these are professional sports and they're competing. And so part of it too is competing for talent, right? Because you have to win. And that's just kind of how this thing operates. That’s the mission, right? It's not serving students who play sports. The mission is to be the best and to win. And that means making money, because you have to spend that money in order to, you know, have the best talent and keep winning. So, that's the mission here. It's moved away from serving athletes – if it ever was that. You know, certainly not in the last 50 years. I was laughing when you were talking about how hard it is to get in and out of State College, because when I was an athlete at North Carolina, we bussed there for indoor track.
Amira: Oh my goodness. [laughs]
Victoria: At the end of the day, that was the easiest way of all the awful ways to get there. You know, this is gonna disproportionately affect athletes in Olympic sports, or really just all athletes but football, even though it was a football driven decision, right? Especially for UCLA and USC athletes. What's funny in a way that's like, it's not funny, but you've gotta be kidding me funny, is the UCLA athletic director Martin Jarmond was like, “This is gonna save Olympic sports!” We had a huge multi-million dollar budget shortfall, in part because they tried to get out of the Under Armour deal and have to pay Under Armour a ton of money. But now, you know, we were gonna have to cut all these sports, and now we don't have to – and oh, by the way, we can introduce Alston payments now, too. And it’s like, really? You couldn't afford like less than $6,000 per athlete payments prior, but now you can because of your big Big Ten money?
The thing is, he probably believes that. [laughs] Like, he probably believes that this is the path forward and we're doing a good thing to serve our athletes. Because in the reality of working in intercollegiate athletics, that's what that looks like. But when we're looking at it systemically, it's like so clearly not that. So that's another disconnect that I wish more folks who worked in intercollegiate athletics could start to see. And I think we're seeing more folks seeing it, stepping outside of the bubble, which is working, working, working, working, working, but with your blinders on to achieve the goals you wanna achieve. And now we have people stepping outside of that. Gene Smith, the athletic director at Ohio State, I think is starting to step out. And there's others. And there's a lot of people who do it privately. So, they might say one thing publicly, but be working behind the scenes in other ways. And that's why I still feel a little bit optimistic that the schools might be doing this themselves.
Because all it takes is one kind of entrepreneurial group who wants to disrupt it all. That's when we've seen change come in the past. Like, the athletic scholarship Grant-in-Aid untethered from academic merit was because Southern schools couldn't keep up with the booster model of subsidization that was enjoyed primarily by schools in the Midwest. And so they're like, no, we're gonna start offering athletic scholarships. And that was a violation of the rules of amateurism. And so they forced the issue, and by 1956 they had all the schools voting to institute Grant-in-Aid untethered from academic merits. So it flipped. And then that booster subsidization model ended up on the dirty side of the amateur line. So I think we'll see something, whether it's the SEC or the Big Ten or some surprise that we weren't even anticipating. I think we're gonna see somebody introducing revenue sharing at least with football players. And I think there's an opportunity there for other sports too.
What we've been watching for the last, you know, 20, 30, 40 years, ever since Title IX really, is women's sports being pushed under the shadow of football. And they're certainly not optimized in serving their athletes or growing the popularity of their sports or treating them seriously. It's like, because you're grouped in with football, we'll do these things for you too. And I think there's actually opportunity for all of the other sports too, that it's not a doomsday scenario, that untethering Olympic sports from their dependence on football players’ money opens up the possibilities of new forms of subsidization, and an opportunity to return to that mission of like, you know, valuing women's sports and investing in them and allowing them to grow in ways that aren't following a football pathway.
Amira: Absolutely. And I think that, you know, one of the points you make so often that's really great is this way that football is this trickle down effect to everything. Almost everything is motivated through football decisions. And I know that sometimes we say football and basketball, but that even really is kind of a fake out because football is so much more cash rich than basketball, than even what March Madness provides. Football is in a league of its own when we talk about these dynamics on college campuses. And oftentimes you write around the conversation of women's sports that gets put in a dichotomy with football, but oftentimes it really is football on its own island and then everybody else.
And I think during the pandemic we started seeing this, whether it was motivation for at Penn State, they kept the school open to have a football season, and they announced fall sports would be played, but they literally…I talked to coaches in multiple other sports who never got a schedule, had no idea if they were playing in the fall. They never actually played in the fall. They had spring seasons. So it was really football was being played, and then that was what they were focused on. They didn't even communicate with any other fall sports about what was going on, because it was simply not the priority at all. And I think what we've seen over the last few years is some of this pretend world that we live in that it's like, college athletics all bundled into one. Some of that has really come undone.
Another thing you mentioned about revenue sharing is where I wanna transition to next in our conversation, because obviously now we're entering the second year under name, image, likeness, and its various ways that it has been implemented. Now, I know both of us were among the voices that cautioned pure joy over this ruling last year. I think we're seeing some of those reasons why. I know one of the things I've had my eyes on is the way schools and various teams within that have figured out how to get back in control of name, image, and likeness. So, every week it seems like we get a new announcement about a school having this program or a new position being invented to manage these deals. University of South Carolina just announced that they were signing a pro agency that deals with advertising, marketing and stuff like that. That's now a partnership that is free to use for any of their student athletes, which I guess is parity, like across the board.
But also, you know, these are the moves that are happening, where in my estimation, it's ways that the universities are getting back in control. You know, I talk about my cousin's experience playing DI basketball, and all of a sudden there was a window of time where she was making her own deals, negotiating her own deals. And now there's an appointed position that is the go-between and the person who actually gets to control that process. And so, I'm much less interested in the conversation in terms of a name, image and likeness, as we were having it last year around like using women's sports as a shield for that. Because we know after football it's actually women's basketball with the highest deals. But also, these deals are not evenly spread, even on the same teams. And we've seen some examples of how this is not this all encompassing, happy, big disruption to the college athletics system. And so now as we go into the sophomore year of name, image and likeness, where are you at with what's going on, how it's being implemented, and what we might as expect to see this season?
Victoria: Well, I mean, the thing I always say when I start to talk about name, image, and likeness, is that the problem created here was that there was a restriction on these economic activities in the first place.
Amira: Absolutely.
Victoria: NIL returned to students who play sports the economic rights of all students, and that restriction in place and then its removal in 2021 is what has caused all of this chaos, not the introduction of athletes being able to monetize their NIL with third parties. And I think that's why this is a disaster. So yeah. It's that. Because think about it. If this restriction had been in place let's say when there were other antitrust lawsuits attacking college sports in the 80s and 90s, that was the moment at which this restriction had been removed, like in a pre-social media and a pre-“athletes are brands” era. Or at the moment that the Olympic movement transitioned out of amateurism and you started seeing athletes in track and field being able to become professional in an NIL manner. This would've been a lot cleaner, but because it's happening right now, it's just a big, hot mess.
And I'm really glad you talked about the using of women athletes as cover to justify NIL as being good enough for football players is one thing I see a lot. I see people who happen to have their own personal interests in NIL being the model, saying it's not perfect, but it's the best thing we have. This isn't really professional football. And the athletes can't really pay these players, because what about Title IX, right? So then you're like throwing the women in in a different way. So, the opportunity for women though is that in many sports this is the pinnacle of the opportunities that exist.
Amira: Absolutely.
Victoria: So like, Paige Bueckers just said, like, I'm staying another year. I'm hurt, right, but I'm gonna stay another year because I can make more money as a college athlete than I can as a pro.
Amira: And you have travel and you have your, like…We know so often you have more resources.
Victoria: Totally.
Amira: You know, you max out those resources before you go maybe overseas, inconsistent professional leagues. Absolutely.
Victoria: Yeah. And there's so many lessons from a poor professional sport, AKA track and field. [laughter] Like, we’re a poor pro sport. There are so many stories from so many parts of the collegiate space of athletes turning pro and having no idea what they're doing, being totally taken advantage of by agents, getting into really bad deals with shoe companies. Those shoe companies have NDAs. I mean, look at Kara Goucher and Alysia Montaño and Allyson Felix and what they exposed about Nike. That's what NIL is. There's not the same labor protections because you're all independent contractors.
And so the people who are benefiting from this the most are the people working as professionals in the NIL space, which you were talking about with these agencies being hired at these new positions being created in intercollegiate athletics. That professionalization within intercollegiate athletics is following what we've seen with academic support, that it's about numbers and metrics and hitting those metrics to get your APR or GRS or whatever the acronyms are. APR and the other one. And then people making bonuses off of that. But education looks a lot different than academic metrics, and having the educational experiences of all students on campus is not what most athletes are getting. We're seeing a similar development within the NIL space.
And the last thing I'll say is we have an opportunity to do better by rethinking, reimagining the relationship between alums and donors and people who care about college sports and wanna invest in it and wanna be good fans. Like, “booster” carries a negative connotation in the United States, and that's just simply not the case anywhere else in the world. And think about the language used around fans, and the responsibility to fans that you see in European football – calling them supporters in a community trust, and the obligation for that community institution to serve its fans, too. We do have an opportunity here to reconfigure that relationship.
And you know, the way you hear people talking about collectives from institutions really kind of exemplifies that there's something seedy going on here. And that's a result, of course, of all of the pretend seediness we see around athletes making money in the collegiate space, that somehow it's morally corrupting or wrong. And so boosters are thrown in on that too. But there's really good opportunity here. And again, like, the people thinking about how to reimagine this, there are brilliant minds in higher ed, so like, choosing not to engage in new models of what this all could look like is a failing of higher ed, as much as it is a failing of college sports.
Amira: Absolutely. I think a lot of what we're seeing is those old models and those old power brokers clinging to the last vestiges of this college athletic experiment. Like, the boosters are a great way to see that, because obviously, you know, we both are well aware of the racial elements here, and you talk very clearly about the racial politics that college football repopulates on campuses. And also boosters are a great way where we've seen this dynamic play out, especially around racist fight songs. I'm looking at you, Eyes of Texas. I'm looking at you, Ole Miss, where we have FOIA requests that have shown these boosters, these donors, saying, you know, make my school great again, or like, they just need to perform for us. We are extracting their labor, but not anything else.
And so I think that saying, hey, we have an opportunity to even rethink the relationship between donors and boosterism on college campus is something that we kind of gloss over, because you're right. We've only connotated it in this really bad negative way because of the way power has worked with it. I think the other point that you make about name, image and likeness is the professionalization of it, also we've talked about on the show, bleeds into these really antiquated, misogynist, homophobic, sexist, and racist marketing logics. And so you're not actually compensating athletic labor across the board. And what you're really not doing, which is to your point earlier, is removing some of the restrictions on college athletes. So, college athletes still cannot take every class they want or be whatever major they want. There's things that are actually foreclosed to them, right? There's restrictions that still remain.
Only some are benefiting even from this NIL space. Within teams, within universities, there's a marked disparity. Actually just providing more labor now, because a lot of people who have these deals, especially if they have a lot of them, are actually performing more labor and more work on other people's schedule, which is just more of an encroachment on their learning time that they're supposed to have. But the other thing it had me thinking of is the way – we’ve talked about this of course with the Sharapova effect, in terms of the elevation of white women in this influencer space as a model for NIL deals. We’ve seen this of course in women's basketball. But I was really thinking about the ways that women athletes in these collegiate spaces are navigating all of these shifting moments. And of course, we're in the 50th year of Title IX. So there's been a lot of retrospectives and memories and things like that.
But we're also at a time where we're seeing the rollback of Roe vs. Wade, which has profound consequences for college athletics. And I'm wondering if you have thoughts about the general state of women's athletics in this anniversary year of Title IX, but also at a moment where we're having really regressive politics in states where so many college athletes live and play and try to exist with this kind of dangling of a carrot of like, well, now you have a little bit of NIL deals, or like, now you're coming up in this space, without a willingness to engage in these really big, scary, structural issues that are actually I think making the college space a worse place to be right now than it was even a year ago.
Victoria: Oh my goodness, Amira. I mean, we've had athletes identify a mental health crisis in college sports for years. And this was before the pandemic, and we're still in this pandemic, and now we've got abortion rights removed, and the pressures of performing both on the court and performing in certain ways to get deals and just all of that kind of social media pressure that young people are facing. There's a mental health crisis among all college students right now. And athletes, because, you know, sleep is so unbelievably important to feel good, and like, not be a little bit sad. [laughs] And you've got all these additional pressures, you know – NIL, education, in addition to your classes, in addition to your practices, in addition to all this other stuff. And people working in intercollegiate athletics are exhausted. And like, the athletes are carrying that too, because there's so much stuff being provided for them.
And then just the anxiety around, like, what happens if I get pregnant and I'm in a state that has, you know, a ban or really restrictive abortion laws. I'm really worried about our college athletes, and especially our women college athletes. And we've individually on our campuses, I think virtually across the board nationwide, gotten to work, trying to figure out, okay, how are we gonna communicate with our athletes? All of our athletes. We can fit this into Title IX training, right? And talk about all possible pathways that are available. We can't advocate for any certain pathway when we're a public university in a state that has super restrictive laws. But we wanna set up our athletes to feel like they won't feel guilty or bad or like they've done something wrong if they get pregnant. And they probably aren't gonna go to athletics, because they're probably worried about that as a public institution.
So, we wanna make sure they're set up for success and know what decisions they can make on their own, that they're educated about it and feel good about themselves. Like, that's the part that I really wanna convey, that there's nothing to be ashamed of. And it's just so unbelievably angering. I mean, it was so cruel for Dobbs to be overturned. You know, I'm on the west coast, so literally the morning after the day of the 50th anniversary of Title IX. But I think there's opportunity in that cruelty, and that is we've had generational knowledge lost on how Title IX and abortion rights and birth control rights are all inextricably linked, and that there is a feminist history behind Title IX becoming law, and that the right to play school sports, the ability to achieve and obtain that right, is a political process.
We have a lot of apolitical or depoliticized athletes who are like, I just wanna be good, I wanna focus on winning, I don't wanna be civically engaged or politically engaged. But that's politics. Politics are bad. Like, it's very polarized right now. I don't wanna get anybody mad. But the fact is it's political. What you're doing playing sports is political, and it's the result of people being political. And so there's a responsibility and an obligation to continue that project to make sure these rights remain. And they're already being eroded dramatically. And so it's hard to both educate around this and make athletes feel like they're loved and wonderful. Because those messages are kind of in like opposite directions. Like, because these laws are telling you you don't matter, and your body matters less than a body growing inside you, and a good woman would set her goals aside because the true purpose of us is to raise children.
And it's not selfish to choose yourself and to say, maybe I'll have kids later, maybe I won’t. It's not a selfish thing to say I wanna stay in school and get a PhD. It's not a selfish thing to say I wanna have a kid and return to my sport. Are you gonna provide care for my child? Like, we haven't heard any of this. And I really appreciate Kara Goucher, who was interviewed for one of USA Today's big stories on this, talking about like, okay, you're saying there's all these protections in place for athletes who get pregnant. Okay. What happens after that child is born? Jim Harbaugh can't adopt everybody's babies, because some of those women wanna keep their babies. And so, how do you practice? How do you go to class? And are athletes gonna have to carry the cost burden of that? So, it’s just really really hard.
Amira: It is. It is. We don't even amplify the stories of student athlete parents, athlete parents, student parents. Like, all under that umbrella. But you know, we have competitors competing now and parenting, and we might trot these stories out as a fun outside of the lines, you know, feel good piece, but we don't sit with the infrastructure required for that, like you said. And this is the chilling, heartbreaking part of so many of these conversations, is that like women athletes have never had the luxury to be apolitical. Politics is exerted onto them, much like Black athletes as well. And for me, Black women athletes are caught in that double matrix, where they're being hyper exploited by their universities and dealing with, you know, all of these other systems bearing down on them.
I'm wondering too about where this kind of leaves us as we go into this season and we're looking at things, like I know Florida A&M’s football team and college are just really going through it. They have something like 26 ineligible players because of procedural issues with awarding financial aid, right? Like, you have Jackson State's athletes moved off campus because of water issues in Jackson, Mississippi. You have sweltering heat and climate change issues forcing unsafe conditions that people are laboring under. Oh, and then you mentioned mental health and all of these things bearing down. And last year we saw multiple young women, especially in collegiate sports, take their own lives. And it feels like even beyond all of the other structural issues we said, these are these little things on a campus to campus basis that are exacerbating the conditions under which these college students are laboring under. And so I know sometimes we sit in college sports and we think of all of this stuff and we read these stories, and it feels daunting. It feels hopeless. It feels like a dystopian hell hole and hellscape that we're all just perpetuating and living in.
But then I know you said you have some optimism, and I saw you tweeted out for College Colors Cays the other day. And I know me and Jessica were talking about going to a UT women's soccer game, and I'm still very close to a lot of my students who have been college athletes, and helping them and watching them and mentoring them through their transition to the professional space. And so we are completely entangled and wrapped up within these systems. And I'm wondering how you navigate, knowing all these things, watching or consuming college sports in various ways, mentoring and actually having relationships with college athletes, and still maintaining some sort of…I wouldn't even say positivity, but like, not always be in the depths of despair, which is oftentimes where I am. [laughter]
Victoria: Well, I think we're critical of this institution because we know the good that it brings, and we want it to be better. I was the person in graduate seminars who is like, I'm not gonna tear something apart, because that's the easiest way to be critical. Like, critical isn't negative. It can be. But another way to be critical is to see the value and the good in something and knowing it can be better, and trying to figure out how to get there. So, like, we're both historians. We do a lot of kind of current commentating on sport and society, drawing from our historical expertise. We also think about the future and better designs too. And I think historians are especially equipped to think about the future because we understand contexts and complexities. We understand stuff is messy. And what that also means is we're really good at anticipating unintended consequences, because we're always exploring consequences of things when we're telling really complicated, complex, messy stories about the past.
Like, I had a wonderful experience as a college athlete at both of my institutions. I have many, many friends who work in college sports. I work closely with people in Sun Devil athletics. Like, I loved how you talked about local conditions, because that's how you know how college sports are running. And that's where you see the good. Because there's so many wonderful people who work in college sports who are inheriting bad systems and bad structures, and doing their best to create a positive experience for their athletes within those conditions. So our responsibility, because we're outside of that, is to try to fix those conditions and fix those structures so that those people working so hard to provide opportunities for our young people to play sports. Because we know the value of playing sport, the educational value. There's so many different forms of value. But since this is in a school setting, educational value is one of them, and one of the big ones. We're working together to get to that better future.
So, getting to work with college athletes outside of intercollegiate athletics means we can have these kinds of conversations. You know, if an athlete is experiencing something that they might not feel like they have the full confidence of the administrator they might go to talk about it, they can come to folks in academics who are still on that campus, who understand that system, and talk with that person there. And I think, you know, I've been for the last decade – and I know you do this too, Amira, whether it was at Penn State, and I'm sure you're already getting to work at Texas on this now building these academic and athletic bridges. Because we can help serve these students too, students who play sports. So that's what gives me hope and optimism. And I think students themselves, college athletes themselves, are just so brilliant.
You know, they're at this age where my hope is that we can make sure to protect their optimism. This is an age in which we're supposed to be optimistic. So, I think that's the recipe for...Like, it's not contradictory to be a college sports fan and wanna make it better. Those things are the same. You know, it's kind of like the critique of Black athlete activism, right? Like, we're trying to make this better, stop hating on us! [laughter] Like, you need to listen to what we're saying. The status quo is bad and we're trying to make things better. We're working on the project of making things better more than you are. So please listen. So I think that's the way I kind of navigate all of it. So, you know, that means I'm a critic who still works with folks in college sports, right? Because critic in my definition is, you know, we're all in this together trying to make it better for future athletes.
Amira: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I wanna end by thinking of the joys of these athletes, like you say, which so many of them are just phenomenal. Is there any program in particular, athlete, or new initiative or something that you're really excited for as we think about this college sports year? Is there a team you're really cheering for? Or anybody that is like doing some cool coaching that you wanna spotlight? Is there something in this space that is really like a shining star for you?
Victoria: I mean, the easy answer is Dawn Staley and her team are embodying how to do both of these things, right? How to be excellent on the court, how to be good citizens, how to force the college sports base to do better. And that's saying, nope, we're not doing a one on one with BYU anymore, right? And I think that's a form of leadership that we've always seen in women's college sports. You know, Dawn Staley going to her athletic department being like, hey, you're gonna implement equal pay, because guess what? I deserve to be paid the same as the head men's basketball coach for better work, right? So I think that's just a program that I love. And South Carolina is also…You’ve got a college sports research Institute there that's doing really great critical work, you know, with partnerships in athletics. So, South Carolina…And who would've thought? Like I was thinking about this today.
Amira: I was about to say. [laughs]
Victoria: 50 years ago, like, let's say it's 1972, and like, we get in a time capsule and we time travel and we go back to 1972, and we're like, hey, college athletes. Guess what? BYU is still racist. And they're like, yeah, big shocker. And like, but guess who's leading an effort to call out that racism? The University of South Carolina and a Black woman head coach of a women's basketball team at South Carolina who's calling that out.
Amira: Yeah. That would be the surprise. [laughs]
Victoria: That's the surprise, right? That it's South Carolina that's the institution that's calling out racism and saying do better.
Amira: Absolutely.
Victoria: The other thing I would like to shout out is a great organization called All Vote No Play. It's led primarily out of Stanford. Lisa Kay Solomon in the design school at Stanford, coach Eric Reveno who's now at Oregon State, they co-founded this. Coach Reveno got the All Vote No Play day passed at the NCAA level so that nobody plays or practices on election day. It's a day to do civic engagement and go to the polls. And they've really expanded beyond voting to being a civics playbook for college athletes. And our good friend Andrew Maraniss and Vanderbilt Athletics and that wonderful program there under Canice Storey Lee are part of All Vote No Play. Actually, you're a part of the educational package on the website, Amira. [Amira laughs] Your amazing work around Title IX with ESPN is one of the educational opportunities under Title IX with All Vote No Play that you can see. And so it's information. It's drills. It's chalk talks for college sports teams who wanna get in the civic engagement game.
So if you go to allvotenoplay.org, you can see the awesome opportunities there. There's also a big all star civically engaged athlete event, a week from today on September 13th. So it's virtual, you can host a watch party. Pizza to the Polls will provide pizza for your watch party, and Condoleezza Rice, Steph Curry, Demario Davis and Tara VanDerveer are the featured speakers, and they're being interviewed by college athletes around what it means to be a good citizen. And, you know, Coach Reveno always talks about being a good teammate is the foundation of being a good citizen. So how can we get coaches and teams engaged around this concept to get more politically active in their communities.
Amira: Absolutely. Thank you for shutting up those amazing things happening. I'm glad to amplify them, and I think point to them as examples is what you were talking about. Here's where the good work is happening. And even on the days where you scroll through Twitter and you're like, college sports is nothing but a dystopian hellscape, these are bright lights that will kind of navigate us through the dark. And your work and your presence in the sporting space is absolutely up there as one of those shining lights. You can find Victoria on Twitter at @historyrunner. Thank you so much for chatting with me and preparing for what is sure to be another turbulent season in collegiate sporting spaces.
Victoria: Oh, thank you so much, Amira.
Amira: That's it for this episode of Burn It All Down. This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon, of course, is on our webs and socials. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network. You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Listen and subscribe, rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts. For show links and transcripts, please check out our website, burnitalldownpod.com. You'll also find a link there to our merch at our Bonfire store. And thank you to our Patreons. You continue to mean the world to us. If you wanna become a donor to our show, visit patreon.com/burnitalldown. Burn on, but not out. And we'll see you next week, flamethrowers.