Podcast 1

The speaker, Chase Mitchell, shares his main takeaway from the readings on race in sports. He notes that there is increasing diversity in sports, with more black, Asian, and Spanish athletes coming to America to play professional sports. While black athletes dominate football and basketball, there is also a growing presence of other races. The treatment of players can be improved, but controlling fan behavior is difficult. The speaker hopes that people will educate themselves and understand the harm of racist comments. Among the articles, he found the ESPN piece on racial and gender hiring practices particularly interesting. He believes that hiring should be based on merit, regardless of appearance or background. He predicts that there will be more diversity among coaches in the future, as the diversity of players continues to grow. Hello, so my name is Chase Mitchell, and this is my first podcast submission for our SPAD 342 class of Race in Sports. And so I found these readings pretty interesting. It definitely expanded my knowledge on the subject. It definitely changed some of my opinions that I already had or either confirmed some of the opinions I already had. So really, overall, my main takeaway is the amount of black athletes or really diversity overall in sports was talked about a lot in these articles, which I think right now, I mean, obviously, it's increased. The diversity in sports is increasing at insane rates. I mean, you have so many black athletes, Asian athletes, Spanish athletes, all these other races that are coming here to America to play our professional sports. I mean, I'm a huge baseball fan, so you look at the MLB and you see the amount of diversity in there. I mean, the World Baseball Classic every year is one of the biggest sporting events. It's not every year, but every few years. It's a huge sporting event. I mean, obviously, the last one was won by Team Japan. So America definitely does not dominate the sport with the amount of Hispanics, Asian countries that produce great baseball players. And, I mean, you look at football and basketball, obviously dominated by black athletes. You will see other races out there, but definitely the black athletes have those two sports pretty well down. So I think, obviously, you can increase the treatment of these players, but you can't really control what the fans do. You can control where the fans sit and where they are during the game, obviously. But what they say, they're just going to say what they say. You can't do anything until after it happens. So hopefully, people will continue to educate themselves more and understand that no matter what, saying those kind of things is not good. No matter who the team is, who they're playing, who is on their team, what they've done to you, what they've done to your team, what they've done to others, it doesn't matter. You can't be racist. That's just a fact. But going through the articles, the one I found most interesting was the second ESPN article about the racial and gender hiring practices. So I'll cover that one. So I'll talk about that one last, I guess. But for the other articles, I really found it interesting how the players experience. Being a black woman in the SEC, obviously, could not have been the easiest thing. I'm sure she heard some things that really is not okay to say. But hopefully, as time goes on, we'll continue to improve and there'll be less and less racism. As this next ESPN article explained, decreasing but still prevalent. As long as it's prevalent, there's an issue until there's none whatsoever. But obviously, great that it's going down. You can't just make it disappear overnight. So you've got to start somewhere. But this ESPN article that talks about racial and gender hiring, I really found interesting because I've always been hired the best person available. It doesn't matter what they look like or what they sound like or anything like that. So as long as they can do the job well, I'll pay them to do the job. So I think with that, you'll see a lot of black coaches or other races coach all sports here very soon. And that can include women as well. Because you don't see too many people going from not coaching anything to head coach of a college or pro program. Obviously, D.L. Sanders would be a name that pops up that did that. But that's very, very, very, very rare. So if you look at coaching staffs as a whole, you see a whole lot more diversity than just looking at head coaches. Because when these head coaches played, there wasn't that much diversity in their game as there is now. So it really helps to be a coach to play the sport. So now that there's more diversity in the players of the sport, and that's continuing to grow, now you'll see it more in the coaches, I think.