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KC Bloom
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SALEM, MASS. – Youth and women’s sports are going through explosions in audience popularity, financial influence, and more. Salem State University’s sport and movement science department is here to talk about it.
Beginning Tuesday, Feb. 11 and spanning the next three months, sport and movement science is hosting an intimate two-part discussion on the growing popularity of youth and women’s sports. The series kicks off Tuesday, Feb. 11 with Jack Sweeney, a 1995 Salem State graduate who has worked in the field of youth sports for 29 years and coached hockey at the DIII and DI levels during that time. He is currently volunteering with SCORE Boston hockey, which is part of the NHL’s Hockey is for Everyone initiative.
“Youth sports is a growing industry, as are women’s sports, and they’re growing at different levels for different purposes,” said KC Bloom, a professor of sport and movement science who is among the faculty organizing the series. “As not only a professor and a researcher but also a youth sports coach and board member, I’ve seen the good and the bad in youth sports. There are a lot of issues with quality coaching, how parents respond to youth sports, and a number of conversations around what’s right for kids and where the emphasis is. A lot of it is based on money. Youth sports has become a huge industry with both financial and socio-emotional development implications for kids and families.”
Conversations should be focusing in on other areas such as – good sportsmanship, doing things for the right reason, and other positive skills that go along with youth sports, Bloom explained. However, these intangible things are often not emphasized with a big emphasis being placed on winning and getting ahead.
“In the second part of the series, Jane McManus is coming in April. She’s a New York Times writer who has written a book on the explosion of women’s sports,” Bloom said. “Women’s sports is an expanding industry. There’s a lot of excitement and growth in that realm. We’ve got the WNBA, which is currently undergoing an expansion. We’ve got a women’s professional baseball league starting up. Women’s soccer is huge and seeing an expansion in the number of teams. We’ve also seen a large increase in terms of support at the university level. For example, everyone knows who Caitlin Clark is and people who were her fans when she was at Iowa are now following the WNBA. There’s been more and more investment… And there needs to be more investment, because the equity isn’t there.”
That isn’t just highlighting the disparity between the salaries of men and women playing the same sport at a professional level, Bloom explained. The conversation will also home in on sports-related research, where the impacts of competition on women’s bodies aren’t studied nearly as much as that of men’s bodies.
The first talk in the series hosting Sweeney will be held on Tuesday, Feb. 11 at 1:40 pm, in room 214 of the O’Keefe Complex.
For more information, contact Bloom at kbloom@salemstate.edu.