By Ethan Moore, sports editor.
A few weeks ago, Harvard University made the decision to cancel the remainder of the men’s soccer season because the team was rating the sexual and physical attractiveness of the women’s soccer team. The team had created a running document that rated the girls based on a scale of 1-10, and implied what kind of sexual positions the girl would prefer. This document was created on Google docs, and was open to the public–though the team was unaware of this. This kind of issue is not new in the world of sports. The fact that this document has been around since 2012, and nobody had done anything until now to stop it really illustrates how far-reaching sexism is in the world of sports and in particular college sports.
Unfortunately, Harvard is just one of the more tame examples of this widespread epidemic. This past year, Baylor University has struggled with a scandal involving their football team, and the administration behind it. Since 2011, 17 different women reported sexual or domestic assault charges to the university, accusing 19 different players on Baylor’s football team. Investigations into the university have found that all of these reports were buried and went uninvestigated. The university’s police department used excuses such as victim blaming and attempting to protect the football team as to why nothing was ever investigated. These tragedies are essentially telling women that your safety and well-being means less to us than somebody starting at Quarterback on Saturday.
When I first saw the story about Harvard, I was initially angry that the administration would cancel their entire season over this. I made excuses such as: “Oh, but it’s just locker room talk,” “The women are just overreacting,” “But the team is playing so well.” It wasn’t until my colleagues here at the Collegiate pointed it out to me, that I realized how misguided I had become. Since when does a team’s on field performance justify them sexually harassing another team? If you actually look into Harvard’s policy on sexual harassment, it’s zero tolerance. Essentially, the team was lucky to only have their season cancelled, as opposed to being kicked out of the university entirely.
So obviously we have a problem here. Athletes on college campuses shouldn’t be above the law the way they are now. The past shows that when you put this kind of the power in the hands of college students, bad things can happen. The issue with trying to root out the problem is that it’s going to cost universities money, which is exactly why they won’t do it. Harvard will get lots of good press for their courageous move to cancel men’s soccer, but, and please stay with me soccer fans, it’s just soccer. It doesn’t bring the university any money. It isn’t overly popular. It’s going to make small waves in an even smaller pond. If this same kind of thing had happened on the football team, I don’t think we would’ve ever found out about. It would be so buried by administration nobody would even think to look for it.
It’s probably too much to expect universities to cancel sports season based on this stuff. If you canceled a season based on the team unwelcomingly rating the sexual and physical attractiveness of women, I’m not sure there would be men’s college sports at all–that’s how ingrained into the culture the sexism is. If we’re going to make a change in the world of college sports, it has to start from the top down. We saw Baylor step in and fire the head coach and their athletic director for involvement in covering up the sexual cases, and we need more examples like that. If we have administrations and coaches who are willing to lie and cheat the systems for their players, then they are no better than the players who are actually committing the acts. We need to create a culture that puts the humanity of players and the university before the sports they play and the money they bring into the school.
Now, I don’t necessarily think that the men of Harvard’s soccer team are bad guys. Given that the “scouting report,” as it’s called, has been a mainstay of the program for four years, they probably grew up in the program participating in it. We need to treat student athletes less like gods on college campuses, but we also need to make sure we give them a fair shake as well. This is definitely a mistake that these guys made, but it’s very correctable, and it shouldn’t hamper them in the future besides losing their season. The team published an apology, and whether or not you believe every word of it, there is some definite remorse in their words. Overall, I think we have to look at the entire culture of sexism in sports and try to add more humanity to it. We need to start holding student-athletes accountable, while sti
