It's been one year for us here on The End of Sport and we can't thank all of you enough. Whether you have listened once or tune in weekly, have come on the show, followed us or engaged with us on Twitter, or supported us in any way -- THANK YOU!  Here are some of our thoughts on the origins of the podcast, reflections on the last year, what it has meant to us, and what we hope to do in the future.  Back to regular programming next week with a *very* special episode!  - Johanna, Nathan and Derek ________________________________ For a transcription of this episode, please click here. (Updated semi-regularly Credit @punkademic) Research Assistance for The End of Sport provided by Abigail Bomba. ________________________________ If you're interested you can support the show via our Patreon. As always, please like, share, and rate us on your favorite podcast app, and give follow us on Twitter or Instagram.

This week on The End of Sport, Johanna and Derek are joined by Dr. Frank Guridy to talk about his hot-off-the-press book The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of Athletics, the place of Texas in the reconfiguration of American athletics, and the role of athlete activists in such reformations. The first half of the episode goes through some of the key takeaways from the book and tells a story of how Texas and its specific political economy was foundational in changing athletic culture. We then dive into a discussion of how we can take these stories from The Sports Revolution to help us better understand our contemporary moment, athlete activism in sport, and the overarching racial dynamics inherent to the structure of American sport.  Frank Guridy is an Associate Professor of History at Columbia University whose work focuses on sport history, urban history, and the history of the African diaspora in the Americas. He is not only an award-winning historian, but also has won two awards for his pedagogy which is impressive. His first book, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow, won prestigious prizes from both the Association of Caribbean Historians and the American Historical Associations. He is joining us today to talk about his new book, titled The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of Athletics which just came out and comes *highly* recommended.  _____________________________________ For a transcription of this episode, please click here. (Updated semi-regularly Credit @punkademic) Research Assistance for The End of Sport provided by Abigail Bomba. ________________________________ If you're interested you can support the show via our Patreon. As always, please like, share, and rate us on your favorite podcast app, and give follow us on Twitter or Instagram.

In this week’s episode of The End of Sport, Johanna and Derek chat with Dr. Letisha Brown, assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Tech, to talk about Black feminism(s), gender, sport, and the sports media industrial complex. Grounded in a discussion of Dr. Brown’s published work, the first part of the episode centers on the importance of using Black feminist approaches to sport and sporting culture to critically engage with the myriad contemporary issues we talk about on the show. We then talk about how this lens might be applied to other discussions we have had on the show – including racial capitalism and exploitation in revenue generating NCAA sport and racism in gymnastics. Dr. Letisha Brown is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and affiliate of the Africana Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies Programs at Virginia Tech. Her research focuses on representations of Black female athletes in the media, as well as the ways social relationships influence healthy eating, overeating, and food choices. Dr. Brown’s brilliant work can be found in The Shadow League and the Palgrave Handbook of Feminism and Sport, Leisure and Physical Education, and in the journals Social Forces, Ethnic Studies Review, South African Review of Sociology, and the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. Dr. Brown is also a *must* follow on Twitter!   For a transcription of this episode, please click here. (Updated semi-regularly Credit @punkademic) Research Assistance for The End of Sport provided by Abigail Bomba. ________________________________ If you're interested you can support the show via our Patreon. As always, please like, share, and rate us on your favorite podcast app, and give follow us on Twitter or Instagram.

On this episode of The End of Sport, Nathan, Johanna, and Derek talk about the plantation dynamics of revenue generating college sports and higher education. This episode accompanies a recent piece published in The Guardian, entitled "'I Signed My Life to Rich White Guys': Athletes on the Racial Dynamics of College sports," that explicitly tries to amplify the voice of athletic workers on the racial dynamics in revenue generating NCAA sport. For a much deeper analysis of the plantation dynamics in college athletics, we urge you to check out The Black Athlete podcast and their latest episode where Drs. Louis Moore and Derrick White discuss the recent controversies surrounding racism, exploitation and the Black athlete. You will also be interested in Dr. Billy Hawkins' book The New Plantation: Black Athletes, College Sports, and Predominantly White NCAA Institutions, which is the basis for this entire episode. We also discuss Dr. Victoria Jackson's 2018 piece in LA Times, "Take it From a Former Division I Athlete: College Sports are Like Jim Crow." For a transcription of this episode, please click here. (Updated semi-regularly Credit @punkademic) Research Assistance for The End of Sport provided by Abigail Bomba. ________________________________ If you're interested you can support the show via our Patreon. As always, please like, share, and rate us on your favorite podcast app, and give follow us on Twitter or Instagram.

On this episode of The End of Sport, Johanna and Derek sit down with historian Dr. Andrew McGregor of Dallas College to talk about the history of American football, public historical work, and (some) of the problems with sports media and its complicity in reproducing harm in sport.  How did Oklahoma remake itself through football in the post-Cold War period? We dive into this question in a fascinating discussion of the history of Oklahoma football. The second half of the show focuses on Andrew’s wonderful public history work as founder of the Sport in American History Blog and his critical takes that have been published in, among others, Inside Higher Education. We also chat at length about how academia and sports media at times work hand in hand to protect the harms associated with college football.  Andrew McGregor is an American historian of politics, culture, intellectualism, and sport. He is a Professor of History at Dallas College at the Mountain View campus in Texas. He is the author of several academic articles as well as the founder of the great sport history blog, Sport in American History. He is moreover working on an impressive 3 book publications, 1 of which is his dissertation-turned-book manuscript about postwar Oklahoma and football that we’ll discuss today.   For a transcription of this episode, please click here. (Updated semi-regularly Credit @punkademic) Research Assistance for The End of Sport provided by Abigail Bomba. __________________________________________________________________________ If you are interested you can support the show via our Patreon. As always, please like, share, and rate us on your favorite podcast app, and give follow us on Twitter or Instagram. @Derekcrim @JohannaMellis @Nkalamb @EndofSportPod www.TheEndofSport.com

So, it's been a week for The End of Sport Crew.  This episode had to happen. We have some thoughts on the college sports media problem.  Thank you to everyone who has Tweeted as us, sent us supportive DMs or messages, or otherwise retweeted any of the threads posted over the past week. Your support means the world to us.  In solidarity,  Johanna, Nathan, and Derek     For more on this developing story: Article feat. Dr. Johanna Mellis in IndyStar Original story by Ian Kennedy - "Line Change: "One Bad Apple Spoils The Bunch" Story in USA Today's ForTheWin Piece by Sean Keeley for Awful Announcing Article in SBNation Story in The News & Observer ________________________________ If you're interested you can support the show via our Patreon. As always, please like, share, and rate us on your favorite podcast app, and give follow us on Twitter or Instagram.

In this episode of The End of Sport, Derek and Johanna are joined by USA Today’s For The Win editor and columnist Hemal Jhaveri and Natalie Weiner, weekly columnist of Good Form on Fanbyte, to discuss everything that went down over the past week in Women’s hockey. More specifically, the episode provides a deep dive into what happened with the National Women’s Hockey League (NWHL), Barst**l Sports CEO Erica Nardini and the mass of online trolls, and the critique launched at Nardini and others from Metropolitan Riveters defender Saroya Tinker. After describing what happened last week, the four talk about Natalie’s piece in Fanbyte and Hemal’s analysis in For The Win, and highlight how it reflects a broader issues of systemic racism, patriarchy, privilege and power, and how people at Barst**l perfectly encapsulate the form of what Nancy Leong calls “identity capitalists” – powerful insiders who eke out social and economic value from Black, Indigenous, and people of color, women, LGBTQI+ folks, the poor, and other marginalized groups. Following our discussion of the hypocrisy and paradoxical logic put forth by representatives of Barst**l in their protection of their CEO (by targeting players in the NWHL and, more specifically, athletes like Saroya Tinker), the four chat about how the events of the past week are reflective of much broader systemic issues that move beyond the NWHL and hockey culture in general. Finally, Johanna probes the rest to think about how we might apply Natalie’s critique of the “girlboss” mentality to another realm of exclusion in sport – the transphobic rhetoric we are seeing emerge in sports like Swimming targeting Biden’s Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation (for some MUCH NEEDED background and analysis on this see Britni De La Cretaz brilliant piece for Refinery29).   Hemal’s piece in For the Win: “The NWHL has a Barstool problem, and it can no longer look away” Natalie’s piece for Fanbyte:  “The Double-Edged Sword of ‘Women’s Empowerment.” You can follow Hemal and Natalie on Twitter!     For a transcription of this episode, please click here. (Updated semi-regularly Credit @punkademic) Research Assistance for The End of Sport provided by Abigail Bomba. __________________________________________________________________________ If you are interested you can support the show via our Patreon. As always, please like, share, and rate us on your favorite podcast app, and give follow us on Twitter or Instagram. @Derekcrim @JohannaMellis @Nkalamb @EndofSportPod www.TheEndofSport.com

In this episode, all three hosts are joined by Jordan Bohannon to discuss exploitation and injury in the context of men's college basketball. Jordan Bohannon is a redshirt senior point guard on the top five ranked University of Iowa men’s basketball team, school record holder in three pointers made, and sixth player in school history with more than 1000 points and 500 assists. He is also co-host of the terrific The Standpoint podcast. In a remarkably candid conversation, Jordan explains what it has been like to be treated as an unpaid essential worker in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The discussion then shifts to a broader look at Jordan's experiences in college basketball and how they have shaped his understanding of policy and practice around compensation, education, and injury. You can follow Jordan and The Standpoint on Twitter! For a transcription of this episode, please click here. (Updated semi-regularly Credit @punkademic) Research Assistance for The End of Sport provided by Abigail Bomba. __________________________________________________________________________ If you are interested you can support the show via our Patreon.  As always, please like, share, and rate us on your favorite podcast app, and give follow us on Twitter or Instagram. @Derekcrim @JohannaMellis @Nkalamb @EndofSportPod www.TheEndofSport.com

In this episode of The End of Sport Johanna is joined by Drs. Christienna D. Fryar and Matt Hodler to break down the white supremacist terrorist actions of swimmer Klete Keller in the January 6th attack against the US Capitol building and the white sport media’s apologist portrayal of him. Dr. Fryar is a Lecturer in Black British History at Goldsmiths, University of London where she teaches about British colonial history, Black history, and much more, alongside researching the histories of disaster and sport. Dr. Hodler –a repeat guest on the show! - is an Assistant Professor of Sports Media & Communications at the University of Rhode Island. His research interests include racialized nationalism, gender, and international sport structures, mediated representations of sport, internet memes, and swimming. Both of them are fellow swimmers with Johanna. The impetus for this episode emerged not only due to Klete Keller’s horrendous actions, but also due to the sport media and swimming community’s largely apologist portrayals of Keller and his actions. Our discussion brings a much-needed critique on Keller that has been mostly absent from the media pieces about him (outside of The Nation’s analysis of Keller within the IOC’s history of racism). Drs. Fryar and Hodler first help Johanna situate Keller’s actions within the sport of swimming, arguing against the popular and comforting idea that his behavior is a deviation from the swimming community’s values posited by The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Swimming World in particular. Their discussion articulates why modern swimming has a whiteness problem that historically and currently is centered on the white community, making Keller’s actions a product of US swimming, and explicitly not an aberration of it nor of Trump’s followers. Importantly, Dr. Fryar explains how – like point that Dr. Kevin Dawson made in our episode with him and that other scholars have shown – white Euro-Americans have consistently made bodies of water a site of intense trauma and pain for Black swimmers, which has led directly to horrendous drowning statistics. Our ensuing discussing shows how US swimming’s white supremacy is a real public health concern that Keller contributed to through his white terrorism. We then turn to analyzing the media’s white apologist portrayals of Keller, such as why their focus on his mental health issues, homelessness, and his white teammates and coaches’ sympathetic responses is a white tactic not actually aimed at highlighting mental health issues; rather, it is an intentional attempt to individualize Keller’s actions rather than tackle the core issue of his racism, terrorism, and where it fits within the swimming community. This is clear when we compare how Keller, Ryan Lochte, and Michael Phelps have been treated for their crimes with white gloves compared to Tamir Rice and the countless other Black boys and men who have been murdered by the police for far less and even non-criminal behaviors. Dr. Fryar points to the issue that sports journalists are not trained to analyze racism, classism, and other issues as evidenced by her students’ research about how the Hillsborough incident was covered by the sports media. We end the conversation by dissecting the appallingly inadequate – but perhaps not surprising – statements made by USA Swimming and to a lesser extent Team USA. We question the ‘values’ that USA Swimming supposedly stands for, and what their silence regarding Keller’s white supremacy means for the sport and Black swimmers. Dr. Hodler mentions the Swimmers for Change episode with Lia Neal, Cullen Jones, and Anthony Ervin as being one of the first comprehensive spotlights on the racist discrimination that swimmers of color face in the sport. This conversation is very much a continuation of our Swimming Week series of episodes from September 2020. Check them out if you would like to hear more about the sport’s discriminatory foundation, such as its

In this episode of The End of Sport Nathan and Johanna speak with Dr. Lucía Trimbur, an Associate Professor of Sociology and American Studies at John Jay College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York and a Global Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Dr. Trimbur talked with us about her forthcoming ethnographic work about the concussion crisis in football, and interweaves insights about her past work on boxing into an absolutely fascinating conversation. In the second of a two-part show, Dr. Trimbur dives into her recent piece for Tropics of Meta on the horrific evidence showing that the NFL used the common medical practice of ‘race norming’ to alter (lower) the cognitive levels of Black football players in order to argue that their cognitive functioning levels were less impaired than that of their white counterparts, in order to exclude them from being able to claim compensation from the NFL. We moreover discussed the important issue of how difficult it was for her to find a home for this important work, as the mainstream media outlets she pitched it to were—unsurprisingly—not interested in spotlighting the work. She also walked us through her understanding of the position and function of athlete activism in Trumpist America (from this piece), and the enduring power that athletes have as demonstrated by and even beyond the NBA wildcat strikes this summer, and how more athletes should be like the WNBA players. For the remainder of the episode we discussed the growth of Sport Studies as a field (which she published an academic piece on here) and the challenges that sport scholars continue to face across different fields as some non-sport academics continue to not see our work as being valuable enough to hire into their departments. The episode concludes with an honest look at Dr. Trimbur’s athletic career as a D1 college athlete and the difficulties she encountered while training as a boxer for Come Out Swinging. Dr. Trimbur’s first book, Come Out Swinging: The Changing World of Boxing in Gleason’s Gym can be found here. You can find Dr. Trimbur on Twitter!   For a transcription of this episode, please click here. (Updated semi-regularly Credit @punkademic) Research Assistant: Abigail Bomba __________________________________________________________________________ As always, please like, share, and rate us on your favorite podcast app, and give follow us on Twitter or Instagram. @Derekcrim @JohannaMellis @Nkalamb @EndofSportPod www.TheEndofSport.com