Basketball and weightlifting: two women’s sports notes

A couple of women’s sports notes.

So much for women’s college basketball being less competitive than men’s! That old lie got put to bed these past few days. The lowest men’s seed to advance to the Sweet Sixteen was number 7 UNLV; the women have already sent a pair of double-digit seeds (Florida State, a #10, and everybody’s cinderella, Marist, a #13), to the regional semifinals. This is great for the women’s game, even though it shot my bracket. (I was surprised that Stanford lost, but as a good Cal alum, shed no tears for them.)

I’m late to the story that I read about both at Feministing and Feministe: Florida Girls Lift Weights, and Gold Medals. In recent years, competitive weightlifting for girls (as well as boys) has become very popular in the Sunshine State:

Extracurricular club programs for girls have sprung up around the country since women’s weightlifting became an Olympic sport in 2000. But Florida, with 170 high school teams that have produced two Olympians and several dozen world team members, has “set the gold standard” for the sport, said Rodger DeGarmo, director of high performance and coaching for USA Weightlifting in Colorado Springs, the governing body that oversees Olympic lifting.

It’s a very positive article, and here’s hoping the sport catches on.

I have friends of both sexes who are serious lifters. The sport has never appealed to me, largely because I generally like to minimize my indoor workouts. But what I honor about lifting weights is its fundamental democracy: anyone, at any size, can become a very strong lifter if they work at it. There are few other sports in which “God-given natural talent” takes such an obvious backseat to persistence and determination. It’s much, much easier to make a weak young person into a strong lifter than a slow young person into a fast sprinter! This doesn’t mean weightlifting is easy: it is (not literally) often backbreakingly difficult; it takes time and effort and concentration; it takes mental toughness. More than most sports, doing it well involves intense visualization; it teaches those who practice it to see themselves completing the task before they actually attempt it.

One vital feminist task, of course, is teaching women of all ages — particularly the young — that their bodies belong to them. They are not baby-machines-in-training, nor are they objects to visually (or physically) gratify men. Building strength and muscle serves to undermine the ugly cultural fetish for young women’s bodies that appear emaciated, frail, vulnerable. Lifting ever-greater weights gives young women a tangible sense of physical success; they can measure their body’s progress in terms that have nothing to do with beauty or sex appeal or reproductive potential.

Leigha, the Spruce Creek senior, said she loved the competitive aspect of lifting.

“It’s a rush, it really is,” she said. “We have boards in our weight rooms with the names of all the record breakers, and you’re thinking about how bad you want your name on that record for everybody to see.”

I like reading that.

After all, “weight” is always a feminist issue. Since the 1920s, generations of young American women have desperately tried to lose it, even as we live in a culture that celebrates “weight” and “heft” as attributes of power and influence. We speak of folks “throwing their weight around”; we note that the words of someone we admire “carry a lot of weight.” To call someone a “lightweight” is never praise; it suggests superficiality, incompetence, immaturity. Outside of the discussion of women’s bodies, “weight” almost always connotes something positive and powerful.

Weightlifters, like dieters, are very concerned with numbers. But while the goal of the dieter is generally to become smaller and smaller, lighter and lighter, the goal of the lifter is to push more and more, to see the numbers rise rather than fall. As with wrestling, competitive lifting offers different weight classs to its participants; a team that wants to be successful thus must have a group of girls with very different body types. More so than virtually any other sport, this encourages coaches and teachers to recruit a wide variety of girls.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m an exercise fanatic. My desire to share the gospel of fitness, however, is not motivated by a desire to get everyone to start chasing an unattainable physical ideal. We live in a culture in which most of us are alienated from our bodies, often ashamed of our bodies. The best kinds of fitness activity teach us to reconnect with our bodies, to love our bodies, to experience the power and pleasure our bodies can bring to us.

And in achieving this goal for high school-age women, Florida seems to be ahead of everyone else.