Haterade: Kim Mulkey & also the NWSL's new COO
Haterade: Kim Mulkey & also the NWSL's new COO
plus! your sports-related reading for the week
Today’s post was originally structured like last week’s Haterade and links, with March Madness reading alongside more general sports-related reading. However, being that we are mid-tournament weekend, I have decided to send out a bonus reading round-up and analysis on Tuesday that is March Madness-specific. However, I will be writing about Kim Mulkey in today’s post. Strap in, there’s a lot here for you today.
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Haterade: every word of whatever this is
The NWSL announced Thursday that they hired a new COO. I’m just going to copy and paste from the Fortune article about the hire because there are so many words that I hate in one article that I’m not really sure how else to break it down.
HED: “The National Women’s Soccer League hires ex-Bumble exec as COO to run the league ‘like a business’”
Lede: “A few years ago, I published a Fortune story about Sarah Jones Simmer, a former Bumble exec whose cancer diagnosis made her realize she wanted to reach the career milestone of becoming a CEO. Jones Simmer has spent the past two-and-a-half years as the CEO of Found, a weight-loss startup. Earlier this month, she announced she was stepping down from that job. Now, Fortune is the first to report, Jones Simmer has a new role: COO of the National Women's Soccer League.”
Far be it from me to say how anyone should respond to finding out they have cancer, but I cannot imagine facing my own mortality and deciding I need to spend my one wild and precious life doubling down on capitalism and girlbossing harder.
The new COO of a women’s sports league is coming from… a weight-loss startup! Wow, gross! I hate it! More cis white women hiring other cis white women into leadership roles!
What is clear to me, though, is that the NWSL’s new(ish) commissioner, Jessica Berman, is following the Cathy Englebert playbook, mimicking a lot of the moves that Englebert made when she became the first-ever commissioner of the WNBA. Englebert moved into the role after having been the first-ever woman CEO of Deloitte.
Now we get Deloitte commercials like this where WNBA players are drafting C-suite executives and providing play-by-play commentary on corporate women.
An interesting side note that I have been sitting on, unsure how to really tie it into anything but the Bumble mention is good enough for me: Bumble has gone all-in on NIL deals for female student-athletes, which I find fascinating. I got a press release about it earlier this year and I was like, “why would a dating site be sponsoring athletes?” But apparently Bumble is also for friendship and also networking now? Anyway, sure!
From the press release:
“While we’ve seen some progress in closing the equity gap in college sports, women continue to receive fewer sponsorships and lower compensation than their male counterparts,” said Christina Hardy, Bumble’s Director of Talent and Influencer. “By collaborating with these remarkable women, we are not only celebrating their achievements in sports but also amplifying their voice, continuing to challenge the status quo, and hopefully inspiring a new generation of women athletes.”
In a recent survey conducted by Bumble, a majority (67%) of respondents agreed that there are still significant obstacles that make it harder for gender equality in sports, with 68% agreeing that women athletes have to work harder than male athletes to achieve the same recognition. Furthermore, 71% of respondents believe that women’s sports deserve the same financial investment as men’s sports.
I’m mostly just impressed by the knots companies will tie themselves into to capitalize on whatever they see as the next big money maker. Brands have ignored women’s sports and female athletes for years and now that they think they can make money by lifting them up, they’re preaching “women’s empowerment.” Spare me (no shade to the athletes—get your bag!).
Let’s *sigh* talk about Kim Mulkey
I wish we were talking about Flau’jae Johnson’s performance yesterday or how great the analyst team of Elle Duncan, Andraya Carter, and Chiney Ogwumike have been tbh, but instead we are going to talk about LSU coach Kim Mulkey. The women’s basketball world has been waiting impatiently for the Washington Post story that Mulkey has spent over a week threatening a lawsuit over.
The brouhaha Mulkey created around what she characterized as a “hit piece” pulled the focus away from her players—where it should have been—and onto Mulkey. But, as Ray Ratto wrote at Defector, that was Mulkey “promoting the game the only way she knows how—by promoting herself, and promoting herself by threatening people she perceives as weaker than her.”
That story finally dropped just a few hours before LSU played UCLA yesterday in the Sweet 16. It was not nearly as explosive as Mulkey implied it would be. In fact, for anyone who has followed women’s college basketball closely at all, there was nothing new revealed about the embattled coach. There were new quotes, but none of those quotes revealed any new information. Everything that was reported has been publicly available for a long time, whether in old newspaper articles, Mulkey’s autobiography, or Brittney Griner’s memoir. Mulkey holds grudges, has an explosive temper, is homophobic—all things we already knew.
I read a profile to learn something new about or get deeper insight into its subject; I didn’t learn anything revelatory about Mulkey despite the many thousands of words the piece dedicated to her (that said, if you want to read more about Mulkey’s mentor Sonja Hogg and her focus on femininity & beauty,
wrote about it a few years ago).
Mulkey’s attacks on Post journalist Kent Babb (especially for what turned out to be a pretty standard profile) are a really bad look, and are bad for women’s sports as a whole. “As women's leagues continue to grow, that ecosystem needs to include more reporting,” Shireen Ahmed wrote at CBC. If women’s sports want to be taken seriously, people need to expect that they will be held to the same level of scrutiny and criticism by journalists that their male counterparts are. It’s a sign of respect—and accountability.
LSU won their game over UCLA and in the post-game press conference, Mulkey harped on another piece of journalism published this weekend, a column at the Los Angeles Times by UCLA beat writer Ben Bolch. Unfortunately, Mulkey was right about this one. It was one of the most offensive pieces of journalism I’ve read in a long time—on par with the kind of sexist commentary Lyndsey and I uncovered about the National Women’s Football League in the 1970s while writing our book. White LSU player Hailey Van Lith was also quite candid about the racism directed at her Black teammates in the columm.
When a column is so bad that it can make me agree with Mulkey, that’s saying a lot. Bolch managed to be both incredibly racist and deeply misogynistic while pitting the players of LSU and UCLA against each other for truly no reason. UCLA coach Cori Close publicly engaged with the piece and promoted it and then issued an apology for doing so, saying that she had read the headline but not the column itself before hitting retweet (imo the headline was bad enough, but I digress).
For just a taste of what the LAT published: they said the UCLA-LSU match-up was “America’s sweethearts vs. its basketball villains,” “good versus evil,” “right versus wrong.” The LSU team was called “dirty debutantes.” Angel Reese, a confident, vocal Black woman, was again pitted against Caitlin Clark and characterized as mean. Meanwhile, the UCLA team was called “tender” and “cheery,” and described as “operat[ing] in the saintly shadows while being as wholesome as a miniature stuffed Bruin mascot.”
This kind of commentary only serves to reinforce the criticism Mulkey has lobbed at the press. Why a grown (white) man felt the need to attack young (mostly Black) women in this way I will never understand. Why the Los Angles Times decided to publish it is something I understand even less (I have reached out to the publication to ask about the editorial process for this column but have yet to hear back). Not unrelated is the fact that many incredible Black journalists were recently laid off by the LAT, including Tyler Ricky Tynes, one of the best sports critics working today.
UPDATE: as of this morning, much of the offending commentary has been removed from the piece, with this editorial note: “A previous version of this commentary did not meet Times editorial standards. It has been updated.”
LSU beat reporter Cory Diaz at The Daily Advertiser wrote a response, centering his experience covering the team this season: “LSU women's basketball players aren't evil. They're important for the game.” I have to agree. The sport may be moving on culturally from someone like Mulkey (or maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my part), but the players she coaches are the future of the game—and the future is bright.
More USWNT memes
I hit “send” on Friday’s newsletter just a bit too early and didn’t have a chance to include the “10 lesbians and Alex Morgan” bit which deserves a moment.
And this one, which made me lol:
Weekly sports-related reading
Palestine is on course for an historic World Cup qualification, as
writes atSources told The Washington Post that the Title IX regulations regarding trans athletes are “too much of a hot topic” for an election year and therefore any updates will be delayed until after November 5th. So much for “your president has your back,” huh?
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