Playing Through the Noise

Not everything about your competitive environment is equal.

Maybe the facilities. Maybe the travel budget. Maybe the crowd in the stands compared to the crowd at the men’s game. Maybe the media coverage, the social media following, the way the administration talks about the program. Some of what surrounds your competition is different than what surrounds the men’s program, and you know it, and you compete anyway.

That requires something specific. Let’s name what it is.

Read this passage slowly.

Let that sit for a second before you move.

I can do all this through him who gives me strength. Paul wrote this from prison — not from ideal circumstances. The strength described is not the strength of a person with every resource and advantage. It is the strength available to a person in constrained circumstances who has found a source of capacity that the constraints cannot reach.

Female athletes who compete through inequity develop a specific kind of toughness that is not always visible until it matters. The program that has competed for years with less — smaller budgets, smaller crowds, less institutional attention — and has found a way to build genuine excellence in spite of that is a program that knows how to compete when the environment is not favorable. That is a competitive advantage that teams with every resource often lack.

This is not an argument that inequity is acceptable or that you should stop working to change it. Change what you can change. Advocate for what this program deserves. And in the meantime, compete with the full capacity available to you regardless of what the scoreboard of institutional support says. The competition itself is where you are equal. Go be excellent in the place where the environment cannot limit you.

Forward-looking and team-focused. The answer should produce concrete commitments.