Color Commentary: “The Role Model Thing: Perspectives from the Women’s Game”
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by Andrew Guest. Courtesy of PitchInvasion.net 2/22/10
The periodic debate about whether athletes should be role models (recently, think John Terry, Tiger Woods, or marketing Women’s Professional Soccer) offers much fodder for provocative discussion. What are the obligations of sports celebrity? Is it reasonable to expect athletes to be good at things other than their sport? Do children really model their behavior and decisions based on tabloid reports about sports heroes?
What the role model debate usually does not offer is systematic analysis or evidence about whether athletes actually have any influence on other people’s behavior—an absence I became aware of a few years ago when working with one of my University of Portland students on a thesis project. At that time Stephanie Lopez (now married and playing in WPS and with the Women’s National Team as Stephanie Cox) had a vested stake in the debate. She was on the verge of playing with the US Women’s National Team at the 2007 FIFA Women’s World Cup in China, was in the midst of a college soccer career that would earn her the Senior CLASS Award “presented each year to the outstanding senior NCAA Division I Student-Athlete of the Year in women’s soccer,” and was even identified in an article on ESPN.com as “soccer’s unassuming role model.”
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