Introduction
In the book, A Woman’s Touch: What Today’s Women Can Teach Us About Sport And Life, Dr. Epperson brings out light to the beginning of a new era in the athletes, by using anecdote, evidence, and testimony. The book uses the melding of male and female perspectives to help in guiding the sports policies and practices into the 21st century.
In the book, Dr. Epperson enumerates lessons that male athletes can learn from female athletes in the volleyball game. In this way, the athletes will be able to enjoy the intimate relationship that can be established through the sport and be able to take risks with their bodies. In the process of all this, the athlete should be able to accurately interpret the feedback from the opponent or teammates. Furthermore, the exercise will enable the athletes to learn to play with people that they don’t necessarily like (Epperson, 1999).
Women Athletes
In the past century, a spectacular transformation has been taking place in women athletes. Women in society can become strong without being athletes but athletic strengthen holds certain meaning in the societal culture. This is because it is tangible, visible, and measurable. Sports have particular salience for men sharing the same memories of their childhood life, whereby their masculinity has either been confirmed or questioned depending on their athletic ability or inability.
Women do understand sports, but they have been reduced to spectators due to historical values. When women take place in sports, they challenge the association between masculinity and sports. It happens that if a woman can play a certain game and play it better than her male counterparts, then the game stops being a yardstick for masculinity.
One of the social obstacles that have been avoiding women to become good athletes is that many men feel that they might be left with the job of doing household chores such as cleaning utensils, taking care of kids, while the mother is taking part in sports.
Most women who take part in sporting activities, do this because it is fun and it gives them a more challenging role, rather than just calling themselves feminists.
By reserving time each day for volleyball training and running around the court, women are changing themselves and society. In the training, the women are rarely motivated by feminism, but it is always a result. As a woman athlete trains regardless of what led to the involvement in the sports, there is a patriarchal change in her behavior. Therefore, sporting for women will change their experience and the experience of others towards her.
The changes that are being experienced in the social life of women have also been experienced in the sporting sector. The position of women in society cannot just be separated from sporting activities. Hence the women athletes can highly influence the position to be held by women in society. There is an increased struggle to control the institutions handling women’s sports and the meaning of sporting expenses.
This has also been experienced by increased agitation to increase the number of females in the coaching and administrative positions. Many things have contributed to the successful participation of women in sports. These are some of the things that the men can learn as well as the aspiring young ladies who want to join the sporting activities. One of these is passion. Passion is the desire that the athlete feels that wants to join a certain game and goes for it. This has been a driving force among the athletes that have helped them to achieve their goals. Therefore if the ladies can be driven by passion in the volleyball game and decide to go for it, they can be good at it than even their male counterparts who do not have passion for the game.
Many times not everything goes as planned. Some days the touch is not always perfect, but a good athlete should count on her heart. In playing the game with a heart, the athlete gives it the best short to help the team emerge victoriously. Therefore, every effort that the athlete puts into the game, counts a lot. The effort put by females to derail the issue of femininity can make the team better than the male team.
It is also encouraged to have competition among the teammates. Every team member should try to be the best. Positive competitiveness is healthy in all aspects, and there is thus no problem when the females compete to be the best as their male counterparts or even better than them. Being competitive does not mean always winning and hating to lose. Rather it is a situation whereby the athlete puts in her best in the performance all the time. Competitive games start at a tender age when the boys would go out to play competitive games that do not make anyone a loser and the other a winner. This implies a lack of competitiveness in the team. But things are slowly changing and female athletes are also encouraging competitiveness in the team.
A good competitive team member shows sportsmanship. In this regard, the athlete can show respect to the teams they are competing with. For instance, when the team is defeated, it should show humbleness and whenever the team wins, it shows gracefulness. At times, it is not a sign of sportsmanship to humiliate a competitor team, when it is clear that we are going to win. It is also better to apply gamesmanship, whereby the team wins without violating the rules of the game.
This can however be disputed in some cases. For instance, during the game, it is the desire of every team to win, and therefore they would be capable of doing everything to win. After all, the sweetness of the game is emerging victorious and not necessarily being a sportsman or showing gamesmanship and end up losing all or almost every game. Therefore, in sports, there are critical moments when an athlete has to put aside the issue of gamesmanship and sportsman but look at how the end will justify the means. This is because the team that will emerge victoriously will be rewarded no matter how poor they would have displayed sportsmanship.
In building a teamwork spirit, it is not always that the teammates would like each other due to the various backgrounds each player has. But since the players have a common aim of winning, many players would put aside their differences and thus aim to make the team emerge victoriously. This can still be a very important issue in the general life aspect whereby the athletes can learn to apply the same to life aspects.
Many women have also been lying low and avoiding participating in-game and sports due to the criticism they receive from their counterparts in the games. Female athletes have been mostly judged by their physical appearance, which if they can’t control, can be a hindrance to their sporting endeavor. Women who have entered the various athletes have thus put aside all the critics leveled to them.
The women athletes can mostly suffer from triad i.e. a combination of disordered eating, amenorrhea, and loss of bone density. This problem is also prominent among women who do not consider themselves to be athletes but are still physically active.
Many athletes thus do associate thinning with being physically fit to play well. The thinning has been widely promoted in various Media, and some coaches promote their athletes being thin. However, it not good that an athlete should be thin to perform well, but rather should be strong and muscular to be a good player. Chronic dieting in female athletes does not only lead to chronic triad but also creates energy deficit for the athletes.
Initially, the athlete might feel that since she is losing weight and doing well, she might feel obligated to lose more weight to be much better at the game. But in the process, the dieting might end to the point whereby the situation will affect the athletes’ health negatively. Hence, even though the athletes need to be physically fit, they also need to be health-wise fit.
Work Cited
Epperson C.E. A Woman’s Touch: What Today’s Women can Teach Us about Sport and Life, ISBN 1888698284, Diamond Communications, 1999.