Season 1 Episode 4
Ben Binversie:
It's pretty common nowadays to see girls playing contact sports, which have been historically reserved for boys, but what happens when a boy wants to play on a girl's sports team?
[00:00:30] This is All Things Grinnell. I'm your host, Ben Binversie. On this week's show, we'll talk with Sarah Fields, Professor of Communication at the University of Colorado in Denver, about the intersection of law, gender and sports.
Then, we'll talk with Nola Agha, Associate Professor of Sport Management at the University of San Francisco about the impact of public stadium subsidies. This week's show is coming up next, after a word from Grinnell College.
The information [00:01:00] and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the individuals involved and do not represent the views of Grinnell College.
Ben Binversie:
Sarah Fields already had a law degree when she entered the University of Iowa's American Studies PhD program. She knew she wanted to use her law degree, but she didn't know exactly how, so...
Sarah Fields:
I show up for orientation and my adviser tells me what classes I should take and then he says, well, you get an elective, there's this class called The History of Women in Sport and you were an athlete. [00:01:30] You're a woman. We want to scout out how this professor is, to see if we want her to be in an affiliate in the department.
I took the class and it changed the whole course of my career. I did not realize you could study sport and get credit for it and I had no idea you could make a living at it.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah. It does, on the one hand, surprise me sometimes when I still think about these cool people like yourself who do this kind of stuff, but then the work that you do does resonate with a lot of people, so.
Sarah Fields:
The whole time I was working on my PhD, my mother kept saying, couldn't you just be a lawyer? [00:02:00] You're never gonna make a living and pay off your loans with a sports degree.
Ben Binversie:
Well, take that mom! You should talk to my mom, as well. So your book, Female Gladiators, details the history of how women and girls used Title 9 and the Equal Protection Clause to carve out a space in contact sports traditionally reserved only for boys. Although there were significant victories won by these girls, where are these battles at today? And are there any youth sports that continue to exclude girls?
Sarah Fields:
[00:02:30] There are a number of youth sports that still exclude girls. The law has now been made pretty crystal clear that under the Equal Protection Clause, and then under the use of Title 9, you must allow a girl to try out for the boys' team, if there is no comparable girl's team. You have to treat her the same as you would treat the boys.
You can't have different standards or elevate the standards for the girls. But if you look around at high school teams, it's still unusual when a girl plays high school football. It often [00:03:00] makes national news. Particularly if she wins Homecoming Queen, as happened last week, I think, somewhere in Mississippi.
And I have been at institutions, public institutions, universities where they have said that women can't even try out for the football team. That is simply flat out illegal. But people don't know and the women who are being excluded don't participate. They don't try and they don't file lawsuits.
Ben Binversie:
Hmm. Wow. Outside of that, I guess there are no lawsuits pending in that realm, but-
Sarah Fields:
[00:03:30] There actually is.
Ben Binversie:
There are?
Sarah Fields:
It's the reverse.
Ben Binversie:
Okay.
Sarah Fields:
So, one chapter in that book looks at what happens when boys try to play girls' sports.
Ben Binversie:
Girls' sports.
Sarah Fields:
Field hockey, particularly. 'Cause for the rest of the world, field hockey's a guy's game. US, it's women and girls. So, every once in a while you'll get, usually a guy who's either grown up or spent time abroad, who comes here and wants to play field hockey. Sometimes they just wanna play 'cause they have had sisters.
In about 1993, or '94, the courts ruled that you could exclude boys from trying out, to make up for the history [00:04:00] of sexism in sport. Kind of an affirmative action thing. But in those decisions, they said, this isn't gonna last forever. At some point, girls are gonna have more opportunities and will have to revisit this.
There is a lawsuit that has been filed. It hasn't been heard by a court yet, in that same jurisdiction, by a boy who says, it's time. You should let me play field hockey.
Ben Binversie:
Wow. Are there any other significant sports issues making their way through the courts right now? Other than other the Kaepernick collusion case? Is that [00:04:30] the biggest or are there others that we should know about?
Sarah Fields:
I think the collusion case may be the biggest in terms of its significance to American society as a whole and its interest to the American society as a whole.
There are a whole bunch of small, local cases that matter a great deal to the communities that are involved. Title 9 requires that you basically treat boy's and girls' sport equally. Colleges and universities have had these battles, but the high schools and the middle schools haven't.
There are a number of lawsuits for high [00:05:00] schools, in which the boy's baseball field is immaculate. They have dugouts, they have a cool scoreboard. Everything's stunning. And the girls play on gravel that's five miles away. So those kinds of lawsuits are happening all across the country.
Ben Binversie:
If, going back to the Kaepernick collusion case, will there be legal ramifications outside of just his case in the NFL?
Sarah Fields:
That's a really good question. I think it will send a message. Every time the major leagues, whatever sport it is, get [00:05:30] nailed for collusion, there's a ripple effect across all of professional sport. The idea is to teach them a lesson.
Right now Kaepernick is going through the mediation, I think it's mediation, not arbitration, and I'm not sure if he's waived his right to a trial, but if it goes to a trial and he goes for monetary damages, the Sherman Antitrust Laws, and their subsequent enforcement laws, say that whatever damages you're awarded, they get multiplied by 3.
He's [00:06:00] probably lost a hundred million dollars, at least, in terms of salary. Multiply that by three. That's just his actual damages. If a jury gave him punitive damages, that number could go even higher. Big money losses are significant and more importantly, they teach a lesson.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah, it doesn't seem the like the NFL wants to settle. It is, more, I think, about message than the money for them. Because they have a lot of money.
Sarah Fields:
I agree. And I also don't think Kaepernick wants to settle. [00:06:30] The nice part about his Nike contract and his endorsement deal is he doesn't have to settle, he's not broke.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah, that's true. Your other book, more recent, Game Faces, details how some prominent legal cases involving athletes has significantly influenced our legal understanding of things like privacy, defamation. Can you talk about one of the stories from that book and why it mattered outside of sports?
Sarah Fields:
Sure. I like this story. Warren Spahn is [00:07:00] arguably the best left-handed pitcher in the history of baseball. He was pretty remarkable, but like most pitchers, he started off a little bit slowly. He got signed to a major league contract when he was 17.
Bounced around between the different minor levels, spent a couple days in the major leagues and then got drafted into World War II. He schleps off to Europe, where he serves in an engineering brigade in Germany, see combat. He's not a front line solder, he's building bridges, but he is injured. [00:07:30] Gets shrapnel in his foot.
Gets a purple heart for being injured in combat. Returns to the US, goes on to have this amazing pitching career. He's pitching in the 1960's when it was common for writers to write what they called juvenile biographies. I read a ton of them when I was a kid.
They basically write, okay, here's this story about your hero. They'd make up dialogue and they'd attribute thoughts and it was super fictionalized. A couple of them were written about Spahn. Well, one of them [00:08:00] was so fictionalized that they gave him a bronze star and that's for heroism. Spahn was pissed.
He said, I wasn't a hero. I don't deserve a bronze, I didn't get bronze star. Don't attribute it to me. He sued and had five different trials to stop publication of that book. Eventually he won. The court ruled that you couldn't basically make stuff up about a living person and make up and attribute dialogue and actions.
[00:08:30] You had to rely on fact. You had to have evidence. The author had argued that kids wouldn't read stuff that was evidence based, that would be boring. To compete with television, you had to kind of jazz it up a little. Court didn't buy that.
Spahn wins. Except that he didn't. I started researching this long after his death and I kept running across reference after reference, including in his hall of fame obituary, that he'd won the bronze star. That's because even though publication of the book was ceased, [00:09:00] ten thousand copies had already been printed, sold and distributed.
In fact, I bought a copy on Ebay a couple years ago for like five bucks. Truth doesn't get in the way of a good story. There's only so much you can do to control it. I like the fact that he's one of the only people in history to sue for having something make him look too good.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah, that certainly says something about his character. Asking you to look into the crystal ball a little bit here. But what do you see as potential issues [00:09:30] that might come up, in terms of protests, in this year, upcoming years, that aren't necessarily being talked about as much right now.
Sarah Fields:
That's another really good question. I think what we're gonna see is a continuation of anthem protests around racial inequality because we have done nothing really to solve the racial inequality problem. So that will continue and I think athletes feel a little empowered by Nike's choice to stand behind Kaepernick, to continue to make those [00:10:00] protests.
The thing I think that we're gonna see next, that'll be kind of interesting and it's already starting at the youth level and it's gonna expand, is trans athletes and their rights and their opportunities. Sport is one of the last places with a gender binary. And trans athletes challenge the very notion of a gender binary.
We may have to rethink, as a society, how we deal with sport and does it need to be divided based on gender or are there better ways to make [00:10:30] divisions?
Ben Binversie:
Yeah, that's something that certainly is not gonna be resolved in the next year, but it's something to think about and definitely will become an issue.
Athletes have often been discouraged from activism saying it's bad for business. Whatever the arguments are. But if the Nike ad campaign with Kaepernick is successful, do you think that might change?
Sarah Fields:
I do. I think that there'll be a certain number of companies who particularly want target audiences between say, ages 14 [00:11:00] and 34, that demographic appears to be a little more liberal. They appear to be more sensitive to social justice issues.
If I were a company targeting that audience, I might think about supporting athletes who speak out.
Ben Binversie:
Oftentimes, when people do respond to athlete activism negatively, they say, just stick to sports.
Sarah Fields:
Shut up and dribble.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah! But if athletes are protesting conditions within the sport itself, whether it's labor [00:11:30] issues or things like that, it kind of seems like they may have a better chance at controlling the dialogue and responding to criticisms like that?
Like women's soccer protesting the pay differences between them and the men's national team. Do you think that's the case?
Sarah Fields:
Yes and no. It doesn't get the same kind of attention when women protest and complain, in part because fewer people pay attention to women's sport. Fewer people notice. WNBA players wear t-shirts about [00:12:00] social injustice and it gets much, much less press than when the NBA players do the same thing.
But if you go back historically, Billie Jean King and other tennis players, in the 60s and early 70s fought to create the WTA and to separate them from the USLTA. They got a lot of backlash. The USLTA was largely run by men and they were, they immediately banned all of the women from all tournaments. There was a limited amount of social [00:12:30] involvement because it didn't get covered very well.
But what involvement there was, was really vitriolic and just as nasty. The tennis folks cared just as much. It was just that most people didn't care much about women's tennis.
Ben Binversie:
Going back to the topic of the NFL protests, about police brutality and racial inequality. People discuss the relative indifference that most white players in the league have expressed. Do you think it would make a difference if this some of those big [00:13:00] name white players forcefully took a stand and really joined in?
Sarah Fields:
I do. I think it is important, whenever we face injustice of any kind, that it is not simply the people who are being oppressed who stand up, but that others stand with them. We saw it in the 1960s civil rights protest, when white students went south to participate in those.
We actually see it more with the women. The WNBA players were both black and white who wore t-shirts. The entire Indiana Fever team, both black and white players, took a knee during [00:13:30] an anthem.
Megan Rapinoe, of the US National Women's Soccer team took a knee. She's white. I've been personally a little disappointed that the white guys, particularly in the NFL, haven't done more. Chris Long has done remarkable things, donated his salary, speaks up, stands up, but there's only been one white guy in the NFL who took a knee to my knowledge.
And I would like to see more of them with their fellow football players.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah. Reminds [00:14:00] me of a Martin Luther King quote, "in the end, we'll remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends," you know?
Sarah Fields:
Yes.
Ben Binversie:
Makes a difference. On the topic of concussions, in football, what is the current legal precedent for liability, for both the NFL and the NCAA, as it pertains to former players who have suffered from CTE?
Sarah Fields:
Okay. So, all legal liability is based on the same basic principle of tort. You have to establish that a person who did the harm [00:14:30] or caused the harm had a duty to the person who was harmed. That that duty was breached and the breach of that duty resulted with proximate cause of an injury.
The challenge for athletes is the proximate cause. Often in law school, we call it the but for test. But for this, this wouldn't have happened. What the NFL tried really hard to argue was that the CTE damage, there was no evidence that playing in the NFL was the proximate cause of CTE.
We don't know exactly [00:15:00] what causes CTE. We see a very strong correlation of CTE in the brains of many, many retired football or deceased football players. But the NFL, the NCAA, and all the way down to Pop Warner, are still arguing that we don't know that the blows to the head caused it.
They see correlation. They're arguing there's no causation. I think most scientists think that the strong correlation implies a degree of causation, but they're likely other factors involved, since not every football player, every person who gets blows to the head develops it.
[00:15:30] That's gonna be the challenge at the lower levels. The NFL has settled the one lawsuit and I think there's a billion dollars that they're being kind of jerky about distributing. But I think there are more lawsuits coming. All of this can happen at the state level, so every state that has a professional team, there are class action lawsuits, to my understanding, in almost every state. Going after the NFL, as well.
Ben Binversie:
Wow. Yeah, how certain do you have to be before we establish and accept that [00:16:00] the cause is getting repeated blows to the head, might cause brain injury. You know?
Sarah Fields:
Yeah! It took us a long time to decide that tobacco might actually cause cancer because the tobacco companies fought really hard to say, oh, correlation, not causation, who knows, can't prove it.
But eventually we bought it. Hopefully, we go a little faster on this one.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah, so much of the emphasis, as it relates to concussion seems to be about football. Should we be just as worried about sports like soccer or hockey, lacrosse?
Sarah Fields:
I think we should be worried. I say that as somebody [00:16:30] who played soccer for almost 40 years. Somebody who played rugby for five years. I've had a lot of concussions. I think about this a lot.
I do think we should be concerned because the question is about sub-concussive blows. We know that, yet tons of those in football, but folks who are serious, heading specialists or even just practice a lot of heading in soccer, may also be at risk.
At the high school and college level, but particularly, I'm more familiar with the high school data. We see lower rates of concussions [00:17:00] in everything. Football's by far at the lead, then we see women's soccer and then ice hockey shows up.
There are some who argue that a single concussion is too much of a risk. But a concussion can happen from all sorts of things. We can't always avoid them. You can fall off your bike. I got a concussion once by just walking into a staircase and knocking myself backwards against concrete. Yeah.
Unless we walk around with really good helmets all the time, sometimes they're gonna happen. But we [00:17:30] should try to figure out how we can minimize it, so that occasional walking into the staircase isn't your sixth or seventh concussion, it's your first.
Ben Binversie:
That makes sense. Well, thank you Sarah, for coming in on the show and thanks for coming to Grinnell.
Sarah Fields:
It's my pleasure. Thank you.
Ben Binversie:
Sarah Fields is a Professor of Communication at the University of Colorado in Denver. Her work includes the recently published book, Game Faces: Sports Celebrity and the Laws of Reputation. Check out links to her work on our website. Grinnell.edu/podcast.
[00:18:00] Have you ever seen headlines in the news citing the economic benefits of sports stadiums? Oftentimes, those studies are conducted by the league or team building the stadium and have questionable legitimacy.
I sat down with Nola Agha, Associate Professor of Sport Management at the University of San Francisco, to talk about these stadium subsidies and their actual economic impact.
Nola Agha:
Proponents will argue that a public investment, in [00:18:30] a stadium, is not just an expenditure by the public, but an actual investment. If it's an investment, it will then generate some sort of positive return. That's one of the things that most researchers question the most, if there's actually some sort of return on this investment or whether it's just a very real cost to the community.
Ben Binversie:
What are the common things that they cite as positive externalities of building stadiums?
Nola Agha:
There's a common claim of there being economic impacts. There will also be claims [00:19:00] of economic development that sometimes stadiums can serve as a catalyst that will inspire other building or other businesses to move to the are.
There's claims of wage growth, of job growth. They really hit the spectrum, in terms of what they claim.
Ben Binversie:
And do any of those promises pan out and can any of these stadiums kind of point to tangible evidence of these lofty promises that they make? I know, in Milwaukee, they're just building, well, [00:19:30] it's actually already been built, but a new arena for the Bucs to play in.
They made this whole district around it and have kind of made these claims that it's gonna revitalize that area and bring new life into it. But how do you put the numbers to that?
Nola Agha:
There's a lot of different ways. One of the first things you can do is, it's important, I guess, to note that it's different for every city. It's possible that maybe that area would have been redeveloped anyway. You could go back, you could look at building permits, where [00:20:00] developer's already buying land in that area.
So you can evaluate some of those claims. Maybe the ideas, maybe that development could have happened without the public expenditure on a new facility. The other way to look at it is in terms of sales tax revenues. So you can see, as a whole, what's going on in the city. If there really is more expenditure, if there's more money coming in, then you can look and see what's going on with your sales tax.
One of the things that we often see is that a new stadium will simply redistribute spending. The Bucs played there before, so [00:20:30] it's not like people are suddenly spending more than they did before. They're simply shifting from one facility to the other.
Then the other thing to consider is jobs. Actually this is one of my favorite headlines, that I saw just recently. It said Bradley Center to cut 650 jobs. You know, when the arena closes. Then it said, semicolon, new arena to add 620 jobs. So when you tear down old arena and you build a new one, there's in general no net gain.
In this case, what [00:21:00] seemed like a small net loss, but you can look at it in terms of jobs, income taxes. All these different things.
Ben Binversie:
Then when we talk about the negative externalities of building these stadiums, what are we talking about?
Nola Agha:
That's where you, the common ones are noise pollution, traffic, all the annoyance of construction. The externalities can vary depending on where the stadium is located. There's some research that looks at property values. Do [00:21:30] people really want to live near arenas and stadiums? Does it actually drive down housing prices in areas around?
The externalities can be related to the event itself or it can be related to the facility or it could be related to the construction of the facility.
Ben Binversie:
Focusing on the economic impact of these stadiums, who are they affecting? Is the affect spread across taxpayers equally or on whose backs are these stadiums being funded?
Nola Agha:
That's a great question. When [00:22:00] you look at the number one driver of the value of a professional team. The number one reason that the value of that business increases is because they get a new stadium. The Vikings are a great example. Before the US Bank Center opened, they were worth 1.6 billion dollars.
The public built a new facility. Public spent about 800 million dollars. The next year, that private business, their value increased by 38%. It went up to 2.2 billion dollars. The next year, [00:22:30] another 9% to 2.4 billion dollars. So in a two year period of time, that 800 million dollar public cost was fully capitalized into a private business. That's taxpayer money, so that's coming from the city.
And it the city isn't generating that money back through whatever sources, whether it's lease payments or new sales or property or income tax, then that's a cost to the public. As we know, things like sales taxes are very oppressive and so it's often the poorest members of our society [00:23:00] that are really hurt by these things.
Ben Binversie:
The Vikings did get a little bit better in the past few years, but I don't think they got a billion dollars better. What do you use when you're trying to think about counterfactuals? You kind of hinted at this. But how do you really gauge what would have happened in a community, had there not been a new stadium there?
Nola Agha:
Instead of answering the question related to stadiums, I'll answer related to just the presence of teams themselves. Strikes and lockouts are a really great natural [00:23:30] experiment. In the past, we've looked at research and there's been, whenever there's a strike or lockout, we'll collect the data and we'll look at that.
Actually find that in most cities, when the professional team is not playing, economic impact either is the same or economic activity either the same or it increases, which means the presence of a team is actually depressing economic activity.
That boggles most people's mind, but it is consistent with research, both during strikes and lockouts and not during strikes and lockouts.
Ben Binversie:
[00:24:00] Wow! Given that that's the case, why do these stadiums continue to be financed?
Nola Agha:
It's a great question. That's the one that everybody wants the answer to. A big part of it just relates to humans. It relates to our incentives. It relates to politics. It relates to the motivations of the people in power.
Do you want to be the mayor that lost a beloved team or do you want to be the one that saved it or that kept it? A lot of that then comes [00:24:30] because these leagues are cartels and they artificially reduce the supply of teams. There are more cities that want a team than there are teams. Because of that, cities are competing with each other for the right to host these.
Ben Binversie:
In lieu of public financing these stadiums, how do you suggest that they be financed? Just on the, the NFL makes a lot of money, for example. Do they have the money to pay for these stadiums themselves?
Nola Agha:
I believe that every team owner [00:25:00] has enough money to pay for a stadium themselves. If it was financially worth it, for them, they would. We see lots of examples of teams that do. For example, the Golden State Warriors right now, spending a billion dollars, building an arena and some associate development.
The question is whether the teams have the motivation to do so and they don't. When there's public money to be had, they don't have motivation to do it themselves. And if they did have to purely do it themselves, they would find other ways.
They would find creative financing methods or maybe they wouldn't get a new stadium [00:25:30] every 20 years. Maybe it would be every 30 years. Maybe we just wouldn't see the turnover. Maybe we would see renovations instead of brand new ones built, but they would have to do the math solely on their own revenues and expenses. As opposed to relying on those public subsidies.
Ben Binversie:
Is there scholarly consensus of the impact of subsidizing sports stadiums or are there some studies that cite positive benefits? Is this comparing it to climate change science, where the academic community might be totally or almost totally in unison [00:26:00] in their understanding, but their sitting there banging their heads against the wall wondering why we're still behaving in the way that we do?
Nola Agha:
Also a great question. It's one of the rare things that economists can agree on, which is, for the most part, these are gonna be bad for the public. Now there's exceptions. It's very possible for a community to negotiate a good lease with a city, where they are actually obtaining enough revenues, whether it's a ticket fee or whether the city's getting the naming rights.
[00:26:30] It is fully possible for a city to have developed the right formula so that they can pay back the debt that they took on for the construction of that stadium. It just doesn't usually happen.
At the end of the day, that's sort of the financial argument, which is, yes, there is a potential for cities to not be harmed by this. Whether there's any sort of economic development or economic impact from that? That's a different story and that's where most people agree, not really.
Ben Binversie:
Can you think of a particular example that was [00:27:00] a really bad investment for a community or maybe you can think of more than just one, but highlight one of them.
Nola Agha:
The list is a mile long, of the bad deals and it's pretty short for the good ones.
Cincinnati is a really good example of a city that has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on baseball, on football. They're now spending on a major league soccer stadiums. They've famously had to sell off a hospital because the city was in so much debt.
[00:27:30] Phoenix and Glendale, those are other really good examples. They've had to raise taxes. They've had to cut city services. We're seeing the exact same thing in Cobb County. They recently built or helped build a stadium for the Braves. Same thing. They're consolidating, closing libraries. They're trying to figure how to pay for the police. They're having to raise taxes to do that. They're also cutting city services.
There's an awful lot of examples.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah, some of your studies have done, and you particularly, have emphasized [00:28:00] the impact of stadiums and teams in minor league baseball. Can you give a brief picture of the minor league landscape and how it might differ from major league stadiums?
Nola Agha:
That's a great question. Minor league baseball has most of the same features as the major league sports, in terms of the public subsidy game. In terms of the fact that there are more cities that want a team than there are.
So you still get these [00:28:30] leases that tend to be really bad and these agreements between cities and teams that tend to be really bad. On the financial side, we see cities being harmed in the exact same way we do in the majors. What we find that's different, though, what I've found that's different, is if you try and look at some of the variables that we use to measure the economic impact, in this case, income, you can also look at sales tax data.
I've actually found that there's a few places where we start to see a positive effect. It's different. It's different than major league sports. We don't see that in major [00:29:00] league sports. The question is why. That's what we're still trying to figure out is why.
One of the ways is, maybe that you're inspiring locals to stay locally more. Maybe there are more people coming, so most of these are small towns. You can imagine them in the rookie leagues or in the Pacific Northwest. There's an Appalachian league that's in these little valleys in Appalachia.
Maybe people have something to do in town now? Maybe they all want to come to that area? We're not really sure in the AAA [00:29:30] leagues. Classifications for my league baseball, we see some positive effects as well. That might be because these are the up and coming cities of the world. These are the teams that sometime, or the cities, that sometimes have a professional team already.
Columbus, Indianapolis, Buffalo is a good example. They don't always, but they're the cities that are on the verge of maybe becoming the quote, unquote, big league city. Maybe the people in those cities [00:30:00] appreciate the highest quality of baseball that's around.
Maybe Salt Lake City, for example, has high quality basketball. They have an NBA team. If people want the highest quality baseball product, they might be drawn to the AAA league, because that's the most that they have.
We don't entirely know why, but there do tend to be some different effects at the minor league level.
Ben Binversie:
Another one of your studies looked at the effective team name changes on revenue, which I thought was pretty interesting. Are there any teams in professional sports who have changed [00:30:30] their name and seen a dramatic increase in revenue?
On the other hand, are there any teams that maybe you think should change their name?
Nola Agha:
Um, you're gonna kill me on this one, though. I can't think, there's 220 minor league baseball teams and they change their names and their location all the time, so I probably can't come up with any on the fly.
Ben Binversie:
There's some gems out there.
Nola Agha:
There really are some gems and there certainly are, I mean, if you look at the list, at minor league baseball, puts out a list of the top 25, [00:31:00] I think it's the top 25 grossing minor league baseball teams every year.
It's usually teams that have recently switched their name to something cute and funky, so people can flock to buy that merchandise. It's great, in the short term. It really works out well in the short term for teams.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah, I know the Cedar Rapids class a affiliate, The Kernels.
Nola Agha:
The Kernels.
Ben Binversie:
The Kernels, that's a good example.
Nola Agha:
Yeah.
Ben Binversie:
I don't think they're gonna change their name anytime soon.
Nola Agha:
They used to be the Bunnies, believe it or not. The Rabbits. They started off as, [00:31:30] I'm not gonna remember, but I know that at one point they were the Bunnies and at one point they were the Rabbits. That stuck in my mind.
Ben Binversie:
I think the Kernels is a good switch.
Here at Grinnell, our sports team's don't necessarily produce revenue, but they are a big part of the Grinnell experience for people, so I wanted to get your insight on our team name. The Pioneers.
Should we consider rebranding? Changing our team name or should we stick with it?
Nola Agha:
I'm gonna say stick with it. There's a lot to be [00:32:00] said for history. There's a lot to be said for cultural references. There's a lot to be said for not changing your brand name on a regular basis.
Ben Binversie:
Well, thanks for the input and thank you for your interesting insights into the economic impact of stadium subsidies.
Nola Agha:
You're very welcome. Thanks for having me.
Ben Binversie:
Nola Agha is a Professor of Sport Management at the University of San Francisco. Links to her most recent work are available on our website. Grinnell.edu/podcast. [00:32:30] By the way, Agha mentioned the Golden State Warriors new arena, which they're paying for with 1 billion dollars, out of their own pockets?
It sounds great, but she told us later, at her talk, that the construction of the stadium caused the planned high speed rail route in San Francisco to alter its path. Costing the city, you guessed it, about a billion dollars.
On a lighter note, we mentioned the Cedar Rapids minor league baseball team. Now the Kernels, formerly the Bunnies. I looked it up and [00:33:00] their original name was....drum roll...the Canaries.
I checked out some of the other funky minor league baseball team names. Here's a few of my favorites. The Savannah Bananas. The Albuquerque Isotopes, the Pensacola Blue Wahoos. The Richmond Flying Squirrels. That one hits close to home here in Grinnell.
The Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs. The New Orleans Baby Cakes [00:33:30] and the Toledo Mud Hens. The list goes on, but you can check out our website for links to more of these quirky names.
On the next show, we'll talk with two of the speakers from this year's Scholar's Convocation Series at Grinnell. We'll talk religion and pop culture with Cathryn Lofton, a religious studies professor from Yale University. And the politics of resentment with Kathy Kramer, a professor of political science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Music [00:34:00] for today's show comes from Bret Newski and Audio Blocks. If you'd like to contact the show, email us at podcast@grinnell.edu.
Find us on Twitter with #allthingsgrinnell or check out our website, Grinnell.edu/podcast.
For more information about the guests for today's show. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast, wherever you listen. I'm your host, Ben Binversie. Stay weird, Grinnellians.