Thursday July 23, 2009 7:54 - 8:02 pm - Who's brining the wine for 2009!!! Skylines...pie lines...Obama is here Obama is here and those sky little...women are about to lose two in a row and drop out of the playoff race right before allstar break.
All set up for power move though, whatever they want in LA for CP, then whatever they want for Sudney, Catherine, Janel in NY!!! Like cool and easy/Hot and Nasty USA Gymnastics...and then she came in to crush the competition in dancing with the stars...what a surprise!!! AVP stars making successful transition soon to Oak Street Beach/Michigan Avenue with every one looking forward to 2010 and 2012 cause not enough World Records this Olympic Summer Games. Even though Beijing, China allowed American girls and women to have a unique and exciting chance to attain the level of elite world class athlete, this is especially true in soccer as in the first season of WPS Women's Professional Soccer see's Chicago Red Stars sixth place of seven teams...
What is the responsibility of coaching, academia, and the women’s movement to the attainment of such athletic accomplishments in our community? As a baccalaureate and M.A. Chicago Studies Loyola University Chicago alumni and third semester M.S. Information Technology Computer Science student in Technology Management (TM) Track continuing archival and traditional research attempts to analyze this question through the development of this open source project centered around athletics management software.
Methods – Development of business plan/coaching style/open source project built around IT/archival data coincides to March 2008 visits to Notre Dame Archives and other visits to the Chicago State, De Paul, Loyola University Chicago, Northwestern, and UIC archival collections, De Paul has up until this point been the source most referenced. Although now realizing that the University of Detroit Mercy (like Loyola University Chicago, also a member of the Horizon League conference) and Marquette archival collections are also accessible, this revision centers on a reexamination of the (UIC) University of Illinois at Chicago archives and recent discovery of Notre Dame collection.
Results – Business plan/open source project/archival paper/coaching credentials in early stages of development but there seems to be substantial lack of coaching focus on specific goals of world class athletics in midwest which can be directly seen in lack of Olympic presence of girls and women in this area and lack of athletic record almost totally in archival collections concerning girls and women. Most strikingly, at the De Paul archives, the collection with the most current archival materials, it was obvious that the two programs many would consider closest to world-class elite women’s athletics are both chronicled, however slightly, yet other sports are starkly absent. Secondly, at Northwestern, the archival record is, at times, parallel with the history (if not the Illinois history) of the development of women’s athletics specific to world-class competition, such as the Olympics. Lastly, at other universities - Chicago State, UIC, and Loyola, the overall lack of archival data is alarming, thus the reason for the reexamination.
Conclusions - This research into women’s athletic development has led to a thesis that girl’s/women’s athletes in American universities are not usually competitive with world-class standards, and this directly correlates with traditional defeatist/gradualist attitudes embraced by a majority of the coaches of American, and especially, midwest and more specifically Chicago-area girls and women.
