This Week's Women's Sports Recap
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Paige Bueckers, Flau’jae Johnson, and JuJu Watkins pave the way with latest NIL wins.
LSU basketball star and Puma athlete Flau’jae Johnson announced a player exclusive shoe deal on Friday, shortly after UConn phenom Paige Bueckers’ historic player edition shoe with Nike last week. These moves are the new normal in college basketball, where women are outperforming men in terms of NIL and shoe deals.
Flau’jae Johnson: The LSU junior has been building her brand for years, which includes a budding rap career featuring Latto and Lil Wayne collaborations. Thanks to deals with companies like Meta, Amazon, and Powerade, Johnson has an estimated $1.5M NIL valuation, which isn’t far behind the $1.8M her former LSU teammate Angel Reese had upon graduation.
Paige Bueckers: The UConn senior made history as the first college player to receive pro sports equity by signing with 3v3 league Unrivaled in August, along with being one of The NIL Store’s top-selling athletes. And when it comes to NIL valuations, Bueckers and Johnson are neck and neck.
Amber Glenn wins biggest title for U.S. women’s figure skater in 14 years at Grand Prix Final.
Amber Glenn capped her breakout 2024 by earning the biggest title for a U.S. women’s singles figure skater since 2010.
Glenn, 25, won the Grand Prix Final, the most exclusive event in figure skating, over the rest of the world’s top-ranked women (all five from Japan).
Fellow Americans Ilia Malinin and ice dancers Madison Chock and Evan Bates later repeated as Grand Prix Final champions. The U.S. won three of the four Grand Prix Final titles for the first time.
Glenn had the highest score in Friday’s short program and Saturday’s free skate, landing a triple Axel on both days. Glenn tallied 212.07 total points, prevailing by 3.22 over 19-year-old Mone Chiba.
“Baseball is for everyone”: Meet legendary pitcher Ayami Sato, the first woman to play on a men’s pro team in Canada.
Japanese-born Ayami Sato is known as the best woman pitcher in the world, throwing at the lightning speed of 129 kilometres per hour and winning six world championships for her home country in the process. Now, she’s making history as the first woman to play professionally in Canada, joining the men’s Toronto Maple Leafs Baseball Club—which, yes, shares a name with a certain hockey team. Here, through her translator and partner Mayo Hirano, Sato talks about joining an all-men team, her goal of inspiring young girls in Canada, and her love of Toronto’s beer and doughnuts.
You began playing baseball as a young girl in Japan. What was your experience competing in a sport considered to be “for the boys”? I grew up in Amami, Kagoshima, a small island located in southern Japan. When I was a kid, all my friends were boys. We’d play baseball together all the time, and I didn’t notice that it was anything out of the ordinary. Luckily, I was big and strong by the time I was in elementary school, so I blended in easily with the boys. The older I got, the more I realized how rare it was to play men’s sports as a young girl.
Female athletes being deterred from triathlons, report reveals.
The new report from SheRACES in partnership with Fund Her Tri UK, is the most detailed research and analysis to date of the experience of women in triathlon, and reveals just three per cent of female athletes experience no deterrent or inequitable provision.
The research revealed that large proportions of athletes would be more likely to enter races that offered better provisions for female athletes, such as better changing facilities, toilets, and changes to cut-off times, while 28 per cent surveyed experienced physical or verbal harassment at a race.
In response to the findings, SheRACES have produced a set of recommendations for events to improve inclusivity for women, with the ability to become SheRACES accredited if certain criteria are met.
Sophie Power, founder of SheRACES, said: “We believe a woman’s place is on the start line. Over the last three years, our detailed insight work, campaigning and analysis has driven real change in the world of trail and road running, with some of the biggest races in the world committing to change that positively impacts the women’s race experience from beginner to elite.
Time Athlete of the Year: Caitlin Clark.
Few jobs require less physical exertion than rebounding for Caitlin Clark. On an early-November morning in downtown Indianapolis, Clark, the two-time college national player of the year for the University of Iowa, reigning WNBA Rookie of the Year from the Indiana Fever, and emergent American sports icon, sprints to different spots along the three-point line at the Fever practice gym, trying to bang as many shots as possible over a six-minute span. A Fever coach has tasked me with standing under the basket to retrieve her misses. But as Clark runs all over the court to launch long-range bombs, I barely have to move. Swish, swish, swish. She hits 14 shots in a row. A dozen in a row. Eleven in a row. Swish, swish, swish. Nine in a row. Another nine.
Sure, she’s putting on this display in practice. But her ability is still mesmerizing. Clark, 22, takes shots with a degree of difficulty never before witnessed in the women’s game; her signature 30-ft. launches, from near half-court on team logos across America, are akin to home-run balls, hanging high in the air. Can she actually make that flabbergasting attempt? Yes! it turns out. Over and over again.
Love the inclusion of Ayami Sato. We have admired her for a long time and she is truly a legend.