“I’m a 34-year-old NBA center. I’m black. And I’m gay.”

The news from Jason Collins shook the world Monday morning. Shook it so hard that the Twitter birds were stumbling over themselves to get out of their nests. Within 10 minutes of being posted on the Sports Illustrated website, the article had over 800 comments and Jason Collins was a trending topic.

Collins, who just finished his twelfth season in the NBA, became the first active male player to be openly gay in any of the four major American sports. Yet two weeks ago on April 18, when the number one WNBA draft pick Brittney Griner came out as lesbian, there was hardly a ripple.

Are expectations different for men and women in sports? Whereas Griner had practically been labeled a lesbian already, many assumed Collins to be the perfect example of a virile, heterosexual man. People often worry that looking up to athletes affects the way we look at alcohol, safe sex and drug use. However, less attention is paid to how sports reinforce strict gender roles.

Matthew Genuchi, a professor of psychology at Boise State, with research focusing on men and masculinity, calls American sports “a traditional environment of hyper-masculinity.”

According to Genuchi, male sports value such norms as dominance, assertiveness, non-intimacy, power and competition. Athletics became a way for men to showcase these characteristics.

“Sports historically was seen as a male preserve,” said Shelley Lucas, Ph.D., a professor of kinesiology at Boise State. “This is something that boys and men do to learn about, prove and demonstrate their masculinity,”

Collins’ coming out is one of the most recent and significant challenges to some of these traditional notions.

“People who care about these kind of things are hopeful that this is going to open the door to more active athletes coming out and being more comfortable,” Lucas said.

Challenges to gender norms

The current state of gender norms in sports may be in flux. After February’s NFL Scouting Combine, both Manti Te’o of Notre Dame and Nick Kasa of the University of Colorado reported teams asked them questions pertaining to their sexuality. These questions would be illegal in nearly any other job interview.

MLB, the NBA and the NHL have started fining for homophobic slurs used during games. However, slurs are still being used. The NFL has never reprimanded a player for using slurs.

“They’re very invested in presenting a certain style of hyper-masculinity: violence on the playing field, but we also see it off, big, powerful musculature, it’s about brute force, it’s about domination,” Lucas said. “The sports culture of hockey, baseball, basketball, the NFL, seem to have a lot riding on that particular view of masculinity.”

But there are signs of change as well. NFL players Chris Kluwe and Brendon Ayanbadejo have filed a lawsuit against the NFL. Their brief states, “For far too long, professional sports have been a bastion of bigotry, intolerance and small-minded prejudice toward sexual orientation.”

Recently, several retired players, athletes in foreign leagues and female athletes have come out. There has also been an increase in activism among players who are straight allies.

“I think in the United States there has been a shift in that there is more openness and acceptance of nontraditional masculine norms,” Genuchi said. “But … I think these predominant norms still exist and still have an impact on men.”

Even Collins discussed this in his announcement: “But I’ve always been an aggressive player, even in high school. Am I so physical to prove that being gay doesn’t make you soft?”

As free agent this summer, it is not known where or if Collins will play again. While it is almost certain he will not be the last openly gay athlete in American sports, the dominant culture of hyper-masculinity has not ended.

“I don’t imagine that just one person coming out is just going to erase all the homophobia that is out there,” Lucas said. “It’s going to be interesting to see how teams and sponsors and people who speak up, who are silent. Because that will be saying something as well.”

What this means for women

Sports have been equated with masculinity for a long time. Because of this it seems unnatural for women to possess these characteristics and have an interest in displaying them.

Lucas noted that working class women and women of color were always physical in their labor. The idea that it is improper for women to sweat and be physical came out of white, middle class society. However, these views still affect perceptions of gender in American sports today.

Women have made great strides since Title IX was passed in 1972. The number of women participating in sports has increased tenfold, and women have found some space in a traditional male sphere.

But that has created other challenges. If a woman is too aggressive or athletic she may be considered “mannish” or assumed to be a lesbian.

“I like to call it this idea of sport-induced lesbianism,” Lucas said. “For women, sport becomes a way to raise suspicion that you’re a lesbian.”

In today’s society there are sports that women can play with little to no question, Lucas suggested.

“Women who are in gymnastics and tennis and swimming, figure skating—they’re meeting the cultural expectations of what a woman is,” Lucas said.

The number of girls and young women playing sports have helped push this change into the cultural space.

“There still is a pretty strong gender stereotype about who’s expected to play sports and what is normal. Although that certainly is changing,” Lucas said. “We see tons of little girls out there playing sports. I think that has helped with changing some of those gender roles.”

How children are affected

Children learn perceptions through role models and examples. Many youth, especially adolescents, are drawn to athletes when looking for these role models.

“It shapes who they (children) are and what they think is within the parameters of acceptable behavior,” Lucas said.

The Kaiser Family Foundation conducted a study that showed 93 percent of youth between the ages of 10 and 17 who participated in at least one sport considered a professional athlete to be a role model. That is higher than the number of kids who listed their parents.

“We look to other people for how we should be,” said Kimberly McAdams, Ph.D., another professor of psychology at Boise State. “We focus on people who are powerful and attractive because of course we want to be those things ourselves.”

For young men especially, the hyper-masculine culture starts long before the professional and college level. From a young age they are taught to represent one cultural norm.

“One message young men and boys are learning: Don’t do feminine things,” Genuchi said. “An implied part of that is we don’t talk about homosexuality. Male athletes don’t talk about it.”

That can make finding space of acceptance hard for young, gay athletes, who have been watching for signs of acceptance. In recent years, NBA players have been fined for using homophobic slurs on the court, Lucas noted.

“Role models can just as easily inspire bad behavior as good,” McAdams said. “It’s all about the perceptions we hold. If that person seems like someone we want to be like, we emulate them no matter what.”

In that at least Collins has offered a small ray of hope to other gay athletes: that they aren’t alone.

“I think he’s a great role model for athletes who want to come out, telling his story the way he does,” Lucas said. “For younger athletes, that’s especially important.”

In his announcement, Collins revealed his reasons for coming out. He said he wanted to tell his story after watching a friend march in a 2012 gay pride parade, sitting in his apartment less than three miles from where the Supreme Court was hearing arguments about gay marriage, and being instilled with a sense of mortality by the bombing at the Boston Marathon.

Collins also explained that he wears number 98 as a silent statement in remembrance of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student in Wyoming who was kidnapped, tortured and hung on a barbed wire fence in 1998. It was his one gesture of solidarity.

“I want to do the right thing and not hide anymore,” Collins wrote. “I want to march for tolerance, acceptance and understanding. I want to take a stand and say, ‘Me, too.’ ”

The idea came to Mark Rudin, Vice President for Research and Economic Development, one night when he ran into senior art student Marshall Sinclair at a metal pouring event. Sinclair talked about his desire to open a foundry, a workshop for casting metal, in Boise after graduation.

Boise State, through the Office of University and Industry Ventures, has long offered services to their faculty to help them market and commercialize their ideas. However after his talk with Sinclair, Rudin questioned why they weren’t offering this opportunity to students as well.

“We provide that service to our faculty but there may be as much if not more, I tend to think more, innovation occurring with the students,” Rudin said.

What is Venture College? 

Venture College is a new program that will enter it’s pilot year in fall 2013.   The name may seem misleading, but Venture College is not an academic program.  Students who participate do not receive credits toward their degree. Rather Venture College is an extracurricular activity for students that want to open their own business or start a nonprofit.

“They’ll (students) get kind of an abbreviated, but very intense, business education,” Zimmer said.

“It’s an extra activity to help you pursue your dream of starting up your own business,” Rudin said.  

Venture College welcomes students from all majors. While business students are welcome and encouraged to apply, Venture College enthusiastically welcomes students from all majors.

“I think there has been a paradigm at a university that innovation, that starting a business, is for business students,” said Rudin. “One of our tenets of Venture College is that innovation occurs in all fields.”

Ed Zimmer, retired CEO of ECCO group who has been hired as Executive in Residence for the research department  and will serve as Associate Director of Venture College, seconded this thought. 

“There are a whole lot of people that have to have jobs… and generally business is going to be related to most of them,”Zimmer said. “This is a way to put some business educational opportunities to students who aren’t business majors.”

The most famous example of product commercialization from a university is Gatorade which was created at the University of Florida. Similarly the goal of Venture College is to provide student with the resources to market their own idea.

“(Gatorade) is kind of the grandfather of all examples,” Zimmer said. “I don’t know if we have a Gatorade here but there are a lot of great ideas.”

How does Venture College Work?

The Venture College will be overseen by what is called the “Board of Angels.” Zimmer will serve as the chair of this board. 

In business the term angel means someone who provides startup funding. It is different from a venture capitalist. An angel is someone who provides a first, small sum of money to get the idea off the ground to the point where venture capitalists might be interested.

“When we’re talking about our group of advisors being angel advisors that’s the intention,” Zimmer said. “We want to get these seeds of business planted and sprouting so they can get farther… they can get funded in some other way.” 

Venture College will be based of  Boise State’s new space downtown in the Collier Building. Being downtown in the heart of Boise Business is one of the strengths of the program.

Students who are participating in Venture College will for a two hour session every week. Beyond that involved students are welcome to put as much time into Venture College as they chose. 

The strategy will be two fold. The Board of Angels and other community members will discuss what Zimmer calls “common gaps” in the students’ education. These may include any number of topics from accounting to cash to market analysis. 

Beyond that each student will receive a specialized focus for their plan.

As of now there are 245 “friends of the venture college.” These are members of the business community and entrepreneurs in Boise that have agreed to support Venture College. Members will be put into contact and given network opportunities with these individuals giving them real world insight.

It is the willingness of these business professional to participate that makes Venture College possible.

“The relationship between Boise and Boise State creates a synergy that allows us to do Venture College,” Rudin said. “There aren’t a lot of other university/city relationships, this intimate, that would facilitate a Venture College type of relationship.”

At the end of the program participants have an opportunity to pitch a business plan to the board. Through this pitch they could potentially be given funds to further their vision.

“Someone may get a grant from the pool to develop a product. Or to hire resources to take their idea to the next step. Or to take a trip to meet with people in this industry. It could be for product development… the students could get a few thousand dollars, or more than a few thousand dollars,” Zimmer said.

However this money is not guaranteed just because someone participated in Venture College. 

“The students are going to compete for this,” Rudin said. “They’re not all going to get the same. It’s going to be real world.” 

How to get involved with Venture College

Venture College has already accepted all their applications for fall. However, they will be accepting 15 new applicants for spring semester.

Any student who wants to apply is welcome. The only requirements are that students be full-time in a degree seeking program.

Students who want to apply can find more information on the Boise State website. Having the extra time to prepare might not be such a bad thing. Applicants for fall are currently undergoing a stringent interviewing process.

“Nobody’s left bleeding… yet,” Zimmer quipped.

All jokes aside Zimmer and his cohort of angels have seen a lot of promise from some of the candidates. One interviewee’s car broke down at The Depot the morning of her interview and she ran, in heels, all the way to the Collier building at 301 Capitol Blvd. She was on time for her interview.

“There’s initiative,” said Zimmer. “Talk about passion.”

In 2009, then 15-year-old  Amanda Gilmore, now a sophomore secondary education major, suffered her first concussion. It was her first of four. Gilmore was small for her age, not that it slowed her down when she was bounding after a loose ball. Throwing herself to the floor she wrestled with the other girls, elbows flying and sneakers screeching on the cool gymnasium floor. Gilmore never saw the blow coming when another girl fell on top of her, causing her head to visibly bounce off the floor. For the next 10 seconds everything would turn soundlessly black.

Concussions are a hot topic in today’s news. Images of teeth-rattling helmet to helmet hits and stories of football players dying young pervade the media today.

However, these brain injuries are not just afflicting football players. Biking, walking on treacherous ice and even
pee-wee soccer, or tumbles down stairs; concussions are being recognized in greater numbers of people during their
everyday lives.

What is a
concussion?

“Head injuries, concussion, if you watch the old movies, The Three Stooges, it’s almost like a funny thing,” said Dr. Vincent Serio, director of medical services at University Health and Recreation. “It’s much more of a serious problem than that.”

A common misconception is that when someone gets a concussion that person blacks out. This is not always true. While someone may lose consciousness upon sustaining a concussion it is just as likely that he or she will not.

“They may have amnesia, or a loss of memory, confusion, disorientation, headaches, seizures… but all of them are transient. They’re usually completely reversible and will go away,” Serio said.

Head injuries are always something to worry about. While people don’t need to go to the doctor for every little bump, anytime there is a blow to the head with significant force that individual should see a doctor in order to be safe, Serio explained.

“If you have any loss of consciousness you should go. If you have any loss of memory you should go. If you have any symptoms that don’t go away within 30 minutes you should go,” Serio said. “So headache, nausea, vomiting, light sensitivity, dizziness—any symptom that persists after even the most minor head injury should prompt a medical evaluation.”

The future of concussions:

The emergence of new evidence that proves concussions could have long lasting effects has given parents pause when considering whether they want their children to be involved in sports. For Marc Paul, head athletic trainer at Boise State, this is a worry that he deals with every day at work, and that hits closer to home.

When Paul’s own son was in eighth grade he received two concussions playing football.

“The dad in me would love to see him play,” Paul said. “The bonding, the things you get in the locker room, you know? After practice and before, the road trips; you’ll never find that anywhere else and there’s a huge benefit to it. I’m just sad to see he’ll never have that.”

Paul left the decision up to his son and his son has chosen not to play football again. “The athletic trainer side of me, and a little bit of the dad, is relieved because I’ve seen the long term effects of concussion. In a kid, in a developing brain and all that: it can have pretty severe consequences,” Paul said.

The biggest danger is not what we know about concussions, but what we are just now learning. What was once conjecture is now gathering more evidence all the time., ideas like Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). This is the condition found in the brains of deceased football players Junior Seau and Cookie Gilchrist, diagnosed posthumously.

CTE is believed to be caused by repeated concussions. It can cause severe depression, dementia, erratic behavior and difficultly with balance. Research is just now beginning to delve into CTE, but it has proven difficult.

While we can biopsy, x-ray, touch, examine and generally poke and prod most areas of our bodies to see what is happening, things are not so simple when dealing with the brain.

“The brain is different,” Serio said. “It’s enclosed in bone, in the skull. You can’t just open up somebody’s skull and take a sample.”

Concussions were once thought to be a benign brain injury Serio explained. For years this was accepted because the damage from a concussion cannot be seen on any brain scans.

With no way to harvest samples from living patients and scans that do not show the problem, the progress being made in research is slow.

“There’s probably levels of detection that we haven’t discovered yet,” Serio said. “What are these levels? That would be the million dollar question.”

Gilmore still loves to play basketball. However, her concussions have left  her with frequent migraines and other lingering symptoms. She’s taken a step back, albeit a small one. She now coaches girls’ basketball at a local junior high. Even in the short years since her high school campaign she’s noticed some big changes.

“When I got my concussion it was ‘sit out for two days and rub some dirt on it so you can get back to the game’,” Gilmore said. “Now before I could coach I had to take a class on concussions…It changed which is a definite good thing.”

Tips and Myths

A concussion is bleeding or a bruise on the brain: 

False. 

By definition, a concussion leaves no visible physical mark or damage on the brain. If bleeding occurred it is no longer considered a concussion—it’s a higher level of brain trauma, explained Serio.

The bottom line:  If you can see it on a CT scan or MRI, it’s not a concussion.

You should never let someone with a concussion sleep: 

Partially true. 

Sleep itself is not dangerous for someone with a concussion. The danger is that while sleeping, warning signs of a serious problem, such as slurring or disorientation, are likely to be missed.

The bottom line: Wake someone who has had a concussion once every 2 hours for the first 24 hours. If he or she is responding normally it’s safe to return to sleep.

When you have a concussion you can’t do your homework: 

False.

It is true that the prescribed method of treatment is “brain rest”. However doing so is not dangerous, but is likely to aggravate the symptoms, such as headaches.

“Hey you’re college students,” Serio said. “You can’t avoid college. But anything extra—no.”

The bottom line: If you get a concussion you’ll probably want to keep up on your homework and cut out “The Walking Dead” instead.

Boise State professor Dawn Shepherd is interested in the disconnect between how people think about what they do online compared to how actions online are actually
completed.

For example, when we use a search engine such as Google, it’s more of a matching activity than a searching activity—matching the user to the material they are most likely to find relevant.

Shepherd’s focus, while pertaining to matching, doesn’t involve Google searches; instead Shepard’s research looks at people-matching, or in more common terms,
online dating.

The bulk of Shepherd’s research focuses on the algorithms online dating sites use to match people with one another.

Interestingly, online dating giants eHarmony and Match.com use completely different bases for creating potential relationships.

eHarmony was founded by psychiatrists and a marriage counselor. They conducted interviews and surveys of couples with long lasting, happy marriages and created a formula based on the “29 dimensions of compatibility.” These include everything from family goals to sense of humor to intellect to level of spirituality.Based on individual answers, eHarmony measures the user’s character and recommends people with whom he or she is likely to develop a relationship with a high level of relationship satisfaction.

eHarmony acts as a gatekeeper for its members.

“In some ways (eHarmony’s) relationship with its users is very paternalistic,” Shepherd said. “eHarmony doesn’t allow you (to) search the site. It says, ‘These are the 10 people we found for you.’”

Under eHarmony’s model, there isn’t always a relationship for everyone. If eHarmony determines a user does not have a likelihood of finding a successful relationship it won’t match him or her.

So what might exclude an eHarmony user from finding any matches?

“They’re things like character, anger management—so if you seem to exhibit the likelihood to not be able to control your anger, you quality of self-perception,” Shepherd said. “One of the things it includes is family background. If you’ve seen a lot of arguing and violence and those sorts of things it might make you less likely to have a happy, productive relationship.”

On the other hand, Match.com uses a system akin to Netflix. You rate certain activities or characteristics, such as traveling, working out or pets, on a basis of how important they are or how much you enjoy them.

“Match.com gathers thousands of bits of information not related to what makes you happy in a relationship or your personality, per se, but things like your hobbies and interests—things that are based around consumption,” Shepherd said.

Match.com then matches the user based on similarities. The more specific the ratings, the more specific the matches will be. Match.com also tracks users by habits and activity on the site and makes recommendations based on those.

“You might say, ‘I am interested in football and going to dinner and long walks on the beach,’ but when you’re on the site you’re actually looking at people with blond hair and blue eyes. You’re not even paying attention to those other things. It will actually use that information,” Shepherd said. “It doesn’t tell you that though. When it comes to which site works better, it just depends what a person is looking for. Match.com has a higher frequency of people going on dates but eHarmony has had more couples commit to marriage.

eHarmony is for people who are interested in a traditional path to marriage and a stricter filter, Shepherd stated. Match.com is less formal.While traditional college-age students are becoming a bigger presence on online dating sites, most young people whose relationships began online have met in less formal settings.

With the explosion of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs), such as Halo and World of Warcraft, people are spending more time online playing with strangers.

“There are lots of couples that meet through MMORPGs,” Shepherd said. “It’s not surprising. They spend hours and hours and hours playing together. They accomplish things together, so it’s not that different from meeting people at work.”As our society relies more and more on technology, online dating is likely to keep getting more prevalent.

“It might have occurred to you already that even in your lifetime dating has changed,” Shepherd said. “People are becoming more and more open about dating online. It’s just something that’s becoming part of the larger pulse of society.”