Just My Opinion - by Mary Kilen
March Madness!
If you live in small towns, you get used to sports being the thing that brings a community together. In the fall, it is high school football on Friday nights and volleyball during the week. Girl’s golf can be found just about any day of the week as can cross country. In the winter, it is boys’ and girls’ basketball on just about any night except Wednesday and wrestling pretty much the same, but mostly on the weekends. Spring sports take you outside for track, golf, baseball and softball. One thing is true, though, fans can be found cheering on their favorite athletes for both the boys and the girls.
You likely have your favorite college teams throughout the year in their many sports and if you get lucky you might be able to watch them on television. You have your favorite pro sports teams and again, if you are lucky, you get to watch them on television.
Then comes March Madness and men’s basketball has been king for as long as I can remember. I’ve watched chunks of March Madness for years. Most years we have been in Las Vegas for part of the tournament and it is on most screens you walk by.
This year, women’s basketball, though, was the event that people were watching. It was hard to not get drawn in as the stories about Iowa’s Caitlin Clark grabbed your attention. She was breaking records right and left this year as she played her senior season. I’ll admit, I wasn’t much of a fan. I didn’t even know who she was until this year.
If you’ve ever watched the women’s tournament, you know that it got less coverage and was on the lesser channels, while the men’s tournament was everywhere you looked. The crowds for the men’s games were huge compared to the women’s.
This year, though, the viewership was huge for the women’s tournament, especially when Iowa was playing. The stands were packed with fans. The ticket prices were through the roof and in cases like the Iowa against LSU game considerably higher than the men’s games.
While I agree it is about time that the scales balance out, I’ll go back to my first paragraphs and remind you that in small towns, those stands are close to equally full for any sport and the fans are just as loud.
For me, though, the overall message for young girls is one of empowerment. Little girls see everyone equally as excited for a women’s game and they want to be the next Caitlin Clark or any of the other amazing women they watched play in the tournament.
I want my granddaughter Jozie to feel every bit as important as her brothers when it comes to her decisions to play sports or whatever she may choose to do in her life.
It is just a small moment in time, but maybe it makes us look differently at how we support our children as a whole. May we learn the lesson and make sure that we support every aspect of every event, including the academic events. My wish is that every child feels empowered, valued and cherished no matter what they undertake.
Solar Eclipse and North Dakota
I may have seen my favorite eclipse meme today on Facebook, showing what it looks like in North Dakota with a cloudy sky.
That was my view today when I tried to check it out. I had seen breaks in the clouds throughout the morning and thought to myself that we might get a fairly decent glimpse of the solar eclipse. Granted, it wasn’t going to be the totality that was seen across the country, but it would still be cool.
By the time the eclipse began, the clouds were pretty solid. Christina, however, had brought her eclipse glasses from 2017 and we all took turns looking through the glasses and got a glimpse of what was happening in the sky. It was really pretty fascinating.
Not so fascinating that I was going to travel cross country to see it. I was amazed to see some of the crowds across the path of the totality today. I get it, in a way. It is likely a once in a lifetime thing to experience totality. Watching some of the coverage today, it was an awe-inspiring sight. It was really intriguing to watch as the moon moved in front of the sun, starting to cover it, seeing the Bailey’s beads, the diamond ring and the corona around the edges before the moon started to slip to the other side seemed like it was over so quickly in each location.
Watching it is nothing like experiencing it, but coverage of the path moving and the various locations where news crews were set up as the networks moved from one location to another was at times a little overwhelming.
We weren’t the only ones that had our view obstructed by clouds, but even with the clouds in the path of totality it appeared to still be an experience to be remembered.