Tennis and All That

In this blog post, I shall focus on the relative lack of visibility of lesbian, bisexual and transwomen on the professional women’s tennis circuit and in particular, the first ‘out’ lesbian tennis player. Despite the prejudicial stereotype that sporty women are more likely to be lesbian, a stereotype that may influence girls to opt out of sport at an early age, there are shockingly few professional women in the history of tennis who identify as being part of the LGBTQI+ community. This is especially surprising in recent decades, when coming out seems to have a less negative impact for sportswomen, for instance with role models such as Amelie Mauresmo whose sponsors supported her coming out rather than dropping her, as was the case for Martina Navratilova. There is a misconception that “tennis is full of lesbians” as Margaret Court, one time tennis player turned preacher, claims and then she goes on to admit that “there were only a couple” in her day but makes it sound as though ...

February is Black History Month when we celebrate the contribution that black people have made to society and to admire their various achievements. It’s also an opportunity to encourage black athletes to join the professional sports world, especially tennis. In this blog post, I wish to focus on black women tennis players many of whom I have watched at tournaments eg Zina Garrison, Lori McNeil, Katrina Adams, Chanda Rubin, and the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena. However, it all really started with one amazingly athletic, multi-talented black woman, Althea Gibson (1927-2003) who excelled at tennis, golf, basketball and became a singer, musician, actress and writer. She had trouble getting into tennis tournaments and at the start of her career played in all-black tournaments on the ATA (American Tennis Association). She broke the black glass ceiling when Alice Marble wrote to a magazine criticizing the USLTA, an all-white tennis circuit, from banning Althea from competing at t...

Today, 11 th February, is International Day of Women and Girls in Science but Sports Science is not included in the statistics to show the lack of women’s inclusion in this field. For more details about this day, see: http://www.un.org/en/events/women-and-girls-in-science-day/ It’s a two pronged problem in Sports Science. Firstly, women aren’t being researched so that means we have less information on, for instance, injury prevention and recovery in relation to women. Secondly, not many women study the subject and even when they do and become researchers they fall into the trap of researching men rather than women, perhaps in the hope that this will be popular with men and so give them an opportunity to be published in a prestigious Sports Science journal. Given that men are biased towards researching men themselves, this means that there’s even less research on female athletes which could be adversely affecting their success, progress and performance in sport. It’s an issu...

February 7 th is National Sports Day for girls and women 1 in the USA to celebrate women’s achievement in sport and to encourage girls’ participation in sport. I think this is a great idea. Billie Jean King’s foundation ‘Women’s Sports Foundation’ 2 is one of the 4 premiere organizations that are in this coalition supporting women in sport. This is something I feel very strongly about having trained to become a professional tennis player on a shoestring and with only the support of my mother who was also my coach. That’s a tough, impossible ask but I learned a great deal from it and I’m pleased I gave it a go even if not very successfully. I haven’t given up tennis, I’m still a professional player member of the ITF. It was a combination of severe financial constraints and family crises, bereavements, together with unfavourable conditions at Uni to put it mildly that disrupted my tennis career. After completing my Uni degree/life, I carried on as an independent researcher in m...