Read my colleague Jerry Carino's column on former Courier News Player of the Year and Scotch Plains-Fanwood standout Hillary Klimowicz in Saturday's paper.
Klimowicz was the Atlantic 10 Rookie of the Year last season at St. Joseph's in Philadelphia, but she gave up a promising Division I career to pursue other academic and social interests and transferred to The College of New Jersey.
http://www.c-n.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070113/SPORTS02/701130359
Klimowicz stopped by a few practices at her alma mater during winter break, but her old teammates could sure use a pep talk right now. Scotch Plains-Fanwood is in danger of slipping under .500 in January for the first time in a long, long, long time.
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5 comments:
Ryan,
Welcome aboard, and thanks for the plug.
P.S. Your favorite movies are really lousy.
Fever Pitch only had one thing going for it, and that would be that it was in focus. As a Red Sox fan, that had to be one of the most loathesome, terrible films ever made.
As for the article at hand, I wonder if the lack of enough professional women's teams leads to a lot of decisions like that. I remember there was another league besides the WNBA a few years back that folded. The odds are stacked against you to begin with to have a career in professional sports, but it seems that's an understatement for women's basketball and women's sports in general.
Great point. The average salary in the WNBA is somewhere in the $40,000 range. Most college grads could make more doing something else (not sports writing, though). There is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Sadly, women's professional team sports have foundered in this country. It's partly due to oversaturation, partly due to the fact that the bulk of the population, including those at peak buying power right now, grew up in the pre-Title IX era.
One or two generations down the line, this may change. Right now, though, student-athletes like Klimowicz are better off preparing to become a psychologist or a teacher.
The WNBA also needs to a do much better job of marketing its product and its stars. They have some very marketable players like Lisa Leslie, Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi -- but when do you ever see them in a commercial or in any sort of advertising promoting the game.
Maybe Candace Parker can change all that, but I doubt it...I think all three of the aforementioned players are bigger names.
Women's basketball needs that Michelle Wie presence that golf (obviously) has right now. Even if she's not performing well when playing against the men, she's still getting people talking about her and her sport for the right reasons (as opposed to the "sex sells" angle) and that's what women's basketball could really use.
Good for Hillary. Having covered her during her h.s. career at SP-F, I could tell basketball was her hobby but not her calling. It never defined her.
She had the same passion for music as she did for hoops, but people who only read about her in the paper probably never knew about her other interests and life goals.
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