On any given day, sports fans – regardless of religious denomination – may cheer brutality, pray for victory, and question the heart and commitment of an athlete when a team loses. In the heat of competition, we forget the bodies we are watching are risking health and well-being in the game or match we find entertaining.
Marcia W. Mount Shoop, a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) minister, author and longtime advocate for athletes, invites fans to look at sports as an extension of the larger culture and to “bring their whole selves and all the questions they bring to issues they are about — to the sports they love.”
“It is almost like (sports) is supposed to be a break from those big questions, but it’s really Ground Zero, where these things truly impact people,” says Shoop, who is pastor of Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church in Asheville, North Carolina. “Sports has everything the larger culture has in it. It has capitalism, it’s got White supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia — everything.”
When her husband, John Mount Shoop, was coaching in the NFL – first as quality control coach, then quarterbacks coach for the Carolina Panthers, and, later offensive coordinator for the Chicago Bears – she said people seemed to check their values at the door.
“Sports is a business, whether college or pro sports. Our bodies are commodities in that business.” — Marcia Shoop
“Sports is a business, whether college or pro sports. Our bodies are commodities in that business. I was very disturbed and unsettled about some of the ways that bodies are treated, especially in big-time revenue sports,” Marcia Shoop said.
“If a young man had a bad game, they didn’t want to hear about it,” she said. “If he had a concussion, they said ‘toughen up.’”
These are the kinds of attitudes that create an intense and stressful culture for athletes in what is already a naturally competitive environment. In this kind of culture, winning becomes a priority, often more important than the health of a body or mind. Some of the resulting traumas are as well-known as the athletes who have borne them.
- In 1984, boxing legend Muhammad Ali was diagnosed with Parkinson’s syndrome, which sometimes results from head trauma from violent physical activities such as boxing.
- NFL Hall of Fame running back Earl “The Tyler Rose” Campbell left football in 1986. His career included winning the Heisman Trophy during college while playing for the Texas Longhorns. He has since been diagnosed with spinal stenosis and sometimes uses a cane, walker or wheelchair.
- In 2007, track and field athlete Marion Jones admitted using performance enhancing drugs in her quest to become the fastest woman in her sport. She was stripped of her five Olympic medals and served six months in prison for lying to federal investigators.
- In 2020, Luke Kuechly retired from the NFL at age 28 after spending eight seasons (his entire career as a professional player) as a linebacker for the Carolina Panthers and sustaining at least three concussions.
- He was not the first young player to step away from the game at his peak, concerned about brain injury since the discovery of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease found in athletes and others with a history of repetitive brain trauma. In an interview with the Charlotte Observer, Kuechly said of football, “I think everybody in the N.F.L. understands that it’s a violent game.
- Simone Biles, the world’s greatest gymnast, bravely withdrew from the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 and took a two-year hiatus to prioritize her mental health. After this year’s Olympics, she became the most decorated U.S. Olympic gymnast.
The mount shoops: The coach and the pastor
At times when he was working in the NFL, Coach Shoop wished he could just be a fan and ignore what he saw up close: The disrespect and devaluing of athletes, the people who risked their bodies to make profit for the business.
But his wife called his salary “hush money,” and she nudged him to do what he could to make things right, assuring him he was not alone because God was with him.
“I’m really not the social justice warrior; my wife is,” he said.
Yet the two became well-known advocates for athletes and pioneers in the movement to have collegiate athletes paid for their work and what is known as NIL, the use of their name, image and likeness.
“We thought ‘everybody else could make money on who they are; why can’t college athletes?’” Marcia Mount Shoop said.
The Shoops grew up in sports-oriented families and became athletes themselves — she a cross-country runner in college and he a collegiate football player. He coached football for more than two decades in both the NFL and NCAA Division 1 and now is quarterback coach for the Rhein Fire, a European Football League team in Germany.
“There isn’t a lot of progressive Christian presence in the world of sports,” said Rev. Mount Shoop. “We were sometimes the lone voices, especially in big time football.”
In addition to being a minister, Marcia Mount Shoop is the author of books such as Touchdowns for Jesus and Other Signs of Apocalypse. The couple has a daughter who is a Division 1 track and cross country athlete in college and a son who plays professional rugby.
John Mount Shoop was an assistant football coach at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010 when the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) investigated the school and determined it had violated multiple regulations.
“Eighteen young Black men were just steamrolled by the university with no due process, as their leaders tried to cover their tails,” said the coach. “It was hard to swallow. For the first time in my life proximity (to the game) felt like a burden.”
Coach Shoop took a year off to advocate for the athletes. The couple blogged, testified before Congress and produced a public radio podcast advocating for rights for athletes on the college and professional level.
He took a coaching job at Purdue, where he was unsuccessful at convincing the administration to adopt protections for players based on new concussive research. His firing from the school was noted in a New York Times article with the headline, “Purdue Fires A Champion of Athletes’ Rights.”
Shop talk
Ultimately, the coach believes he and his wife made a difference in the public conversations and the education of people about the injustices experienced by athletes and the changes needed, but he said, “One person who did more for changing the landscape in college sports than anyone else is a man who didn’t even play in college: LeBron James.”
The coach said the directors of an HBO documentary called “Student Athlete” asked to feature him and his family in the 2018 film, which was critical of NCAA policies it said unfairly left many athletes poor.
“I was very reluctant to participate because I wanted to coach and this would keep me from probably coaching again,” said Coach Shoop, who was considering backing out until the directors received word that basketball superstar LeBron James of the L.A. Lakers had signed on as an executive producer.
The coach knew that with the sports legend attached to the project, the documentary would be seen by a larger audience. Then, he said, James made another move that would elevate the rights of athletes. Shortly after the movie premiere, the NBA superstar had California Gov. Gavin Newsom on his HBO talk show called “The Shop,” where candid conversations occur in a barbershop. On the show, the governor signed into law the state’s “Fair Pay to Play Act,” which gave college athletes the ability to be paid for use of their name and likeness in the state of California.
“The gig is up,” Newsom said on the show. “Billions and billions of dollars – 14 plus billion – goes to these universities, goes to these colleges; a billion plus to the NCAA; and the actual product, the folks putting their lives on the line, putting everything on the line — are getting nothing.” Gavin said signing the bill would give athletes the right every other college student already had: the right to earn money off their name, image, and likeness.
Mount Shoop said that within days, the people he and his wife had battled with for years signed the same law in their states.
“Some of the most conservative states in our country made an absolute 180 because they realized they would lose their best players to California,” the coach said. “I think Lebron James was the tip of the spear and certainly Marcia and I were in his wake.
“It’s really interesting how fast things turned and how fast student athletes gained the upper hand and got power.”
Women’s sports
Today, John Mount Shoop enjoys waking each morning to check the box scores of the WNBA. He said his critics once warned him that the trickle-down impact of his advocacy work for men would be to ruin women’s sports.
But he didn’t believe them. He believes he’s seen that the work he and his wife did has helped women’s sports also. “So, in some ways maybe a rising tide raises all ships.”
But of course, it’s no surprise that the ship of women hasn’t risen as high as the boatload of men. Women athletes still earn way less than their male counterparts for the same work. Their bodies and their talents are considered less valuable than those of men.
It’s no surprise that the ship of women hasn’t risen as high as the boatload of men. Women athletes still earn way less than their male counterparts for the same work.
A recent Forbes list of the 50 highest-paid athletes of all time shows only one woman: tennis icon Serena Williams.
Nevertheless, some marquee events and increased television coverage bringing long overdue attention point to a dramatically changing future for women athletes. There’s a fresh interest in women’s college basketball, which might be credited to the spirited rivalry between the University of Iowa’s Caitlin Clark and Louisiana State University’s Angel Reese, two players at the top of their sport and both now playing in the WNBA.
The women’s NCAA tournament is coming off its most successful year, including a record television audience of 18.7 million for the title game win by South Carolina over Iowa. The broadcast drew three million more viewers than the men’s championship. Yet the women’s NCAA teams and therefore, the athletes, have never benefited financially in the same way that men’s teams have.
Finally, this past August the NCAA Division I Board voted to introduce a proposal to financially reward women’s teams that reach the NCAA Tournament, in the same way they have rewarded men’s teams for years. The deciding vote will be taken in January 2025 for a plan that will allow financial incentives to begin with the 2025 tournament.What helped propel the proposal is the NCAA’s new media rights deal with ESPN that includes many women’s championships. The NCAA shares with its member schools the millions it receives for television and marketing rights. The latest extension of that deal is worth $8.8 billion over eight years. Most of the money flows through the NCAA and back to its member schools. The schools mostly re-invest in athletics, from scholarships for athletes in all sports – though not salaries – to coaching salaries, training facilities, stadiums, ballparks and arenas.
Nevertheless, the disrespect for women has been deep and blatant.
In 1963, the Equal Pay Act (EPA) passed, “prohibiting discrimination on account of sex,” according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, but last year, a week before the 60th anniversary of the EPA, tennis player Coco Gauff earned $455,000 for winning the Cincinnati Open, while the male winner of the Open, Novak Djokovic, took home $1,019,335 for the same work.
The disrespect for women has been deep and blatant.
In 2021, fans, coaches and former players were appalled when a female athlete posted a video showing the women’s NCAA tournament weight room consisted of one rack of dumbbells and a stack of yoga mats. She also showed the men’s tournament weight room — an expansive room stocked with rows of weights and training equipment.
“That NCAA bubble weight room situation is beyond disrespectful,” wrote A’ja Wilson, who plays for the WNBA’s Las Vegas Aces and was a member of this year’s Olympic team.
“These women want and deserve to be given the same opportunities,” Ali Kershner, a sports performance coach at Stanford University, tweeted.Mary Elizabeth Shoop grew up aware that
her parents, the Mount Shoops, were advocating to change the culture of sports and for the rights of athletes. She witnessed that fans loved her father as long as his Big 10 Conference team was winning.
When it was time for her to choose a college where she’d run cross country and track, Shoop chose a smaller Division I school, Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina.
“Going to colleges each year and hearing people yell at my family definitely was a factor when I decided on Davidson,” said Shoop, who longed for a kinder, less aggressive sports culture.
“I think being a female athlete is especially challenging as it is. In the female running community there is a lot of comparison of bodies and eating disorders that are easy to latch onto.”
What has been helpful to her peers, she said, is “a lot more female voices in the forefront of the community. I could not imagine going to a school and having a male coach. Running can be so vulnerable, and it’s easier to talk to a female coach about how I feel in my body.”
Still, according to the Women’s Sports Foundation, nearly 75 percent of youth head coaches are men. Great change will take intentionality by everyone, including corporate brands who give multi-million-dollar sponsorships to men.
Women’s sports, however, are drawing record-breaking crowds and the world of women’s sports is growing as new leagues and games are founded. Investors, including tennis legend Billie Jean King, launched the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL), an alternative route for women who want to play professional hockey and who previously were required to play in college. Attendance for The National Women’s Soccer League was up 48 percent and viewership was up 21 percent last year.
Women’s sports … are drawing record-breaking crowds and the world of women’s sports is growing as new leagues and games are founded.
WNBA stars Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier co-founded the professional women’s basketball league called Unrivaled, which will launch in January 2025. They say Unrivaled will be player-owned and will offer the highest average salary in women’s professional sports league history.
According to The Wrap.com, an entertainment news site, the four most-watched days of the 2024 Olympics were the days that women’s gymnastics competitions were held. On two of those days, swimming and basketball events contributed
to the viewership: Katie Ledecky won her ninth gold medal, and both the men’s and women’s basketball teams from the U.S. secured spaces in the semifinals.
The struggle to maintain mental and emotional health
In addition to risking their bodies, athletes risk their mental health to play at their peak.
For the past decade, Natalie Graves, a social worker and sports therapist, has worked specifically with athletes in all levels of sports, from elite youth to retired professionals. What she finds they all have in common is stress.
“Quite often we dehumanize athletes,” said Graves, who owns Natalie Graves Athletic Counseling in Chicago, Illinois.
“We equate their worth to what we want them to achieve, not considering all the commitment it took to reach, for instance, the Olympics,” Graves said. “As fans, we have this entitlement of the win, which puts more pressure on the athlete and makes what they do even more difficult.
“Very often, if their views differ from our own views, they are demonized,” Graves said, citing as an example Fox News journalist Laura Ingraham’s comment after LeBron James expressed his political views. Ingraham said James should, “Shut up and dribble.”
Graves said athletes are allowed to be “conscious and to have political views. Fans should allow athletes to be themselves and be human.”
She often recommends her clients take social media breaks for their own emotional health, avoiding the mean and disrespectful online posts made by fans emboldened because they’re speaking “behind the screen.” She also guides athletes forced to give up their sport because of injury or retirement as they find a new personal identity quite often after decades of a single, focused commitment.
“We know athletes who are injured have a higher incidence of depression,” said Graves. “I would liken leaving a sport, particularly being forced out, is a similar grief to a death.”
She counsels athletes, particularly Black athletes, who hesitate to get psychological help because of the associated stigma in their community.
“There is also a Christianity tie, where you’re told you can’t be depressed or if you are you don’t have enough faith. But we don’t say that with cancer. We don’t say that about diabetes,” said Graves. “You have to think about the culture of sports. You shake it off. You play hurt. You’re tough. Asking for help is very contradictory to sports culture.”
She finds women athletes are criticized for their bodies much more often than men, and Black women appear to be criticized even more because of their body types.
“My Black gymnasts mention comments about their bodies and how people are ‘othering’ them,” said Graves.
Tracy Ellis-Ward, senior vice president of Pacers Sports & Entertainment, played basketball at University of Missouri, and has long observed “how women of color get portrayed versus Caucasian women in women’s sports. Sometimes people don’t appreciate a person can be strong and muscular and still be feminine.”
Decades of advocacy work have taught Rev. Mount Shoop that change is possible. The question might be, ‘How long does change take?’ The pastor and wife of a football coach offers this: “Even as we change our policies and even as we change the rules, it takes decades to change cultures. To really change the culture around things like body image, racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and transphobia takes a lot of intentionality. I don’t think there’s consistent intentionality in the world of sports, because there is not intentionality in the larger culture.”
