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Launched in 2020, Voice in Sport™ (VIS) is a resource for female athletes to openly discuss everything from training to self-esteem, leadership, nutrition, life after sport, and more. Among the podcasts produced by VIS are discussions about concussions, healthy sleep habits, disordered eating, and handling the rigors of competition. VIS also engages in advocacy work.

“We think it’s really important that young athletes have access to a diverse set of role models,” said Alexandra Suarez, platform manager for VIS. “What we’ve done is created the first global digital sport mentoring platform, which connects professional and current athletes with younger athletes. From there, we brought on teams and clubs.”

The VIS mentoring program enables young athletes to connect with established names in sports, like Allyson Felix, for sessions. All mentors are able to individually set their rates for mentoring sessions, so rates vary based on who is hosting a session.

“Separately, we’re offering a lot of free sessions because of our partnership with the WNBA Changemakers,” said Suarez. “They’re sponsoring 50,000 athletes with premium memberships and unlocking 144 mentorship sessions for free over the next year.”

Among the WNBA players available for mentoring are Aliyah Boston, Alysha Clark, Ariel Atkins, Betnijah Laney, and Nneka Ogwumike. These will be group sessions, such as for an AAU or club team. Some mentors have discussed dealing with an injury such as a torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), which numerous women’s basketball players have experienced.

In a recent session, Atkins spoke about building confidence and avoiding comparison. “She [described] to the athletes times in her life where she didn’t feel as confident as she does now, and I think the vulnerability is really inspiring for young athletes to see—[that] even the pros experience hardships and lack of confidence in their careers,” said Suarez.

Any athlete can join for free and free content is available on the VIS website (voiceinsport.com). There is also paid membership ($2 per month), which gives athletes broader access. Those individuals can view mentor profiles and request a one-on-one session or group sessions.

“We emphasize that mentors don’t have to solve each problem, but we encourage them open up, empathize, and share their journeys,” Suarez said. “For the younger athletes who are getting mentored, we hope that they will feel like they have somebody who believes in them and their success.”

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Willie Mays turned 93 on Monday.

We often measure our own immortality and human finitude by the timeline and aging of those we revere and venerate.

For builders, the generation born before 1946; baby boomers, the demographic born between 1946 and 1964; and Generation X, those born between 1965 and 1980, Willie Mays is a measure of duration, continuity, and inevitability.

Mays is arguably the greatest baseball player in the history of the sport. His place at the top is decisive for many longtime followers of the game that has been dubbed America’s national pastime—an appellation, according to the Library Congress, that was coined in 1856 by the Sunday Mercury, a weekly New York newspaper published from 1839 to 1896. The impact of baseball on this nation’s complex existence is why Mays is a cultural icon.

Sports historian, journalist, and baby boomer Mel “Doc” Stanley has frequently made his case to this writer for Mays being unsurpassed.

“There is no one who has ever been as good as Mays as an all-around player,” Stanley said. “If you consider what he did as a hitter, fielder, and base runner, playing most of his career at Candlestick Park, from 1960 to 1971—one of the hardest stadiums to hit and field with the wind whipping off of the water (San Francisco Bay), Mays is hands-down the best of all-time.”

Mays retired in 1973 at third on Major League Baseball’s home run list, with 660—behind only Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron. He averaged a remarkable homer every 15 at-bats at Candlestick.

“If Mays didn’t spend most of his career at Candlestick, he would have hit more than Babe (714) and Hank (755).”

Like his friend and contemporary Aaron, Mays was born in Alabama—Aaron in Mobile and Mays in Westfield. Both were products of the oppressive Jim Crow South and the Negro Leagues. (Aaron played just three months for the Indianapolis Clowns in 1951 before joining the Boston Braves, which later became the Milwaukee, then Atlanta, Braves organization.)

Mays roamed the outfield, primarily playing center field for the Birmingham Barons, New York/San Francisco Giants, and New York Mets, the latter from 1972 to 1973 when he was in his early 40s and well past his prime, a shell of his amazing height of eminence. 

Many Harlemites who grew up there in the 1950s can recall seeing Mays strolling through their neighborhoods, enjoying an evening at a local eatery, or famously playing stickball with them on their blocks. One of the most celebrated and recognizable figures in the United States of that era, “the Say Hey Kid,” as he was affectionately known, Mays embraced one of this country’s most prominent Black enclaves as his home.

The 2022 documentary “Say Hey, Willie Mays!” by filmmaker Nelson George illuminates and situates the various aspects of Mays’s indelible life; a life that has reflected many facets, hopeful and tortured, of the United States of America. 

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No woman had ever preached the keynote sermon at the Joint National Baptist Convention, a gathering of four historically Black Baptist denominations representing millions of people.

That changed in January when the Rev. Gina Stewart took the convention stage in Memphis, Tennessee—the Southern city home to Christ Missionary Baptist Church where she serves as senior pastor—and delivered a rousing message, asserting that Jesus not only included women in his ministry, but also identified with their suffering.

But what happened next put a spotlight on the obstacles women in Christian ministry continue to face as they carve out leadership space within the patriarchal culture of the Black church in America. Several women pastors told The Associated Press that it should serve as the breaking point.

“This is an example of no matter how high you rise as a woman, you’re going to meet patriarchy at the top of the hill,” said Martha Simmons, founder of Women of Color in Ministry Project, which helps women navigate the process of getting ordained. “The next Norton Anthology of African American preaching is probably 20 years away, but that sermon will be in there.”

Despite the enthusiastic reception for Stewart, the original recording of her historic sermon disappeared from the convention’s Facebook page, setting off a social media firestorm—driven mostly by women—protesting its removal. A recording of the sermon later appeared, but it was followed by accusations the convention edited her closing remarks, which challenges the four allied denominations to support women in ministry.

Jerry Young, president of the National Baptist Convention, USA, did not reply to requests from The Associated Press for comment. He said at another January meeting that he believed the Facebook page had been hacked and he planned to involve the FBI.

“I still don’t know what happened with the sermon, but what is clear is that this was a form of erasure,” Stewart said. “I was just as shocked, stunned and surprised as everyone else.”

It is symptomatic of a larger problem, according to several Black women pastors interviewed by the AP. They emphasized how they were worn down by the physical and psychological toll of working in a male-dominated culture.

In some denominations, women have made progress. The African Methodist Episcopal Church estimates that one-fourth of its total staff are women, including 1,052 ordained ministers.

In the Black church as a whole, male pastors predominate, though there’s no comprehensive gender breakdown. Simmons estimates that less than one in 10 Black Protestant congregations are led by a woman, even as more Black women are attending seminary.

The conditions aren’t new, but the public discourse over women’s equality in ministry has rapidly gained ground due in large part to the bullhorn social media provides, said Courtney Pace, scholar-in-residence with Memphis-based Equity for Women in the Church. Pace noted how Facebook afforded Eboni Marshall Turman a venue to publicly share her grievances before filing a gender discrimination lawsuit in December against Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York.

The late theologian and civil rights activist Prathia Hall underscores this dynamic, said Pace, who wrote “Freedom Faith: The Womanist Vision of Prathia Hall.” In the book, she details how Hall was a key inspiration for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

“The kind of thing that happened to Gina Stewart happened a lot to Prathia Hall,” Pace said. “When she was doing her work, we did not have social media, or cell phones with voice recorders and cameras in every hand. So who knows what the response to Prathia would have been with an empowered public like we have today.”

Hall was born in Philadelphia in 1940, the daughter of a Baptist preacher. As a youth, she took part in local speech competitions where she melded folk religion and liberation theology.

But not all of Hall’s relationships within the insular preaching fraternity of the National Baptist Convention were as collegial as her relationship with King, whom she said in later years did more with “I have a dream” than she could have.

Many theologically conservative Christian churches, including some Black Protestant denominations, prohibit women from preaching. They frequently cite certain biblical passages, including one they interpret as saying women ought to “be silent” in churches. Even in denominations without explicit bans, women with leadership aspirations often must contend with a patriarchal culture.

Last month, the audience was dotted with young Black women at an event hosted at the Howard Divinity School in Washington. A group convened a panel about the evolution of Black women’s role in the church.

Inside the cavernous Dunbarton Chapel that Howard Divinity shares with the Howard School of Law, a half-dozen Black women representing a range of independent churches and Black Protestant denominations spoke about persevering through instability and transition.

Their current duties, some of the women said, left them exhausted and unable to grieve the members they lost to COVID-19.

One speaker was Rev. Lyvonne Briggs. In 2019, she was being overworked and underpaid as an assistant pastor of a large Baptist church in California. Her marriage dissolved.

She restarted her life in Atlanta. During the lockdown one Sunday morning in her apartment, Briggs went live on Instagram and held a self-styled worship space for 25 people to share their experiences. It became known as The Proverbial Experience, which Briggs describes as an “African-centered, womanist series of spiritual gatherings to nourish the soul.”

In two years, Briggs grew her church into a digital community of 3,000. She also wrote “Sensual Faith: The Spiritual Art of Coming Back to Your Body,” a treatise on liberation from the sexual politics and objectification of Black women’s bodies in the church setting.

“I don’t ascribe to this idea that the Black church is dead,” Briggs told the AP. “But I do acknowledge and promote that we have to eulogize what it used to be so that we can birth something new.”

One preacher who fashions himself an expert on the topic of women’s role in the church, Walter Gardner of the Newark Church of Christ in Newark, N.J, sent a video link of one of his lectures when queried by the AP about his beliefs. At the end of one session, Gardner suggested that women, overall, ignore Scripture and are incapable of being taught.

That’s a mindset Gina Stewart would like to change, on behalf of future generations of Black women.

“I would hope that we can knock down some of those barriers so that their journey would be just a little bit easier,” said Stewart, who has continued to charge forward.

In a given week, her preaching schedule can take her to multiple cities. As an example, she traveled to Washington earlier this month after accepting a sought-after invitation to preach at Howard University’s Andrew Rankin Memorial Chapel.

Stewart’s goals mesh with those of Eboni Marshall Turman, who gave the Martin Luther King Jr. Crown Forum lecture in February at Martin Luther King’s alma mater, Morehouse College. In December, after not being named a finalist, she had sued Abyssinian Baptist Church and its pulpit search committee for gender discrimination over its hiring process for its next senior pastor, an assertion the church and the committee disputed. No woman has ever held the post.

A former Abyssinian assistant minister, the Rev. Rashad Raymond Moore, said in an email to The Associated Press that of the several dozen applicants for the senior pastor job, “none were more exciting, promising and refreshing than Eboni Marshall Turman.”

Added Moore, who now is pastor of New York City’s First Baptist Church of Crown Heights, “Pastoral searches in Black congregations, historically socially conservative, are often mired in the politics of discrimination, including biases based on gender, sexual orientation, marital status and age.”

Marshall Turman, a Yale Divinity School professor, offered pointed critiques in her first book at what she deemed the inherent patriarchy of Morehouse’s social gospel justice tradition. She adapted her recent lecture’s title from the last speech ever given by King, the all-male college’s most famous alum.

The title was blunt: “I’m Not Fearing Any Man.”

___

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

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* This article was originally published here