I recently had the chance to sit down with a good friend's spouse, a women's rowing coach, and the conversation gravitated to one of the most pressing issues for NCAA coaches now: weighing athletes, or instituting what my coaches and trainers used to call "playing weight." He told me that the NCAA now discourages coaches from weighing athletes--especially women athletes--because of the alarmingly high rate of eating disorders. I was very interested to learn about this new trend, and so the story on the same topic in today's New York Times caught my eye.
The story cites a psychologist who consults with the NCAA, who says that public weigh-ins amount to "public degradation." And so the numbers are suppressed, and only women's heights are published. The fabulous and brilliant Jenny Moshak, who has been head trainer since my days at Tennessee, speaks out in the story against the practice of closely monitoring weight gain. Times have definitely changed.
In the late eighties and early nineties, my teammates and I woke up at 5:30 every Monday morning for weigh-in with Jenny (though truth be told, I could tell she had some reservations about the army-esque practice even then). Those of us who were feeling a little on the heavy side would meet on Sunday night around midnight for a long sweaty jog, and some would arrive wearing layers of sweats or trash bags with holes cut in the top and sides. Others would eat cereal all weekend long. If we were on our periods, we would put a big dot by our names on the weight chart to account for extra lbs from water retention, and the joke became that some had their periods an awful lot. Weigh-ins were definitely a source of stress.
We all had ideal weights and were allowed to fluctuate only four pounds above or--this is important too--below that weight. Ideal weights changed yearly, in part because college-age bodies are still changing, and in part because sometimes our positions changed. When my coach moved me to the inside, I was allowed (or
encouraged, I can't remember which) to put on a few pounds--I think my ideal weight was ratcheted up about five or seven pounds. Then when I moved back to the outside my junior year, I took it off for speed. Weight does correlate
with certain aspects of performance, and that correlation seems to me to be as
proveable as the frequency of eating disorders. It's just that the latter are
understandably cause for alarm.
So part of me says good for the NCAA
for taking a stand. But there's still a bind, since body weight figures so strongly into performance. (My friend the rowing coach pointed out, for example, that it kind of matters how much rowers weigh when determining placement in the boat and things like that.) Moshak, the Tennessee trainer, says they focus on performance, which seems fair enough. But the solution to sluggishness would also be to watch what one eats, I would imagine. Or maybe I'm missing something.
Despite all these mildly alarming tactics my teammates and I developed for weigh-ins, I do want to point out a good effect of posting weights. Athletes are big and strong, and as a result, we tended to weigh a LOT more than our classmates. The shorter players (5'4") weighed in at 140 or so if memory serves, and the 5'9" players would run around 145 or 150. Those of us who were average height--I mean mathematical average, i.e., around 6 feet--weighed in the high 150s or low 160s, and weights went up from there. So oddly being surrounded by women who weighed in at a solid 160, my weight was normalized so that I never felt bad when I left college and started working at a communication company with people whose weights sound more like fm radio frequencies [I deleted a long aside here about dancer bodies, and how they come under the most intense scrutiny].
In other words, even weigh-ins became a matter of maintaining and also embracing our size, which oddly is the title of the New York Times article. Even if we were trying to sweat off a couple of pounds, most of us still weighed a century and a half or more, and there was something empowering about knowing that. So while I do think the obsessiveness over weight can become a problem, I guess I'm not sure what suppressing the numbers will achieve. That is: could it not be a good thing for young fans to know, for example, that a star player at Tennessee weighs 175? Or that Courtney Paris weighs 225 on a light day? (This according to the article about not publishing weights.)
I also think this article skews things a bit by focusing on Paris, a basketball player. In my experience, other sports like gymnastics, swimming, and track, where levity and speed give an edge almost across-the-board, more commonly feature eating disorders as an occupational hazard. At least Courtney Paris can make good use of the extra lbs in her sport.
If anyone is interested in this issue, you might check out Leslie Heywood's memoir Pretty Good for a Girl, which features a remarkable account of her days as a highly public track star and her private eating disorder. I'm sure there are other good books as well. Feel free to add thoughts/reactions/recommendations in the comments.
(pictured at right), an out lesbian to whom Martina Hingis referred some years ago as "half a man." I think Lindsay Davenport even got in on the action there. This instance is yet another instance where the categories of otherness and excessivness all line up: and here we have not only a bulkier than usual tennis physique, but we also have a non-American, non-straight person, etc. The category of woman can't seem to contain all these othernesses (at least that's how the logic goes). I'd argue that the same thing happens with 
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