Featured awardee: Betsy Schneider

Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts

Throughout her life, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts clinical assistant professor Betsy Schneider connected with friends and family through sport. As a young person, she often would run with her father as a way to bond and exercise. While raising her own children, she became closely involved in their athletic careers, which spanned into collegiate competition.

“If I do my job right, I’m going to be able to present connections and create meaning,” said Schneider. Despite competing in sport as a young person and being disciplined with her body, Schneider compartmentalized that part of her life from her professional career. Prior to earning her grant award from the Global Sport Institute, sport was something commercial and cultural but rarely personal for Schneider.

Now, as a Global Sport Institute seed grant awardee, Schneider is realizing just how strong the bond between self-expression and sport truly is. Her research project, “The Best Girl on the Team,” uses still photographs and video storytelling to document the experiences of athletes who have competed as the only girl on a team full of boys. It’s a formative experience, one that lends itself to intimate portrayals and, Schneider hopes, it will elicit strong memories and responses from those who see the finished installation.

But after a previous project in which Schneider brought to life the experiences of different 13-year-olds and showed the work at multiple museums, she began to realize the power of showing viewers a sincere portrayal of the physical and emotional lives that young people live. How better to do that than through sport?

Image selections from Betsy Schneider’s Best Girl on the Team, her photography project in progress.

Photos courtesy of Betsy Schneider

“I am interested in how we’re formed and what shapes us, and recently I have been starting to think about the relationship of sports to culture in a more profound way than I’ve ever let myself before,” said Schneider.

Schneider’s work shows the possibilities of interdisciplinary sport scholarship and how to make lives and communities better through sport. Moving forward, she envisions a largescale installation that could potentially live in a nontraditional space such as a sports retail store or university athletic facility in addition to a more typical museum installation. This would give those in both worlds the chance to hear these young people’s stories and think more deeply about gender and sport.