Kent State Stopped A Field Hockey Game in 2OT for the Football Team’s Pregame Fireworks Show.
Just another ludicrous example of how football rules college sports.
When it comes to college sports, there’s no secret — football is the big cheese. No other sport brings in nearly as much revenue, and all that money is used to sustain most of a school’s other athletic programs.
But that also means football sometimes takes priority over other sports — something #24 Maine and Temple’s women’s field hockey teams learned the hard way this past weekend.
During a Saturday game hosted by Kent State, the two teams found themselves in a scoreless deadlock heading into the second overtime. That’s when the game reached an abrupt conclusion. Kent State administration came onto the field to call off the game.
The reason? Kent State football was playing their home opener at noon, which was supposed to open with a fireworks display. For safety precautions, the game needed to be stopped to set up the fireworks.
Nope, this isn’t satire (oh, how I wish it was). The deeper you go into this story, the worse it gets. If they were playing at the football stadium, where the fireworks were set to take place, maybe stopping the game for fireworks prep would be understandable.
(In reality, stopping one sport so another sport can play shouldn’t be allowed at all, but since football is the bell cow, the engine that drives the machine, if you will, realistically, they will get preference.)
Regardless, it doesn’t matter. They weren’t playing on the football field, but on a different field entirely, one adjacent to the football stadium.
Okay — they were close to the stadium, though. If the football game was starting, it would make sense to temporarily stop the field hockey overtime for the fireworks.
But wait — that’s not the case, either. I refer you to the above tweet — the game was stopped at 10:45 for a noon fireworks display. That’s over an hour, whereas overtime periods are only 10 minutes long.
Also, this isn’t terribly relevant to the story, but — the fireworks sucked.
Say what you want, but this is the kind of thing I feel wouldn’t happen to a men’s’ sport. They wouldn’t even create a schedule with a possibility of this occurring. It just speaks to the inequalities that remain in the system.
How can Kent State say that field hockey isn’t important enough to finish their match? Perhaps the game wouldn’t have received the same treatment had Kent State’s own team been playing. Still, that shouldn’t be part of the decision-making process. What’s right is right, and this was very wrong.
Kent State offered to let the teams resume play at 5:30 pm. However, it was logistically impossible for the teams to wait seven hours to finish the contest and a ridiculous idea in the first place. The game was ultimately classified as a scrimmage, not affecting either team’s record or stats.
To make matters worse, Maine played again the very next day, falling 2–1 to — you guessed it — Kent State.
At the end of the day, we’ve got to do better here. Women’s sports — and less popular sports in general — shouldn’t exist only when we want them to or when it’s convenient. They have the right to play just as much as football does, and certainly shouldn’t be passed up for cheap fireworks.
Connor Groel is a writer who studies sport management at the University of Texas at Austin. He also serves as editor of the Top Level Sports publication on Medium, and the host of the Connor Groel Sports podcast. You can follow Connor on Medium, Facebook, and Twitter, and view his archives at toplevelsports.net
