Adapting The Experience Of A Female Collegiate Athlete From Paper To Screen: A Reflection

How do you turn a piece of writing into a film? Where do we even begin? These were our first questions when approaching this project, and what made us grateful that we would have three minds working on the answers. I, Alex, was apprehensive, especially after our group decided to adapt my autoethnography. As a female collegiate athlete myself, it is easy to understand and find meaning in my paper. However, to outsiders like Guanqi and AK, the concepts of the male hegemonic systems in sport and the devaluation of female athletes was uncharted territory. Because my group members are such strangers to my particular in-group, I became worried that I would not be open to their new ideas or criticism. However, because Guanqi, AK, and I all eagerly approached this project as open-minded learners and listeners with clear, high expectations for our final product, each of our individual concerns that typically accompany the “dreaded group project” vanished as we quickly trusted one another to provide critical and constructive feedback. As a result of our various backgrounds, thoughts, and suggestions, we created a strong compilation of our individual creativity that powerfully communicates our message about inequality in sport and how it prevents female athletes from fully adopting an athletic identity.

The process for our group was strenuous and on-going, but made easier by our frequent collaborations. We pitched our ideas, discussed how we could combine them, and got to work on our storyboard. The biggest challenge our group faced was delegating a script. Something that was appropriate for our new popular audience, that would keep them engaged, tell a story, but most importantly send our message. The first step was cutting out a basic structure from the original paper, and deciding what the main points were that we needed to include. We decided that the area we wanted to focus on communicating to our audience was the idea of male dominance in sport and its particular impacts on the identity of female collegiate athletes. To accurately portray this inequality to our new audience we strove to create a video that was an appropriate blend of both “They-Say” and “I-Say.” We worked very hard to converge these in order to make a cohesive video that would not only entertain the popular audience, but also put them in the shoes of a female collegiate athlete and urge them to recognize the importance of creating an equal sporting environment for males and females.

The most significant change from paper to script was initially it’s structural component. While the paper began with the literature review evidence and moved into Alex’s personal experiences, the script needed to be modified to introduce my personal evidence and credibility as a collegiate female athlete first. The script was repeatedly adjusted and adapted in order to creatively intertwine the personal evidence with the scholarly references, in such a way that made our group decide upon the inclusion of two voices in the video. Alex would read her own personal evidence, and AK would represent the voice of the broader conversation about female identification in sport. This was a specific rhetorical choice we made to build the ethos of the video, so that the audience could not disregard Alex’s experiences and review of the literature as bias. Rather, it demonstrates in quite a literal sense that she was simultaneously listening and contributing to the larger conversation.

After struggling to transform the formal language of our script into a more casual format, we decided this was the main area that we needed to improve. As a team we went through the entire script multiple times to make it sound more natural and clear to the popular audience. In a sense, AK and Guanqi were able to act as the popular audience during this process and point out particular areas that, although made perfect sense to Alex, would need to be further explained to our audience. We particularly focused on making the personal evidence more relatable and engaging to the viewer. We took the script paragraph by paragraph, summarizing their main points, synthesizing our ideas, and rewording when necessary so we could keep the meaning of the paper relevant, yet still appeal to our audience. We are all truly proud of how hard we worked on this aspect of the project as a team, and think given more time, we could have produced an even more polished script.

In terms of our visuals, we wanted to create both an authentic and professionally polished product. By starting with images of Alex growing up as a kid and an athlete, we hoped to not only appeal to the pathos of the audience, but also to add to the credibility of her words and experiences. Being a member of the team meant that Alex could access film and images of the WFU Women’s Basketball team to benefit the video. These resources proved very beneficial in making the smooth transition between personal documentation and evidence throughout the project! On top of all this, we thought the inclusion of Raegyn’s interview was important because it showed yet another voice and face to the audience and further enhanced the connection between textual evidence and personal stories of female athletes. However, initially we were unsure as to what key ideas we wanted to take from her interview, and as a result her contribution to the video became almost overpowering of Alex’s own evidence. After recognizing this, we made an effort to cut her interview down to just key points that both supported our thesis, and highlighted she and Alex’s mutual experiences. We wanted to send the message that this video isn’t just about Alex’s experience as a female athlete, but also the shared experiences of most members of her in-group.

Our choice of music, although accidentally discovered, came to embody significant rhetorical meaning. While the song “Congratulations” by Post Malone, happens to have a dramatic beat that complimented the introductory basketball clips to our video well, its lyrics connected to our call to action in such a way that could build pathos in our popular audience. The end of the video focuses particularly on the lyrics, “I dreamed it all ever since I was young, they said I wouldn’t be nothing, now they always say congratulations,” which we agreed were a fitting summary of Alex’s growth as an athlete, and what could be, if our call to action was answered. For this reason, we chose to use the instrumental in the beginning of our video, so that while watching the conclusion, the audience can simultaneously see where they’ve come from, and look to what is ahead.

The collaborative writing process that occurred in this project has complimented what WRI111 has already helped us to do. It has made us critical writers who want to be in a conversation with others when we write, and helped us to recognize the importance of critical feedback. Being on a team pushed us to come to all of our meetings with open minds, ready to listen and adapt the work we were building upon. With more eyes it became easier to see the flaws in our script, and from this we were able to develop strategies to put together a strong compilation of our various ideas! Take, for example, the sentence from the original paper “When the ideology surrounding male dominance in sport is culturally reinforced by its masculine hegemonic systems, as well as through the social and economical inequality that exists between male and female athletes, the downstream idea that sportswomen are a sideshow to the main event of male sport is perpetuated.” For Alex, this sentence made perfect sense because it is such a familiar topic. However, AK and Guanqi found it hard to follow and subsequently devised a way to reword it into a sentence that was easier for the popular audience to understand. After multiple sessions workshopping we finished with, “Research has shown that masculine hegemonic systems in sport reinforce not only the concept of male dominance, but also the subsequent idea that females athletes are a sideshow to male athletes ,” which keeps the same message, but delivers it in a more casual way that is suited to our popular audience.

This strategy relates strongly to our strengths as a team, the most important of these being communication. There wasn’t a day that we didn’t stay in contact, check in on our progress, or evaluate plans to work on certain aspects of the video. The biggest change we saw from when we first met, to when we last did, was our collective efforts to input our ideas, critique, and opinions to each other, without fear of being shut down or rejected. We were able to create a safe environment for effective communication which made us all grateful to be a part of such a uniformly driven group. However, that being said, as with any group task, we definitely had challenges with agreeing upon rhetorical decisions like the placement of an image, or the choice of music. We learned to understand that we would all have to compromise for the progress of the group and management of time. There were moments when we could’ve used our time more effectively, especially when we only had one computer to edit the video on (which turned into two after some technically savvy work). However, because we were all committed to the project, even if it meant sacrificing some of our time to study for other finals, we were able to cover for this weakness.

The combination of each of our unique experiences and ideas is what made the transition from an academic paper to an appealing and powerful video possible. As collaborative writers we have come to realize that we can combine our efforts to become one strong writer with three critical mirrors to strengthen us, rather than forcing a predetermined combination of individual works. In the future, we will be able to use the lessons this project has taught us as a springboard into higher level group work and writing. We have developed within ourselves an inbuilt peer response machine, so when describing an idea or stating a theory in future individual assignments we can now ask ourselves, “Would AK understand this?” or “What would Guanqi say about this particular statement?” and edit our writing with their critique in mind. By thinking about our writing in this way, we also ensure that our words make sense to a wider audience beyond just ourselves! At the end of the day, we can now reflect on our individual writing as more than just writers, but also as readers, peers, supporters, and critics.

Alex Sharp, AK Shipper, Guanqi Zeng