Purdue°®¶¹apps hiring strategy proves miserable failure
When is the insanity in the Purdue football program going to end? When is the athletic director going to abandon the practice of hiring assistant coaches for their first head coach position and expecting a winning program?
This strategy, which has been on going for more than a decade, has yielded a winning percentage hovering around 30% and resulted in a historic loss in the Oaken Bucket game.
Hats off to the IU program for hiring an accomplished head coach from the Sun Belt Conference. Their strategy worked. So now that the powers that be at Purdue have accepted their pitiful strategy has failed again, are they going to continue the insanity and select another assistant coach hoping for a different outcome? Or are they going to become enlightened by being trounced by IU and their new head coach, and seek the same kind of candidate?
I wish I had the confidence to believe they have finally learned their lesson and abandoned this horribly failed strategy. Only the future will tell.
Ronald Baker
Fort Wayne
Transgender sports issues demand a deeper study
Growing arguments about transgender participation in high school and college sports have made headlines not only in sports coverage, but in the mainstream media. It is not only an interesting topic to follow because of its controversy, but it°®¶¹apps having to do with the issue of fairness.
Fairness as in the possibility of being excluded from participation, and fairness as in amount of measured testosterone levels in competition. This seems mostly to lean in the area of transgender males to females entering women°®¶¹apps sports.
There have been women participating in male sports. Some in football, some in wrestling come to mind. Particular sports at schools and colleges are not always available for women°®¶¹apps teams, so in some cases, the door has been open for women athletes who were able to compete in male-dominant team sports.
(I looked up women who played in men°®¶¹apps sports and found a list. Here are some examples: Wikipedia had KaLena °®¶¹appBeanie°®¶¹app Barnes: Former punter, and first woman to play on a top 10-ranked Division I-A team, the University of Nebraska; and ABC News reported that on Feb. 17, 2024, Maddy Ripley, a senior at Oceanside High School in Maine, won the Maine State High School Class B boys wrestling championship. Didn°®¶¹appt hear any loud buzz about that, so I guess they figured out locker room issues.)
This brings to center the contested concepts of what the participants want, and what is exactly fair. Is it the love of the sport, and participation with others, or is it acceptance when you appear different than those around you? Maybe both?
Possible solutions could be to have transgender-only sports teams (not practical right now because of the availability of players) or allow transgender males to females to try out for and play men°®¶¹apps sports. It apparently has worked with the women athletes mentioned above. Maybe it comes down making available a changing room for the athlete(s).
A lot depends on the goals of the participant and the institution. Fairness and goals should be discussed in an open forum for understanding to succeed, and solutions to prevail.
Jim Turcovsky
Auburn
An appalling reflection of our society today
When I read the Nov. 28 front-page headline °®¶¹appTrump team under attack,°®¶¹app I thought it would be about criticisms that have been made of the president-elect°®¶¹apps appointees. I was appalled to learn that it referred to bomb threats and swatting attacks.
No one should be targeted with such violent threats. It doesn°®¶¹appt matter what someone°®¶¹apps politics, religious beliefs or sexual preferences are. Such attacks should never be made, and they should never be tolerated.
Darrell Turner
Fort Wayne
