GG Galore: Football For All

Super Bowl champion embraces LGBTQ+ youth

Good Game is a 1-2x/week newsletter speaking the language of youth sports parents. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support our efforts to educate and empower everyone with a stake in youth sports.

Photo: Original Element Foundation

Happy Friday. Excited to bring back a little Good Game Galore, where I share recent youth sports news and columns that caught my eye. I’ll hop right to it because as a veteran NFL journalist, the announcement that two-time Super Bowl champion Khalen Saunders is spearheading a LGBTQ+ flag-football camp gave me all the feels. Saunders announced the camp/combine at the GLAAD Media Awards and will co-host with RK Russell, a former NFL player who came out as bi-sexual in 2019.

Ok, so the NFL hasn’t been the most welcoming place for anyone who isn’t exuding traditional manliness. Locker rooms bring together players from all backgrounds which come with a lot of positives. Conversely, anti-LGBTQ slurs like calling another player a “fag” or “sissy,” even jokingly, has long been a fabric of locker room culture.

Imagine being closeted in that culture. Imagine having a member of the LGBTQ community in your family. Imagine just caring about inclusion.

Enter Saunders, the 325-pound, Saints defensive tackle, who has marked inclusion of the LGBTQ+ community in football as a pillar of his Original Element Foundation. Khalen’s brother, Kameron, is a proud member of the LGBTQ+ community, and was also a dancer on Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. (The Swiftie-NFL connections run deep, people!)

In an interview with NFL Network, Khalen talked eloquently about how the masculine, heterosexual imagery of the NFL underscores the importance of reaching audiences that might feel shut out.

I just love this announcement from Khalen as it signals a tiny shift in NFL culture, albeit a slow one. Hopefully, it trickles down to young athletes. There is no way that 20 years ago, even 10 years ago, a straight NFL player would publicly dedicate his foundation to the LGBTQ+ community. But with Carl Nassib becoming the first active player to come out in 2021, NFL’s Pride initiatives, and now this from Saunders, hopefully a few less young people feel excluded by football.

This good news should come with a grain of salt. Inclusion isn’t exactly the word of the day in American professional sports. Read this from Parker Molloy on MLB’s Jackie Robinson Day edit.

In other news:

USA Lacrosse put out a simple, yet useful guide to curbing unsportsmanlike behavior.

Speaking of unsportsmanlike, imagine being the kid at school with the mom who stole $147,000 from a Pennsylvania youth softball league to go on a shopping spree at Sephora. Save this one for White Lotus: Youth Sports Edition.

Please read this beautiful column in the LA Times: What I learned in the bleachers as a youth-baseball immigrant dad The title speaks for itself.

I really enjoyed this piece on Dionne Kohler’s new book, More Than Play: How Law, Policy, and Politics Shape American Youth Sport, which advocates for play-based sports to curb the “epidemic of preventable over-training issues.”

A Cincinnati city councilman is trying to curb gambling at youth sports events, claiming that bets of $5000 have been made. "Stop betting on our children," Scotty Johnson said. "It's really up to the people attending those games to not make our children objects." Johnson reported an uptick in gun violence and vandalism. Ugh.