April 28th

Thursday, April 28th

Today was a great day for my project, full of interviews and editing. I began the day off early with an interview with a woman named Hana Taiji. She works with Kick4Life, a unique soccer club based in Lesotho in southern Africa. Their mission is to change the lives and long-term prospects of vulnerable young people in Lesotho, boys and girls, through social activities, including soccer, that are focused on health, education, and support towards sustainable livelihoods. In the interview, I learned a lot about the role of women in Lesotho, and how that translates to the opportunity young girls have to play soccer in the country. It was a very interesting interview because I hardly knew anything about the country of Lesotho going in, and I left with a new perspective of women's soccer culture around the world since I got to hear about a country in a different continent. 

After my interview with Hana, I spent a number of hours doing the tedious editing work that now has gotten a little easier. I'm starting to master the previously confusing ways of Audacity, so it's making the boring process move a bit faster. 

Next, I interviewed Daniel Azcarate, general manager of Escuela de Fútbol Sarmiento Lora in Cali, Colombia. What I learned from Daniel actually surprised me. Instead of hearing about a lot of injustice that girls face in Colombia, he said that over the years the access to soccer has become extremely easy for girls. In fact, the have all of the same access as the boys do, even a professional league (will start in 2017). It was great to get to hear about a country that actually is moving in the right direction, so maybe other countries will begin to follow Colombia's example!

April 27th

Wednesday, April 27th

Today was another pretty tedious day for my project, but I got a lot done. The purpose of today was editing. I began the day by putting the final touches and edits on the interviews I have already done. My next priority was making sure the transitions were smooth. It was difficult to think of a way that I could transition from one interview to the next. However, I thought of the idea that I could introduce the interviews based on the countries where they were from, and it would flow a lot better. So, I added a new introduction before each interview, telling the listeners of the podcast what country the interview would be discussing. Now the podcast seems more cohesive, as if it's a journey around the world through women's soccer.

After the editing, I was scheduled to speak with Daniel Azcarate. However, I called him a few times and he did not answer. I waited for 30 minutes for him to respond before deciding he either forgot or something came up. He apologized around an hour later and we decided on a time for an interview tomorrow.

Next, I had Lovett soccer practice for two hours, and then went straight to my club team soccer practice for 2 hours.  After an exhausting 4 hours of playing, I came back home and finalized the questions for my interview with Hana Taiji for tomorrow.

April 26th

Tuesday, April 26th

Today was a pretty boring but also very necessary and productive day for my project. I spent a number of hours in the morning editing the interview with Ati. It took an extremely long time because there were lots of things I had to cut out. Since her English was a little broken, she tended to repeat herself a lot and explain things in a very long way. However, after I cut and pasted throughout the entire interview, it sounds really great because it has all of her important points in it! Although the process was very tedious, I'm really happy I took the time to do it because it sounds a lot better now.

After I edited Ati's interview, I continued and finished editing the other two interviews that I have done. Then, I recorded Ati's introduction and I combined all of the clips I had so far into one large podcast. After that, I went back to work on Daniel Azcarate, because I am interviewing him tomorrow. I decided that I could write his introduction because I did the actual interview, so I did that and then I recorded it. Then, I perfected the questions that are written in Spanish and made sure they were correct. I'm really excited about the opportunity to interview him tomorrow.

April 25th

Monday, April 25th

Today I got a lot done on my project! I started off the day with an interview with Ati from Seprojoven. I had prepared my questions both in English and in Spanish for this interview, but upon speaking with Ati she insisted we spoke in English so she could practice speaking her 3rd language. Her English was a little broken, so there are some long pauses that I will need to edit out, but other than that, it was a great interview. Ati is very young, and her opinions and values are very strong. She explained to me that Seprojoven aims to educate and empower girls and women through soccer, and they want to teach girls to be confident with their gender and with their sexuality.

They mostly work with girls who live in very rural parts of Costa Rica and who have fairly unstable family lives. They want the soccer club to be a place of safety for the girls, where they can act and speak their minds. The soccer drills that they do center around certain values and characteristics such as teamwork, empowerment, and sportsmanship. Ati explained how girls in Costa Rica very very rarely have any access to recreational sports like soccer, and it all boils down to the sexism in the country. She told me about how since Costa Rica is a very patriarchal society, women are seen as the weaker sex who must stay at home and work in the kitchen. She believes that before the problem of gender inequality in soccer can be solved, the country as a whole needs to find a solution to the looming sexism.

After this interview, I worked on writing the introduction for Ati. After I wrote it, I recorded it like I did with the other introductions. Next, I wanted to start putting the entire interview together. I wasn't sure how this worked in audacity, so I watched a number of tutorial videos on Youtube. Once I figured it out, I combined all of the clips. Now I have one cohesive podcast with 3 different interviews in it, and I can't wait to add the others!

April 22nd

Friday, April 22nd

Today was another great day for my project! I continued with my editing, which as I said before, is a pretty boring and tedious process. But, after I cleaned up the interviews by cutting out the unimportant things, the interviews sound a lot better. I'm excited for next week because I have 2 more interviews, and I can't wait to see how they all fit together. Next week I am interviewing Ati from Seprojoven in Costa Rica, and Daniel Azcarate from Escuela de Fútbol Sarmiento Lora in Colombia. These interviews should be exciting because I am speaking partly in Spanish and partly in English for them. I've prepared the questions both in English and in Spanish. That's another thing I worked on today. I took a good amount of time deciding what I wanted to ask these two people, wrote the questions in English, and then did my best to translate them into Spanish. I had Mrs. Mitchell help out with the translation to confirm that the Spanish was correct.

After I worked on that, I watched a number of tutorial videos. I want to make sure my podcast sounds as professional as possible, so I watched some videos on how sound can be edited on Audacity. Next, I watched Youtube tutorial videos on how to make an effective podcast, and made sure my podcast so far had all the elements mentioned in the video.

April 21st

Thursday, April 21st

Today was another productive day for my project. Since I didn't have an actual interview today, I worked on writing the introductions for my interviews. As I mentioned earlier in this blog, after doing some research on what a proper podcast is made up of, I realized all of them have a fairly thorough opening statement introducing the person who they are interviewing and the context of the interview. Because of this, I devoted a good amount of time today to writing the introductions for Blakely Mattern and Mary McVeigh. I used their biographies that I found online as well as information I found out about them in their interviews.

After writing the introductions, I went back to editing. I continued cleaning up the interviews by cutting out unnecessary elements or parts where the sound cuts out. This can be a bit tedious, but I know its necessary for my podcast to sound professional. I edited for a while, as it is a pretty time consuming task. After my editing, I began touching up and editing the questions that I had written for my Costa Rica interview on Monday. I'm very excited about this interview, and I will get someone to look over my interview questions tomorrow to make sure I am all set to go for that.

April 20th

Wednesday, April 20th

Today was another good day for my project. For starters, I secured another interview! I will be interviewing a woman named Ati next Monday. She lives in Costa Rica and works for an organization called Seprojoven that works with adolescent girls and gives them an opportunity to play soccer to build characteristics such as team work and perseverance. This will be an interesting interview because the woman said she can answer some things in English but may also need to speak in Spanish, so I will have to prepare questions in Spanish as well.

I then wrote out all the questions, and then translated them to Spanish. I think that I have a good amount of questions and that this interview will be very helpful. I'm hopeful that the language barrier won't present a problem, and the interview will run smoothly!

After creating those questions, I began doing some basic editing on the interview with Blakely from yesterday. I cut out the unimportant things and any periods of long silence or random conversation. Once again, I struggled with knowing which parts to cut out, so there weren't too many things that I could eliminate next. I'm excited because I noticed some parallels between Blakely's answers and Mary's answers, but also some sharp differences. I think it is going to be very interesting as this process goes on to compare answers between people with experiences in different countries.

April 19th

Tuesday, April 19th

Today was another great day for my project, and I got a lot of things done! First, I went to Lovett this morning for Spanish class. I brought the microphone that I have been using for my recordings so that I could teach the people in my Spanish class how to use it. It was a fun tutorial session and I really enjoyed teaching them how to use the Snowball microphone. After that, I wrote a bunch of questions that I want to ask for my contacts who only speak Spanish. I wrote these questions in English, and Mrs. Mitchell helped a lot with translating them! I don't have specific dates for the two Spanish interviews yet, but I'm happy that I am now prepared for them.

 When I got home, I conducted my second interview! It was with Blakely Mattern, former professional soccer player turned coach. At first, we caught up because we hadn't spoken to each other in a while, but then after I started asking her the real questions. She had some very interesting experiences with soccer and they made for some great responses for questions. Growing up, she even played on a boys team for 3 years so she could get some higher level play. I also thought it was very interesting hearing about her experience playing professionally. She played both in the professional league in the US and in a professional league in the Netherlands, and her comparison between these two experiences was not what I expected. Overall, the interview went very well, and I'm super excited to keep working on it and editing it!

April 18th

Monday, April 18th

Today was an excited day for my project because I got to start a new part of the process. That new part, is editing. Since I didn't have an interview today, I decided to begin looking over my interview from yesterday. I listened to it and realized I really did get some valuable things for this project. However, there are also definitely things that need to be cut out. I'm having a difficult time deciding which parts to take out and which to keep. I think that it will be a lot easier to make these decisions once I have done the other interviews. The interview that I did yesterday was almost 2 hours long, so if I were to include all of the interview, my final podcast would be WAY too long. I'm struggling to choose what ideal length of a podcast is, but I'm assuming this is another decision that will come with time as I go through the interview process.

After listening to the full interview a few times to try and decide what the most important parts were, I began cutting some things out that I thought were unnecessary. I was very hesitant when doing this, because I wanted to make sure I didn't actually cut out anything that could become important later based on other interviews. Because of this, I decided to keep an original version of the interview in addition to the cut one.

Tomorrow I am interviewing Blakely Mattern, and I'm super excited to see where that takes me! I'm hoping to get a great interview with her, and then begin comparing the answers that I got from her and from Mary McVeigh.

April 15th

Friday, April 15th

Today was a super exciting day for my project, because I did my first interview! Although I expected to interview Blakely Mattern today, something came up and we moved her interview to Monday. I was disappointed at first, because I didn't think I'd have anyone to interview, but then luckily I got an email from Mary McVeigh, the woman who works at Soccer Without Borders. She said she'd be willing to talk to me today at 1 if that was okay, and I decided to take her up on it. I was pretty nervous before the interview, because I didn't know how it was going to go since it was over the phone. However, it ended up being a great interview.

Mary had some extremely interesting statistics about the percentage of men who play soccer compared to the percentage of women who play soccer in several countries. Additionally, she has tons of experience seeing how the game of soccer empowers girls, and she's a huge advocate for equal opportunity for women in soccer. She believes that in order for women to get more opportunity in soccer, social norms and perceptions have to change, and the governing bodies of soccer need to do a better job promoting and producing revenue for their women's side. Mary had some very good stories to tell about how the girls she coached in Nicaragua couldn't even name one female soccer player. She said she believes that having women's soccer players as role models for girls around the world would be extremely valuable to the development and growth of young girls, but female soccer players just don't get enough exposure in the media. She gave me a lot more interesting information, and we had a great conversation. I'm excited to start editing this interview and see how the rest of the interviews fit into it!

April 14th

Thursday, April 14th

Today I figured out a lot of logistics for the actual interviews for my podcast. I began the day by meeting Mrs. Brackett at Lovett at 8:30. We met because we needed to figure out how to record a phone call. Although I set up the software the other day that allows me to record the audio of Skype, it is a whole different process for phone calls. It took us a while to figure it out, because the cord that we got for the purpose of recording phone calls was not working. However, the best solution we found was to have the call on speaker phone, and use the Snowball Microphone to record me speaking and the person on the phone speaking. That worked, but the sound was still a little unclear.

So, after working on a few more things at school with my interview questions, when I got home I tested out using a bluetooth speaker instead of just the speaker of my phone. It ended up working much better than the phone speaker, so I'm excited to record phone calls that way.

After figuring all of that out, I finalized my questions that I am going to ask Blakely Mattern tomorrow. I am Skypeing with her at 1:00pm, and I am extremely excited to hear what she has to say. I'm asking her about the wage discrimination lawsuit, pay inequity in the NWSL, about her experience playing soccer overseas in Holland, and much more. I'm so excited for my first interview!

April 13th

Wednesday, April 13th

Today was an exciting day for my project because I finally got some of the responses I had been waiting for! I was worried that no one would respond to my emails, and I wouldn't be sure when to move on and email new people. Luckily, I will not run into that problem because I got 4 responses today! I have set up an interview with Mary McVeigh from Soccer Without Borders on Sunday afternoon. I'm extremely excited to speak to her, as I know she knows a lot about the culture of women's soccer in South America. I also received a response from Ati from Seprojoven, an organization in Costa Rica. She is happy to do an interview, and we are figuring out when the best time to have the interview will be. We will do the interview half in English and half in Spanish, which is her primary language. I'm both excited and nervous to see what challenges a possible language barrier could present, but I have enough confidence in my Spanish abilities to think it will go pretty smoothly. Mike Geddes from "Street Football World" also responded to me, but the news wasn't as exciting. He is very busy right now with his organization, so he doesn't have much time for a full interview. He said he's very supportive of my project and still would like to help, so he can answer any questions that I have via email. I'm interested to see how this will play out in my podcast since I can't get a direct personal statement from him. The final email I got today is the email that I am most excited about. My uncle, who lives in Chile, managed to get someone to talk to the goalkeeper for the Chilean women's national team about my project, and she agreed to do an interview! She only speaks Spanish, so I'm a little nervous, but more just excited! I think it will be awesome to get the perspective of a professional women's soccer player in a country where there is not much opportunity for women to participate in soccer. My uncle said he is also trying to get into contact with the coach of the Chilean national team, which would be an AMAZING interview.

After reading these emails I spent most of the rest of my day formatting questions to ask each participant, and I think I came up with some good ones. However, I'm definitely not finished and I want to make sure I have a second set of eyes look at them before I do the interview. I also went to school today and went to my Spanish class, so I could catch up on the project they were working on and also ask my two project advisers, Mrs. Brackett and Mrs. Mitchell, some questions. Overall it was a good day!

April 12th

Tuesday, April 12th:

Today was a very productive day for my podcast! I began my day learning how to set up the software on my computer than allows me to record Skype, so I can save the interview for my podcast. It was a pretty confusing process, but after reading a few different websites I figured it out. There were a number of different settings I had to change on my computer and a few applications I had to download. Once it was all set up, I decided to do some testing to make sure that it worked. I had my mom Skype me from another room in the house, and recorded the entire phone call. The first time I did it our voices sounded like they were echoing, so I decided to move to a smaller room in the house. This seemed to fix the problem and the acoustics sounded good. I played back the recording and it worked perfectly, so I'm ready for the actual interviews.

After setting up that software and testing it out, I began thinking about the concept of my project. I had gone from "how does soccer empower women?" to "lack of opportunity and reward for women's soccer players around the world", but I felt like I needed to make another small change. The people that I have reached out to all have extremely different experiences with women's soccer, because they come from different countries all over the world. In order to make my podcast as interesting as possible, I decided I wanted to make the topic "the culture of women's soccer around the world". For each person I interview, I will ask them similar questions, hoping to get different and unique responses based on the country they are from. I wrote a list of questions to ask. These include:

-What is the role of women in society in this country in general? How does this translate to sports?
-How much access do girls have to recreational sports/soccer?
-What are the barriers preventing girls and women from total access to soccer?
-Have there been any public figures, scandals, or stories surrounding women's soccer in this country?
-What is the perception of female athletes/ soccer players in this country?
-Is there any opportunity for professional or higher level soccer in this country?
-If there is professional women's soccer, what is the pay like compared to the men?

I think that these are all very stimulating and thought provoking questions, and I am excited to get to hear the answers!

April 11th

Monday, April 11th:

Today was another good day for my project! After all the research I did on the new people I have to interview, I reached out to them via email. It took me a while to send these emails because I had to individualize each of them, and I wanted to make sure they really understand the goal of my project. I'm optimistic that they will respond soon and will want to participate in an interview!

After sending out those emails, I began writing interview questions for these new contacts. I've realized that it's a lot more difficult to write these questions than I had anticipated. I want to ask some of the same questions to each person, but at the same time I am afraid they will have similar answers. I want to make sure that my podcast has a variety of opinions, and isn't too repetitive. What makes me nervous about this project is I truly don't know what these peoples answers are going to be.  Not only that, but at this point there's no guarantee these people will even want to participate in my podcast, so that is a little bit nerve-wracking. I'm really hoping I can generate some inspiring answers with the thought provoking questions I am asking. Although I'm nervous about these things, I am also very excited to start my interviews.

I was in contact with Blakely Mattern again today, the former professional soccer player, and I will interview her on Wednesday. I spent a lot of time today writing out the questions I was going to ask her. It's difficult with timing, because I'm not sure how much time she will have, but I think she will have interesting responses. I'm excited to show someone who has played at one of the highest levels of soccer how passionate I am about giving girls and women the opportunity to play soccer, and I hope that this will be the first step to greater things to come.

April 8th

Friday, April 8th:

Today I got more exciting news for my project! The same man I emailed earlier asking if he knew anyone I could potentially interview emailed me back, and he gave me the information of some very interesting and helpful people.  He also told me that his company has recently launched a new division called "The Third Half". This division helps kids around the world have the opportunity to play soccer.  The first man he gave me the contact information of is the head of Street Football World, who's goal is to change the world through the good soccer can bring. I think he will be an extremely interesting resource. In addition, he sent me the contact information of a man from Lesotho who is the head of a soccer organization there. They primarily work with Aids education and Aids orphaned children, but he is very aware of the gender discrimination in Lesotho. Finally, he gave me the information of a woman who works with Soccer Without Borders, an organization in Granada, Nicaragua that works to help young children achieve growth, inclusion, and personal success through soccer.

I am extremely excited to potentially have the opportunity to interview these people. I spent the next several hours doing research on their organizations, and they do truly amazing things for young people (specifically young girls) through soccer.

April 7th

Thursday, April 7th:

Today was an exciting day for my project!  I secured an interview with former professional soccer player Blakely Mattern. Before playing professional soccer, she played collegiate soccer at University of South Carolina. Not only that, but she was the captain her senior year, so she knows a lot about leadership. I think she is going to have some extremely interesting things to say about why women deserve more opportunity and equal pay in soccer. I am planning on interviewing her next week, and I am very excited to get in touch.

I'm also excited because my uncle, who lives in Chile, gave me the contact information of a few people in Chile who have connections in the soccer world. I emailed all of them and I am looking forward to hearing their responses.

Since I wrote the majority of my interview questions over the passed couple of days, after this morning I didn't have much to do for my project. Before moving to the next stage, the interviewing, I have to wait for responses to my emails. I hope that people get in touch as soon as possible, because I would love to begin the actual interviews. So, since I was waiting, I did some very interesting research on the wage discrimination lawsuit that filed by certain members of the US women's national team. The statistics were mind blowing to me. I don't understand how anyone can think it is fair that the men get a $5000 bonus for a loss in a friendly game, and the women receive a bonus of $1,350, but ONLY if they win. These alarming statistics and more are why I'm so passionate about changing the current situation. As the US Women's National Team says: Equal Pay, Equal Play.

April 6th

Wednesday, April 6th:

Today I did not get as much work done on my project as I did the past two days. I began the day with some exciting news. I got a response from my friend's dad and he said that he has some very interesting people he can put me into contact with. One of these people is the head of an organization in Costa Rica that works with giving girls the opportunity  to play soccer. I am willing to bet that he will have some extremely interesting insight into why it is so important for girls around the world to have the opportunity to play team sports like soccer. He also told me that he thinks he can find the contact information of a few other people around the world that I can reach out to. I'm very excited that there are even more people from all over the world that I will have the opportunity to interview.

Next, I continued writing interview questions for my contacts. So far, I have 5 points of contact and 5 questions to ask each of them in interviews. The next thing I discovered today was sad. Although I was very excited about reaching out to the professional soccer player, Lauren Sesselman, yesterday via Facebook, I am sad to report that she read my message and did not respond. This means that she saw what I had to say but was not interested in doing an interview. This was pretty upsetting, but I know I have to move on and try to find somebody else. I remembered that I used to have a professional soccer player live with me when I was in elementary school, so I decided to reach out to her. (Side note: she lived with me because being a professional women's soccer player means you cannot afford rent. This is one thing I really wish was changed in this country. Equal play, equal pay.) Anyway, she no longer plays soccer but is still active in training younger girls. I sent her a message on Facebook detailing my project and I'm hoping I get a more positive response from her. Finally, I ended my day on a positive note. I won my soccer game! Although this doesn't count towards my project hours, it reminded me why this project is so important in the first place. I want other girls to get the feeling that I get when I win a game. Everyone should have the opportunity to feel accomplished and talented.

April 5th

Tuesday, April 5th:

Today was another productive day! I spent the majority of the day reaching out to my contacts. I emailed a professional women's soccer player, and I'm excited to see her response. I told her about my project, and even attached my TED talk from earlier this year. My TED talk was about lack of opportunity and reward for women's soccer players, so I hope she'll find it interesting and relatable. I am planning on asking her to put me into contact with other people if she responds, because she played in the Olympics and World Cup so she has a lot of connections.

After emailing all of my contacts informing them of my project, I went back to working on the interview questions. I now have 4 questions for each of my contacts. Additionally, I think I found a way to get even more interesting contacts. One of my friends dad works for Adidas International Travel Program, a company that sends soccer teams overseas to participate in games and tournaments. I reached out to him, and he said he has many people he can put me into contact with. I'm very excited to see where this takes me.

Finally, today I made a little change about the concept of my project today. Since 5 members of the U.S. women's national team just filed a wage discrimination lawsuit against US Soccer, I really want to make my project relevant to this. Because of this, a lot of the interview questions I wrote today had to do with pay inequity for women in soccer or lack of opportunity for female soccer players around the world. This is what my TED talk from earlier in the year was about, and I think it is an extremely important issue right now. I believe women deserve equal pay for soccer, and I think my podcast is a great vehicle for getting this point across.

April 4th

Monday, April 4th:

Today was a great first day for my project! I began the day by doing research on what makes a good podcast. Since I haven't listened to that many podcasts in my life, I wanted to make sure that my podcast sounds legitimate. I looked at podcasts from 3 main reporters: Terry Gross, Mark Maron, and Sarah Koenig. All of them had different approaches to their podcasts, but I noticed a few common themes that I wrote down on a Word document. First, I noticed that each podcast segment has about a one minute introduction before the actual interview starts. The introduction gives an explanation of who the person being interviewed is an why they are being interviewed. I also learned that is extremely important to do thorough research on the person who I will be interviewing before I conduct the interview. In each of the podcasts I listened to, it was obvious the interviewers had done their fair share of research. Finally, I got some insight about what makes a good interview question. The best questions are the ones that are thought provoking, but also provoke a long and thorough response from the person being interviewed. In addition, the questions can't simply be good individually, they have to flow all together. I will take all of these things into consideration when making my podcast.

After listening to these podcasts, I began working on my own. I started by doing research on all the people I plan on interviewing for my podcast. I want to make sure that I am prepared for the interviews, so I did as much background research as possible. Next, I wrote two questions for each of my contacts. I will be asking more than two questions per person, but it took longer than I thought it would to come up with these questions so I only made 2 per person today. The reason it was difficult coming up with questions is because I really that although I'm asking these people generally about the same thing, I have to individualize the questions based on what those people do. For example, I ask different questions to a professional women's soccer player than to a general manager of a soccer club. Overall, today was a productive first day and I am excited to continue this project!