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!