Dec 13, 2020

Emma and Gil welcome Adrienne Smith, designer of the
card game Blitz Champz and
wide receiver for the Boston Renegades women’s gridiron football
team. We discuss the intersection of mass market, kids, and sports
game design, the state of women’s football in modern America, and
serial entrepreneurship.

This episode was recorded on November 16, 2020. A couple of
weeks later, Vanderbilt brought their varsity women’s soccer
goalie, Sarah Fuller, onto their men’s football team as a
kicker.

Note: This will be the last Ludology
episode of 2020! We are taking our annual winter break, during
which time there will be no episodes of Ludology, Biography of a
Board Game, or GameTek. We will return on January 10, 2021 with our
annual “State of the Industry” episode with the Podfather, Stephen
Buonocore.

SHOW NOTES

2m05s: Wondering how you can
throw a spiral?

3m18s: Adrienne played for the New York Sharks. Here’s the
web page for the IFAF.

3m56s: More
information about
Jen Welter, the first female coach in the NFL.

5m14s: Gil wrote
a Twitter thread about the history of women in football after
the news about Sarah Fuller broke.

5m46s:
Women’s old-school football pants, versus
MC Hammer’s pants.

8m03s: The Women’s
Football Alliance, and the Women’s National Football
Conference

10m17s: More info about
Ultimate, originally called Ultimate Frisbee.

10m42s: More info about
Ultimate Hall of Famer Molly Goodwin.

14m00s: Adrienne is correct! The periodic table of the elements
was first envisioned by Dmitri
Mendeleev. Said he, “I saw in a dream a table where all
elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately
wrote it down on a piece of paper, only in one place did a
correction later seem necessary.”

21m56s: You can hear more from our interview with graphic/game
designer Daniel Solis on Ludology
204 – The Eyes Have It.

25m23s: Here’s
a closer look at Adrienne’s “Passing TD” card.

27m26s: You can hear more from our interview with mass market
toy/game designer Kim Vandenbrouke on Ludology
212 – Inventing Play.

29m47s: Here’s a clip of the
amazing Kyler Murray “Hail Mary” pass that somehow landed in
D’Andre Hopkins’ arms. This happened the day before we recorded. (I
do not recommend Bills fans clicking on that link.)

34m28s: Adrienne is talking about New England Patriots head
coach Bill
Belichick, winner of 6 Super Bowls. 

42m46s: More info about Gotham Girls’ Roller
Derby, the NYC-based roller derby organization. (There are
other fantastic roller derby organizations around the world, like
the world #1-ranked Rose City
Rollers in Portland, OR, and the world #2-ranked Victorian Roller Derby League in Melbourne,
Australia, all run by the Women’s Flat
Track Derby Association.)

44m17s: You can hear more about Omari Akhil’s views on the
intersection of sports and games in Ludology
233 – A Sporting Chance. 

55m26s: The legendary arcade game Galaga.

58m37s: It may not have been a tornado that hit NYC on November
15, but
it seems to have come very close to one.

1h07m49s: More
info about Title IX, passed in the US in 1972, which prohibits
discrimination in education based on sex. The upshot of this is
that for most sports, if a school wanted to field a men’s team in a
given sport, they had to field a women’s team as well. 

1h09m03s: Pop
Warner Football is a US organization for youth football,
roughly equivalent to Little League baseball. It’s named for
legendary coach
Pop Warner. Also, more information about
Utah Girls Tackle Football.

1h10m51s: If you want to know more about minorities in the
middle ages, a great place to start is People of Color in European Art
History.

1h13m48s: Here’s Adrienne’s Instagram
page.