Shaming The Top Dogs

In David’s comment on the parity post, he engages with my suggestion of having a sexism-free parity discussion and names several criteria for how this might work.  It’s a great start and I agree with a lot of his points.  However, I don’t see the effort to make the U.S. and Canada feel guilty for their success that he describes.  My experience with parity arguments is the critique tends to be aimed at the lower-level programs.  Where this might be coming from, though, is his concomitant belief that people are rooting for the top teams to lose on occasion since that would be ‘good for the sport.’  I think this happens, and I am also one of those people who does think that it’s good for the sport.  We can’t have parity unless we…you know, have parity.  The sole sign of that happening is the U.S. and Canada not always meeting in finals.  That doesn’t mean rooting for these programs to fall back (which is highly unlikely anyway), but other programs moving forward, just as David suggests.  It also does not mean blaming the winners for their current success, and unless he knows something I don’t through his friendship with various players, I can’t believe too many North American stars are actually losing sleep over having to lose so women’s hockey can thrive.  But top teams not being quite so far ahead of anyone else is the whole goal of this parity movement, and it seems counterproductive to intimate this means anything but different results in big tournaments.  In the long run that will actually be a positive in the development of the best North American players, who have to face adversity and overcome it.  To use the example of the U.S. women’s national soccer team: the fans are constantly in a state of dudgeon now that there are several teams that could beat the U.S. at any given time, but after years of whining about the rest of the world’s inability to catch up, we can’t be upset that we got what we wanted.