A March Madness Primer for Non-Fans

When I was in college, I was trying to finish a story about the football team's game from the previous week and asked the sports editor, who was male, if he knew how to spell the name of the person who had been playing cornerback.

Really, I was being lazy and should have checked my notes, but I was in the zone and didn't want to get out of it to check spelling. But in that moment, I learned that being male does not make you an expert about sports. Neither, apparently, does being sports editor at a college newspaper.

"The position is called quarterback," he said. And, in that moment, I knew beyond a show of a doubt that I knew more about football than he did.

I was young and cocky at the time, so I rolled my eyes at him and then explained that I was not talking about the guy who threw the ball, I was talking about the running back who doubled as a free safety and was playing cornerback. That shut him up.

Now, all these years later, I see how to guides for women to learn to enjoy sports or talk the talk with other sports fans and I blanch at the sexist nature of it all. See, even now, I have three friends that I can talk sports with: one guy and two girls. Being male does not automatically mean that you know sports and being female doesn't mean you don't.

The women I know are primarily baseball fans, but they can also talk basketball, especially during March Madness. The guy, well, he's more into football, though I'm guessing he will have a bit of a wager on the Big Dance as well. I think he won his office pool last year.

So, this is my primer for non-fans who don't know sports. Really, it's very simple: READ UP ON IT.

You don't have to memorize position names or a hundred years of stats or even who got traded to whom.

If you have a local team headed to the Big Dance, go to your local newspaper's website and read a few articles from the season. This is not rocket science. With Selection Sunday comes a lot of hype about the NCAA basketball tournament, known as the Big Dance, but a lot of the jargon is simple to understand if you just pay attention.