Watch OL Reign’s Black Lives Matter Demonstration in Missoula
National Women's Soccer League Tacoma based team the OL Reign recently finished up a month of training at our beautiful University of Montana campus. Before they departed for Salt Lake City to compete in the NWSL Challenge Cup, they participated in a Black Lives Matter demonstration at Dornblaser field.
The women wanted to collectively, as a team, demonstrate the impact that privilege has in, and out, of their sport. Their video below shows them lined up at the field and ten statements are read aloud, if the statement applied to them, they were to take a step forward. Statements like "take a step forward if you were raised in a 2 parent household," "if your parents could afford to send you to college without an athletic scholarship," and "if you've never been called a racial slur." It's a chilling visual of systematic racism in America and it left me with tears in my eyes. You can see the full video below.
Challenge Cup games are currently being aired on CBS, players in the matches I've watched so far have been sporting their Black Lives Matter t-shirts, arm bands and/or leg bands.