Why choose these three sports?

I chose to investigate deeper into cheerleading as one of the sports mainly because it is such a female-dominated sport in the current sports scene. Tracing back and looking at the progression of cheerleading at a male-dominant engineering school from a modern-day point of view is fascinating.

Volleyball is one of the other sports I chose because it remained women’s second most popular sport from the late 20th century into the 21st century (Acosta). Another reason for choosing volleyball as one of the three focused teams is because it is the first official all-female sports team at Poly after cheerleading.

The reasons behind the last sport I chose, Judo, are less of a personal decision. Due to the lack of archival sources in the collection, many sports did not have documentation or records of their progression. Judo at Poly was not an all-female team, but it is important to the Poly sports community from aspects that will be explained in more detail in the later section.

On top of all the reasons, another factor why I chose these three sports is the archival silence in the athletics program. Some sports have more archival sources than others, so it is impossible to investigate other sports that seem interesting to explore.