Ever wonder how many pounds that center on the women's basketball team is giving up to her opponent?
Well, tough luck. You won't find it on Penn Athletics' Web site, and you won't find it in the game program.
As a matter of policy, sports-information staffs at colleges around the country do not publish the weights of female athletes. It is not an NCAA mandate, nor is it a formal convention.
"I think it's just the standard," said Kimberly Franklin, a senior on the women's basketball team. "I think it's something that just went unquestioned. . It just kind of became normalized that way."
But women's sports have come a long way in the past half-century. As a society, we have not shied away from reconsidering the way we think about female athletes, and their role in society. (Think Title IX.)
The publishing of athletes' weights may seem mundane in comparison with headline issues like equal funding. But the fact is that weights are made public in men's sports like basketball and lacrosse, and for legitimate reasons that have a bearing on the game itself. If there is no good reason for their exclusion in women's sports, that should be revisited, too.
But that is a big "if."
Junior guard Anca Popovici, for her part, couldn't care less if her weight were made public. Granted, she is one of the smallest players on the team at 5-foot-7 and - I'm guessing here - 135 pounds. But the captain said she didn't think anyone else on the team cared, either.
"Because we're playing a sport, it's not that big of a deal for us," she said. "We even like to brag about how much we lift, and what our body weight is, and all that kind of stuff."
Well, Popovici might be a bit out of the loop on the subject, or maybe the Quakers have been spared what is a widespread problem among female athletes - eating disorders.
A study by eating disorder expert Craig Johnson of the Laureate Psychiatric Clinic and Hospital in Tulsa surveyed college female athletes and found that nearly 13 percent showed signs of bulimia or anorexia.
While this is acknowledged as less of a problem in basketball, it is particularly prevalent in so-called "thin-build sports" like long-distance running, gymnastics and swimming.
Has society gotten to the point where such heavy demands are placed on our athletes that they deliberately harm themselves to perform better? How can we balance the traditional conception of a woman, and the considerations that warrants, with the desire to see a quality product put on display by capable athletes?
Must female athletes be made to choose whether they are women or high-performance machines?
You'll never see LeBron James take time off from the game for a maternity leave. The truth is that women's sports are not exact replicas of their male equivalents, nor should we expect them to be. Equal, in this case, does not mean identical.
Men's and women's lacrosse are hardly recognizable as the same sport. The sticks are different, the attire is different, and the rules of the game are different. Here, a male sport was adapted to female considerations, and to great effect.
Basketball is a different story. Aside from a smaller ball for the women, everything is identical, from the height of the basket to the size of the court.
Women's basketball must decide if it is still the same sport as the men's version, or if it is another version that leaves room for women to be women and athletes.
If it is the latter, then for goodness sake, tell me how much Anca Popovici weighs.
Ilario Huober is a senior International Relations major from Syracuse, N.Y., and is former Sports Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. His e-mail address is ihuober@sas.upenn.edu.
