Karen Delfs grimaces during a rugby game at Ohio University. "Game Face." © Penny De Los Santos, 1996.

University of Tennessee basketball player Kellie Jolly Harper gets her hair braided and foot wrapped in an hotel room before the 1997 national championship game. "Kellie Jolly Getting Ready for Championship Game." Cincinnati, Ohio. © Lynn Johnson, 1997.

Sheila Tighe, Staten Island, N.Y., decided to try out for the WNBA at the age of 35. "Sheila Tighe, Starting Over." Staten Island, N.Y. © Lynn Johnson, 1998.

'Game Face' details "Game Face: What Does a Female Athlete Look Like?" finished a six-month run at the Smithsonian in early January. The exhibit moves to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City from Jan. 28 through March 29, in time for the Winter Olympics. It then continues on a five-year national tour. To follow the schedule, visit the "Game Face" Web site at www.gamefaceonline.org/. The 224-page book ($35, hardback, Random House) can be found at most bookstores or ordered through the "Game Face" Web site.

	Jeanette Johnson, 12, of Paterson, N.J., sits in a Little League dugout. "Twelve-year-old catcher." Lisa Kyle, 1998. © New Jersey Herald & News.

Photojournalists capture the spirit of their sisters in sports

By Melissa Rake

The image of the female athlete has been redefined. We've seen her remarkable evolution take place in Olympic-size pools, colossal stadiums, boxing rings, Little League dugouts and on the concrete basketball courts of New York City.

She's got guts, brawn, grace, resilience and power. She's short, tall, trim, thick, strong. She's your grandmother on the golf course. Your daughter swimming the 100-meter. Your sister surfing a Pacific wave.

There's no doubt that women are embracing sports with a passion that would have been unfathomable a quarter-century ago. Their athleticism, caught on film that makes its way to the pages of small-town newspapers and Sports Illustrated alike, tells the inspiring story of the Title IX generation. And photojournalists are the storytellers.

Three Ohio University alumnae are just such image authors. Their photos are part of a remarkable project -- "Game Face: What Does a Female Athlete Look Like?" -- celebrating the beauty and complexity of women's sports revolution. The book and national exhibition capture women participating in every sport, from pingpong to pole-vaulting, hunting to hardball. And the images range in style and substance, from sepia-toned portraits of a corseted woman with a bicycle in the late 1890s to action shots of soccer star Brandi Chastain savoring her team's sudden-death World Cup victory in the late 1990s.

The project, conceived by longtime sports writer Jane Gottesman, was launched this past summer with a six-month exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution that ended in early January. The exhibit now is on a five-year national tour.

Images taken by freelance photographer Lynn Johnson, who served as an Ohio University Knight Fellow in photojournalism this past academic year, and newspaper photographers Lisa Kyle, BSC '87 and MA '95, and Penny De Los Santos, a former graduate student in visual communication, add dimension and diversity to the 182-photo collection. Their images share space with shots by some of the world's best-known photographers, including Annie Leibovitz, Ansel Adams and Robert Mapplethorpe.

Lynn Johnson, a Pittsburgh resident who freelances regularly for Sports Illustrated and National Geographic, prefers shooting female athletes in honest, real moments off the field. Her three "Game Face" pieces are no exception. One photo reveals former University of Tennessee basketball player Kellie Jolly Harper getting her hair braided and foot wrapped in a hotel room before a national championship game in 1997.Another is a portrait of Staten Island resident Sheila Tighe, who at age 35 decided to try out for the WNBA. The third catches track-and-field athlete Aimee Mullins, a below-the-knee double amputee, doing media interviews at the Paralympic Games in 1997.

	Track-and-field athlete Aimee Mullins, a below-the-knee double amputee, talks to the media during the 1996 Paralympic Games. "Aimee Mullins." San Diego, Calif. © Lynn Johnson, 1997.

"I like taking more personal, more human photos of athletes, especially women," says Johnson. "For women, their relationship to their body is different. Guys will deny the pain. Women do that, too, but I think women tend to be more in tune with their bodies and show more emotion."

It was an emotional spring day in 1998 when Lisa Kyle caught a candid photo of Little League catcher Jeanette Johnson, then 12, as she was sitting in a Paterson, N.J., dugout. Kyle was shooting the assignment for The Herald News in West Paterson, N.J., where she works as a staff photographer. The story was about the inaugural year of a girls' Little League softball team. "It was emotional because it was their last game in a season with no wins," Kyle remembers. "In the sixth inning, they were up by three runs, and the coach promised the girls pizza if they won. They didn't win, but after the game, when he saw tears in their eyes, he quickly offered to buy them pizza anyway."

Kyle connected with the young team's passion. A child when Congress passed Title IX -- a law that mandates equality for women and girls in schools receiving federal funds -- Kyle never had a problem fitting in as a female athlete. At age 10, she began taking roller skating lessons in her hometown of Brook Park, Ohio, and soon began competing seriously.

"My mother took a second job so I could take lessons," she says. "She was a waitress and a bartender. I thank her for that because it kept me off the streets. It taught me discipline and gave me self-confidence. It took me into another world I'd have never known."

Penny De Los Santos was exploring the world of Ohio University rugby in 1996 when she captured an expressive photo of Karen Delfs, BSSE '97, pumped up during a game. "It was my first quarter of grad school and the assignment was sports action," De Los Santos explains. "I simply was at the right place at the right time. I think her expression, the moment and the angle make the photo unusual and powerful."

A staff photographer at The San Jose Mercury News, De Los Santos believes "Game Face" is a convincing study of women's athletic gains.

"It's amazing what it says about mainstream media and how we're covering women's sports," she says. "We're not always on the front page, but we have a growing presence. It's a great book that begins to teach people about women in sports and just what Title IX has done."

"Game Face" has yet another Ohio University alumna on its roster. Marilyn Shapiro, MSJ '86, is the project's director of outreach. In this role, she has watched "Game Face" garner coverage across the nation, from the "Today" show to large photo spreads in several metropolitan newspapers. By the time the exhibit moves to Salt Lake City for the Winter Olympics in late January, she expects nearly a million people to have visited it.

"I think that women's sports is coming into its own. It's becoming a power," says Shapiro, a former photo editor who most recently served as news design editor on the foreign desk at The New York Times.

"Many women identify with this project because we're showing that you don't have to be genetically gifted to be an athlete. A woman athlete can look like anybody. She comes in all shapes and sizes." Shapiro contacted many of the photographed athletes for comments included in the book. Their words are as powerful as their images, she says.

"I was on a high after talking to these women," says Shapiro, who also is a long-distance rower. "They revealed so much of themselves. They are women who would be smashing barriers no matter what generation they are from."

Melissa Rake, former assistant editor of Ohio Today, is senior writer/account manager at Offenberger & White Inc. in Marietta, Ohio.