Every other spring, Pomona politics professor and department chair, Tom Le, teaches Sports and Politics as an upper-division elective. The course’s objective, in addition to its heavy emphasis on public speaking, is to provide a gateway for discussing political theory through contemporary professional sports. From nationalism to inequality, Le believes sports are a medium that makes dense theory more digestible.
“When I design courses, I have core theoretical readings and things I want students to learn, like power inequality, how states extract from people, among other political questions,” Le said. “Then I think of bait. Sports are easy bait because they’re fun and interesting to students. So you give them the popular things that get them in the class, and then you trick them into reading really hard stuff.”
The intersection of sports and political theory drew great attention, Le said; the course garnered over 40 PERM requests in an allotted enrollment slot of 12 students.
Holden Tsai PO ’27 said that the sports “bait” Le describes is what most excites him. Each week, the class looks at a different political issue like gender and race, using readings on sports to discuss, dissect and understand the issue as a collective.
“Politics can definitely seem very inaccessible, but the second you boil it down to questions like ‘why does this athlete get this contract?’ that makes it really easy to understand,” Tsai said.
“Sports has been a really amazing medium to use, especially because everyone comes in with some sort of prior knowledge about it,” Tsai said. “Politics can definitely seem very inaccessible, but the second you boil it down to questions like ‘why does this athlete get this contract?’ that makes it really easy to understand.”
Le hopes that, through this exploration of politics in sports, students can walk away feeling more confident in their public speaking skills.
“We really work on [public speaking], and I grill them on it,” Le said. “We work on hand gestures and eye contact. When they do their midterm, I’ll stop them, adjust their hand, adjust their head and really get in their face about how to present.”
When asked about his favorite moment in the class so far, Tsai quickly recalled an impromptu speech, with a smile on his face. He normally avoids public speaking, but Sports and Politics pushed him to challenge his preconceived limits.
“At first, I just blanked because [Le] wanted me to be very specific about my hand motions, and so I was just stuttering up there,” Tsai said. “But I feel like once I got that out of the way, I thought to myself, ‘this class has seen me at my worst.’ There’s a very good atmosphere, and looking back, I’m glad he pushed me out of my comfort zone.”
Moments like that — uncomfortable and deeply reflective — are included in the course by design. Rather than simply analyzing sports from afar, students are asked to confront how power, performance and presentation shape the games they follow and love.
Charlotte Patel PO ’28, a member of the Pomona-Pitzer women’s basketball team, said she appreciated the critical discussions, specifically on youth sports. The class discussed how programs are becoming more intense with more club and travel teams.
“It’s really interesting to look at sports through more of a critical lens, because that’s how I grew up,” Patel said. “For me, sports have always been super positive. It’s great to look at the counter side and realize that there are a lot of sides of sports that could totally use reform.”
Le is trying to change perspectives. As a sports fan himself, he said that sports offer two key reasons for examining politics today.
First, sports serve as a magnifying glass for political issues in today’s America, illuminating those that are often overlooked or normalized.
“Sports themselves are a very good insight into politics and power for two reasons,” Le said. “One is looking at things that are absurd, like [Shohei] Ohtani being paid $700 million for 10 years. That’s bigger than some economies of a country, so how does that happen? In this way, sports make the absurd very obvious, and then we can study it.”
Beyond the absurd, for Le, sports offer a candid lens into American politics, presenting an often uncensored view of many issues today.
“Sports lets us be really honest. For instance, a topic like nationalism. You [can] get canceled for being patriotic or nationalistic. In the normal world, those [can be] bad things, but in sports, you can love your team and throw a punch. No one cares. Sports lets us look at politics in an unfiltered way.”
Through this lens, Le is paving the way for a more complex view of sports as a political tool.
“Sports is just war without bullets,” Le said.
Jake Creelan PO ’29 is from Brooklyn, NY, and is excited to start his new column, Seminars and Scoreboards. He founded the Claremont Justice and Law Association.
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