Welcome to Beyond the Arc with Kate Harman

I’ve always loved telling stories and I’ve always loved sports.

It only came as a natural fit to tell stories about sports. But not just the games, the x’s and o’s – the stories I like to tell go beyond the numbers and delve into the people that are playing, coaching, or even watching.

For seven years I told stories like that at the Philadelphia Inquirer, where I covered high school sports, an area including over 175 different teams and 11 leagues. During that time, I took great effort and care in my role in empowering girls, going out of my way to spend equal time devoted to both boys’ and girls’ athletics and treating each athlete, team, or coach the same. As someone who used to be that young girl playing high school and collegiate sports I knew how important that coverage was.

Now, I have a new venture. 

There is a huge void in coverage of girls’ athletics on all scales, but especially at the high school level, where, theoretically, more parity in how sports are reported should exist. The boys get the headlines, the profiles, the pictures, while the girls are often treated like second class citizens. 

This is especially true in the basketball world where there are comprehensive and reliably consistent websites for boys’ basketball but none for the girls’ game. 

The fact that there has never been something like this for the wealth of talent in our area – talent that stretches back decades and can be seen currently in the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) has always bothered me immensely.

So, with the help of Mary Jane Souder at Suburban One Sports we have developed a blog completely dedicated to Southeastern Pa. girls’ basketball. We are excited about the opportunity and about the impact this endeavor may have. 

Here we hope to highlight nightly scoreboards, weekly features, top 10 rankings and much more. 

You can email me at KateRHarman@gmail.com and reach me on twitter @ka_harman.

Thanks for reading!