This year’s Netroots Nation had its familiar lineup of panels, with brilliant progressive minds talking about organizing tactics and every issue under the sun. There was one panel, however, that was the first of its kind. At “How Sports Shapes Our Politics and Why It Matters,” the panel’s participants—The Nation’s Dave Zirin, Change.org’s Eden James, professor Diane Williams, and Dr. Eddie Moore—discussed how sports affect larger progressive fights for equality for women, minorities, and the LGBT community, and how professional and amateur athletes have both led and followed fights on those issues and others.

The entire panel is worth watching, even if (especially if) you aren’t a sports fan. Some progressives have seemingly lost a sense of how politics-infused our professional sports are, and about how progressive our sports can be, a point Zirin drove home early in his speech.

“The powers that be in our society have created an athletic-industrial complex that’s set up to make you think that if there are any politics in it at all, it’s politics much more comfortable with Glenn Beck than the people in this room,” Zirin said. “Militarism, patriotism, sexism, all the rest of it, and not the politics of liberation. That has somehow been completely disconnected from sports.”

Sports, indeed, have long been an agent of progressive social change. From Civil Rights to women’s liberation to labor fights and opposition to war, the progressive movement has often found a home—and leadership—in sports.

“You cannot tell the story of the Civil Rights Movement without talking about Jackie Robinson,” Zirin said. “You cannot tell the story of the 1960s without talking about Tommie Smith and John Carlos on that medal stand with their fists in the air. You cannot tell the story of women’s liberation without telling the story of Billie Jean King. It is so much a part of our history and fighting for freedom, and it’s an absolute sin that it’s not a history that we claim.”

For whatever reason, progressives have largely chosen to ignore the opportunities sports give us to talk about and examine our differences and the issues those differences create. Even worse, the left far too often dismisses legitimate issues in sports as unimportant disputes between “millionaires and billionaires.”

We can’t afford that. Progressives should talk about corporations getting rich off of college athletes (who disproportionately come from low-income minority backgrounds) who don’t share in the wealth and often don’t receive the education they are promised. We should talk about our sports leagues and college bowls not paying taxes. We should talk about teams and cities bilking taxpayers to finance sporting events and new stadiums. We should talk about the declining visibility of female athletes and the declining opportunity for female coaches. We should talk about the fact that our athletes often don’t get the health care they need, and the dire financial situations many enter after retiring. We should talk about the fact that there isn’t a single openly gay male athlete in American professional sports and that female athletes are too often told to stay in the closet.

These aren’t “sports issues.” They are progressive issues, and more importantly, they are human issues.

The good news is that sports have proven that they can be a positive agent of social change. And harnessing their potential to be that agent is crucial to the progressive movement. If we’re going to win off the field, we have to win on it too.

I had the enormous privilege to spend my Saturday talking about the employment of women in pop culture and the impacts it has on the representations we see in media with Jezebel founder Anna Holmes, Harmonix video game designer Alli Thresher (who you should know from her appearances around these parts), and Graphic Policy podcast co-host Elana Levin. We talked about a lot of things—Girls, Game of Thrones, DC Comics’ New 52, Naughty Dog’s video game designers, and the kinds of conversations that make guys realize what sorts of images they’re putting out into the world. Plus, the marvelous Jaclyn Friedman of Women, Action, and the Media made a guest appearance to help us field questions from what turned out to be a conservative blogger who wanted to convince us that all dudes are just horrible sexist rapists, or something. It was pretty great:

It was a great conversation, and the questions from the audience (which we restated for the cameras when they were actual questions rather than “I actually have more of a comment” sorts of things) got my thought processes going. Netroots may be over for the year, but the posts inspired by it are just getting started.

If you’re not at Netroots, never fear! My ThinkProgress colleagues and I are leading a series of conversations with the conference’s speakers and elected officials, which we kicked off with Amanda Marcotte this afternoon. The two of us discussed why liberals are dismissive of mainstream culture, whether Peggy Olson is actually one of Mad Men‘s main characters, and the awesome women of Game of Thrones:

Saturday. 7:30pm. Dewey’s Flatiron (Seth Eagelfeld gets credit for the endorsement), which is within a few blocks of the N, R, 4, 6, F and M. Do holler and let me know if you think you can make it so I can figure out how many tables and chairs to try to grab. I’m looking forward to it!

“We’re very underrepresented, as you can see in this conference,” Favianna Rodriguez said at the beginning of the best thing I’ve seen at Netroots Nation so far, a panel called “Educate, Agitate, Inspire: How Artists are Fighting Anti-Migrant Hate” that turned into a broader discussion of the arts and their role in progressivism—and that helped me articulate a lot of the things I’ve been thinking about since I came to ThinkProgress.

What the panelists said, and what I think is tremendously valuable, is that we are losing opportunities to make progressive messaging and campaigns more effective when we marginalize artists. Artists get brought into the conversation last, when, as Favianna put it, professional progressives have decided on strategy and message, and “when they think about engaging artists, they think about ‘here are talking points, reiterate them.’” That’s condescending, of course, and it means you can avoid building an infrastructure that supports and incorporates artists into the progressive movement if you just don’t think they matter very much. But more to the point, an approach to artists that treats them as if they’re just meant to execute messaging within a political context misses is a dramatic underutilization of artistic capacity.

That approach should be reversed, Ken Chen, the executive director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, said, to ask: “how do we taking things that are hard issues, like post-9/11 detention, and spin them in ways that enter people’s lives while they’re pre-political?” That kind of engagement is hard to measure, and because it doesn’t produce a white paper or a talking point, it “requires an investment on behalf of the artist,” that demands a measure of trust and patience, Favianna said.

And beyond politicizing people through the culture they consume, Chen pointed out that shaping campaigns with an eye towards what’s artistically effective can give them tremendous reach.

“There actually is an incredibly successful cultural campaign in Arizona, but it’s not on our side,” he pointed out. “It’s Joe Arpaio, who is probably the best performance artist of the last generation. He’s always thinking about things not in the way a traditional Pat Buchanan thing would think like. It’s like Christo does a crackdown on the migrant community…You can buy pink underwear autographed by Sheriff Arpaio. You can be deputized, and wear night vision goggles, and fulfill your fantasy. He has a tank that has his logo on the side. He raided a house with Steven Seagal.”

And artists can be a check on a progressive tendency to make politics deadening, said Javier Gonzalez, who is helping run the SoundStrike campaign that’s convinced musicians to avoid performing in Arizona to protest the state’s repressive immigration policies.

“The left comes from this rational, enlightenment period debate, we’re going to have a pipe and be Socratic, so we create these boring campaigns,” he said. “You can do the stuff they did in the sixties, ‘come to a forum on Palestinian liberation, discussion from 1pm to 6pm.’ People are not going to go to that stuff anymore. We have to be more creative.”

Progressives are good at recognizing that the medium is the message when it comes to technology. We’re much less good at that when it comes to incorporating art as a core tactic and a shaper of strategy.