On Friday, July 31st, gopsusports.com announced that Nicole Fawcett has been nominated for The Women’s Sports Foundation’s 2009 Sportswoman of the Year award.

This is a really big deal — past winners include Nastia Liukin (the 2008 Olympic individual all-around gold medalist), Annika Sorenstam (2004 – one of the most successful golfers in history), Natalie Coughlin (2003 – the first American female athlete in modern Olympic history to win six medals in one Olympics and the first woman to win the gold medal in the 100 meter backstroke in two consecutive Olympics), and Michelle Kwan (1998 – winner of nine U.S. figure skating championships, five World Championships, and two Olympic medals).

We like this award because the fans get to choose. You can Vote Here on who should win the 2009 award. It’s not exactly a secret ballot (to vote you must give your name, e-mail address, and zip code — we suppose that’s to combat the Chicago “vote early and often” syndrome), so we’ll fess-up now: we’re voting for Nicole.

Nicole’s competition consists of eleven ten nominees . There actually are eleven women among the nominees, but Cara Black and Liezel Huber — the No. 1 ranked women’s tennis doubles team since 2007 — are treated as a single nominee. Not to knock Black-Huber — they’re clearly great athletes — but dignittany is perplexed as to why they are included for the individual award. The Women’s Sports Foundation gives two awards each year — one for individuals, one for a team. Math was never our strong suit, but DigNittany’s crack team of statisticians and researchers unanimously agree that an individual is one person and a team consists of two or more people. We are mystified as to why a doubles team (composed of two individuals) is competing for the individual award. We’re certain there are excellent reasons for this, but so far they have eluded us.

That mystery aside, Good Luck Nicole!