What I think you would need is the ability to handicap players to truly level the playing field. How that would happen would be sport specific. Or perhaps using students of similar ability regardless of age or gender.
However there is more to gender separation than just ability, but issues like harassment and contact in contact sports, and just in general to use a Boy Scout term ‘youth protection’, that also tends to have teen sports separated by gender.
I think the OP identifies an important issue having little or nothing to do with gender: Participation in school athletics is not extended to all the kids who want it.
Full disclosure: I’m a former PE teacher and coach, though I left that field many years ago.
As a former sports coach, you may find it surprising that I say youth sports are incredibly, vastly venerated beyond their importance. We make such a damn fetish about youth sports and it’s a lot of nonsense. IMHO what’s important is that kids get to play if they want to. And that’s where we fail.
The solution to the OP’s issue would be school sponsored recreational sports. This need not pre-empt actual athletic teams, but could exist alongside. I’ve seen it done. Some school districts set up rec programs in which any kid can play, period. There’s no cutting kids, there’s no tryout. A kid wants to play, they have a place to play. They can try to earn a spot on an actual athletic team if they want, or not.
That would be a system that serves all kids in the school district. But we mostly don’t do that. We in the U.S. are largely wedded to the competitive sports model above all else, which leads to political problems of various kinds. Which is to say, we don’t really care about kids participating in sports / athletics. We just want want the football team to win, by and large.
I’m also pretty dismissive of the argument that gender segregation / trans segregation is about student safety. If there’s a kid on the high school football team that’s 6’ 8" and weighs 350, they aren’t generally prevented from playing. If he runs over an opponent, well tough, it’s football. Same in basketball and other sports that don’t match people up by weight, such as wrestling.
Even in wrestling, weight matchups don’t even things out. There’s no attempt to match kids up against those of equal strength or other factors.
But leaving all that aside, if we were really worried about youth safety in sports here’s what we would do:
If I were king of the athletic directors I’d take the football team budget and create a rec program that served every kid in the school district. I hated having to cut kids from sports teams and I want everyone to play if they want to. Of course, I would never be permitted to do this. I do not miss being in that profession.
IMHO the biggest problem is that this would disadvantage the best girls. They would end up competing on the D or E level team, and those teams aren’t going to attract the attention (or money), to allow those girls to reach their potential.
This would be the other major issue.
No, it would first solve the problem of enabling everyone to participate in sports (including those kids of any gender who currently can’t), and secondly, it would solve the problem of having to decide which gender team someone ends up on.
That’s the case now, too. At co-ed schools, nobody outside of the girls actually on the team cares about how the girls’ sports do. I didn’t say that this would solve all problems, just some of them.
That’s part of what motivated the idea, yes, but as mentioned, it’s not the only issue that it addresses.
And yet, every single high school across the country does so all the time. A bunch of people try out for the team, and only some of them get on, because the coaches are deciding who’s a better player than someone else.
Cheerleading isn’t considered a sport as far as Title IX is concerned. The judge who made that ruling made it very clear it wasn’t about the athleticism of those involved, but because there wasn’t a regulatory body or regular seasons of competition. If cheer ever becomes regulated, the number of injuries would likely plummet as certain routines are banned.
In 2024, high school senior Maddie Ripley won in the boy’s division in Maine at 113 pounds. She had won the previous year as well. There are also girls competing in wrestling against boys in other states and some of them are doing fairly well. I don’t know if most people these days are going to have a big problem seeing a girl get tackled if she chooses to compete against the boys.
So just expand sports programs and keep it segregated by sex. You’ve solved whatever problem you think exists, right?
Well, you also want to replace segregation by sex (which is difficult and gets a lot of people upset no matter how you do it) by segregation by ability (which all school sports programs already do and which doesn’t cause any major problems).
That’s a broad assumption that just isn’t remotely true. Often times it may be true when the team isn’t winning, but the same can be said of a boys team. No one cares if about the boys cross country team if they are just showing up, but if they start placing high on a league or state level people care. Same with girls sports. Everyone wants to follow the winners.
Nobody outside the team needs to. The girls Varsity soccer team is the highest level of soccer high school girls can participate in. If that Varsity team wins Sectionals, they won a tournament against their peers, that’s a legitimate achievement. What do the Senior girls playing on a 4th tier co-ed team have to play for? They can’t even internally record any notable achievement, there’s not going to be a 4th tier championship game.
I prefer @Llama_Llogophile 's idea about embracing more availability of recreational sports at the high school level. Rather than push the girls to the bottom of an expanded but still highly competitive continuum of sport, expand recreational athletics that are both co-ed and less rigidly focused on dividing athletes up by skill level.
Ask a cross section of the parents and students how successful the coach’s judging by abilty was. And that’s just the top echelon, where it’ll get much harder to judge the closer to the median you get whilst at the same time less incentive for anyone to care.
One difficulty it would have is that athletes generally want to play in segregated sports over non-segregated sports. Regardless of co-ed sports in HS, there aren’t many in general. If people wanted to play co-ed sports, they would be playing in them in rec and competitive leagues as adults. Certainly there are co-ed leagues, but they are generally non-competitive and mostly for people who want to play at a more casual level. The competitive athletes are almost always in segregated sports. It’s unlikely that the athletes and school community would back this kind of proposal for the simple reason that it’s not what they want sports to be.
One aspect of this is that there is often a different style of play depending on gender. For instance, men’s basketball is more about solo efforts of powering down the court and making a big play. Women’s basketball is more about the whole team working together with passes and assists to get a player into a position to make a basket. While it can be fun to play co-ed basketball, having that be the only option probably wouldn’t be very popular. Women generally don’t want to play basketball like men do and vice versa.
I think that’s really it.
To use an extreme, but actual example, in track and field we have the shotput. A good high school boy is on par with Olympic caliber women, due to the difference in strength, and it only gets farther apart from there.
For example, at the Texas Relays, the winning women’s shot put was 47’ 4.5". That’s using a 8.8 lb shot. A fair-to-middling boy puts it that far with a 12 lb shot, and might place in a meet with a throw that far, but it would be seventh place or so.
Good freshman boys could easily be better than the best girls- is anyone going to want to see the top girls competing against scrubby freshman boys?
Forget about the spectators. What about the athletes themselves? Are the top level girls going to be happy struggling to get seventh place in the E or F division when they could be getting first or second place in the top division of a girl’s only league? Especially when it’s against boys who are only competing as a hobby and maybe spend 30 minutes practicing once a week, while the top girls are practicing an hour or more every day? I think the top level girl athletes (the future Serena Williams’s, Caitlin Clark’s, Megan Rapinoe’s etc.) would not at all be happy with that situation.
My kid’s high school does make two school sports available to anyone who wants them. Cross-country and track at her school both do not have tryouts; they are open to anyone who is willing to go to practice (and in fact it counts as a class, so really it’s “will you show up for your class?”). There are girls and boys varsity teams, girls and boys junior varsity teams, and then everyone else is “on the team” and can go to the general meets but just not to the top space-limited meets (which was a great relief to us, we didn’t want to go to them either).
There are a LOT of kids doing these sports for these reasons. My kid’s cross-country team last fall had more than a hundred kids (both girls and boys). Some of them were pretty slow! (My kid is not fast, but she was not the very slowest.) So in her school the benefits of school sports are, in fact, available to anyone who wants to participate, and they have gender-segregated teams (although to be fair they all practice together, I think, and I feel like some of the meets might have had the times all posted together) and the top girls can be celebrated as varsity-level.
Note that this would not work for a sport like tennis or swimming or soccer, for which there are a limited amount of facilities that can only accommodate a limited number of players. None of those would be able to handle a 100-person team. (unless I guess some of these teams are practicing at like 10pm? Which has its own logistics issues.) So there are space issues that would prevent those sports being available to anyone who wants to play.
I also think that part of the logic behind gender-segregated sports (in addition to what others have mentioned, that the very best girls have less of a chance to stand out) is that there is a lot of value, especially for women in fact, in being part of a team that is all one gender – women seem to often benefit very highly from the bonds they form with other women on a team, and the culture of a girl sport being different from the culture of a predominately-male sport.
this was exactly my first thought as well. Most schools simply do not have the infrastructure to effectively support as many teams as necessary to accommodate every person that wants to play a sport. In addition to limited facilities, there is also a finite supply of everything else necessary (good and effective coaches, parent volunteers, uniforms, trainers, etc.) for the success of a school sports team. Most schools would not be able to support 8 basketball teams. So, you would end up with 3 or 4 teams, in which almost all of the players were boys and the girls in the school would be effectively be shut out from the most part from school teams.
This was exactly the situation before Title 9 and dedicated girls teams at schools. The sports teams were not explicitly boys teams. A girl could try out for, and occasionally make, one of the sports teams. But there were no widespread opportunities for girls to play for their schools because the schools could only support a limited number of teams, and the boys, by virtue of their superior average athleticism, made up most of the rosters.
The OP’s proposed solution could only work if a school could theoretically support as many teams as necessary to accommodate all the students that want to play a sport. And that simply is not the case in the real world.
Generally, a very strong correlation to Coach’s kid and who got the starting QB position.
It’s irresponsible to put girls on the same playing field as developed teenage males who are trying their hardest to compete in most sports. There is a severe risk of injury in most sports, and even aside from that, there is a a huge physical skill gap that turns the whole activity into a farce.
Losing your worst basketball game of the year 70-35 to another girls’ team because their star center is bound for Division I and you can’t keep her from scoring is a learning experience. Losing every game 100-6 to a group of second-tier boys who are barely playing basketball because they’re a foot taller and twice as quick as you and don’t even need to execute strategic plays is a demoralizing humiliation that serves no purpose for anyone.
These are the kinds of problems “gender segregation” is supposed to solve. And yes, it also increases participation by making sure that 50% of the participants are girls, instead of in a way that just creates a second male team.
Again, I’m not saying to put girls on the same team as boys who are far above their level.
And a lot of the responses are focused on things like who gets to win what championship. That doesn’t apply to the vast majority of students of any gender, because most athletes don’t win championships. I would hope that school sports have value even for those students who don’t win championships.
Yes, but the ones who are denied winning a championship (the elite girls) are hurt a lot more than the benefit that others would get.
Y’all are forgetting the other losers in coed sports. The boys who are beaten by girls. Because while the top 10% of boys are better than all the girls, the bottom 10% of boys aren’t nearly as good as the top 10% of girls. And i rather suspect that’s more humiliating than the girls who are on teams with younger boys.