I wish! Also ban hitting the soccer ball with your head. That’s really bad for people.
Effectively all boys are “far above the level” of all girls when you are talking about “people at age 15 or above who wish to play competitive sports.” The best women in the world can’t beat an average high school boy’s team at basketball, soccer, or tennis. Football? We’re talking about people dying.
There isn’t any value in training on the strategy and skills needed to play soccer and then losing every game by 25 goals to opponents who are barely trying. The people who are trying to get the benefits of sports below the top levels of competitiveness would be the most impacted by this.
The USWNT would beat average boys high school teams, but not top ones. I’m not sure what percentile they’d fall in, but it’d be the top half.
Practically speaking, I’m not sure how you envision your plan working. I don’t even know if it’s possible to establish a minimum threshold for skill level that would be applicable across all schools participating in the same division. What do you do if you have 50 kids who qualify for varsity but only 30 spots? Where do those other 20 kids go? They can’t play with the sophomores because they’re too skilled, right?
If there’s that extreme a risk (and I don’t think you’re overstating it), we shouldn’t allow kids to play that sport. At least not in the traditional manner. This is before any discussion of gender.
Once again I’ll say our priorities around youth athleticism are way out of whack and I think we’re having the wrong discussions for the most part. Anointing myself king of school athletic directors again, here’s some more advice for kids and parents:
- Your kid isn’t going to play for the Yankees. Vanishingly few even get meaningful college scholarships, so stop treating JV sports like it’s the most important thing in your kid’s life.
- Newsflash: the most common reason kids play youth sports isn’t for the sport itself; it’s to be with their friends. Let’s make youth athletics fun before any other concerns.
- They can’t have that sort of fun if they’re not playing. If you’re going to have sports teams that cut kids, you have to provide another way to play.
The logic/reasoning behind having a separate division for females is a good one. It’s generally agreed that biological females are at a disadvantage competitively against biological males due to physical differences. Having their own division creates a “different” playing field where they can be competitive within their physical biological similarities.
I think rather than having a “mens” or “boys” division however that division should be designated “open” and allow anyone who wants to compete in it the opportunity to do so. Male, female, trans, etc. Similar with professional sports. WNBA, LPGA, PWHL should be limited to biological women while NBA, PGA, NHL, etc. should be open to everyone who wants to compete with the best of the best.
I’m pretty sure that’s already the case. Ok, I’m not completely sure about the PGA, but for all those others, girls and women are free to compete in the open division. There’s been a few cases where a woman has played as a kicker on a college football team. The only reason there aren’t more examples is because of that disadvantage that you mention.
Women have tried the PGA. Annika Sörenstam, Suzy Whaley, and Michelle Wie all played events in the 2000s. Babe Didrikson made the cut twice in the 40s. A couple more examples and much better writing in this article. Here's how women have fared in PGA Tour events - NBC Sports
What does that have to do with my proposal?
A lot of people seem to be assuming that every high school contains exactly two students, one named “Boy” and one named “Girl”, and that Boy will therefore always beat Girl. It doesn’t work that way. No, it’s not true that every high school boy is more athletic than every high school girl. Every boy who makes the varsity team under the current system is better than every girl, but those aren’t the only boys who are under discussion, here. There are weak boys, too.
Um, we do? At every school I’ve ever seen, the way you join the chess club is you show up at a meeting and say “I’d like to join”, and the existing members say “OK, have a seat”.
Thereby forever condemning the WNBA et al as being not just a different style of play than the (currently) all-male leagues, but as obviously inferior leagues, doomed to irrelevancy as their best players move on to “compete with the best of the best.”
Much like how the Negro Leagues crumbled when the Major Leagues cherry-picked the best Black players after the color barrier was broken.
At least in the NHL, that is the case. Manon Rhéaume signed as a goalie in the early 90s and played a few pre-season games. As far as I know, she’s still the only woman to play in any of the the major American sports leagues.
He argued that sports should be available to everyone, not that we have to jam every student into a team.
And as mentioned, if there is a chess club at all, it is generally open to every student who wants to join it.
And size and shape.
I recall years ago a scientist talking in an article on sports about how it’s not just a matter of “men better, women worse”; men and women in practice play different sports even given the same equipment. Because men and women are physically built differently, and putting them on an identical field with identical equipment doesn’t change that. Everything from the size of the ball (or whatever) relative to their hands, the height of nets or the like relative to their own, the length of the field; they’re all different and they all add up. So the result is that men and women playing “the same sport” will play differently, not just better or worse.
Which makes directly comparing the two head-to-head problematic at best. To use the simplest example I can think of, is it a fair comparison of physical fitness between a man and woman running the same marathon, when it’s effectively a longer run for her because of a shorter stride length? We wouldn’t call it fair if, say, women were required to run a course (number picked at random) 100 yards longer, but that’s effectively what is happening.
Our high school chess club was forbidden to practice during study hall, yet study hall was frequently pre-empted for mandatory attendance at football ‘pep rallies’. The rationale was that we might be gambling on the outcome of chess matches. Fifty years later I’m still dumbfounded that someone presented that with a straight face.
Did I say that that was my opinion? That’s one of the premises that leads to gender-segregated school sports. If we let go of that premise, then we also don’t have gender-segregated sports.
Let me put this a different way: What are the arguments in favor of gender-segregated sports? I maintain that, behind every argument in favor of gender-segregation, there’s an equally good argument for gender-neutral sports.
Putting young women in front of large, aggressive males with permission to get physical with them will likely end poorly. Not just sexual assault, but just plain brutality.
Given my experience, I’d just not have sports at all.
My brother, who was fast but not large, refused to join the football team for that reason. (The coach tried to recruit him.) There are sports other than football.
But that’s because the black male athletes were capable of competing against the white male athletes.
With gender, it wouldn’t be the same. I can’t fathom any NBA team “cherry-picking” any players from the WNBA. As good as Caitlin Clark is, for instance, how could she be good enough on a male NBA team to make it worth it to put her on court in a 5-vs-5 situation?
So, there’d be no collapse of the WNBA because no players would be “poached” from WNBA to join the NBA. In fact, IIRC, there is already currently zero prohibition on an NBA team signing a woman to their roster, yet no NBA team has taken anyone from the WNBA.
So women can have championships that they can win.
If you made all the women like the Williams sisters, Sharapova, etc. compete directly against male opponents, 1-on-1, in tennis, for instance, they would struggle to win a single title - or even get to any sort of high ranking. As John McEnroe said, Serena Williams would likely rank about No. 700 in the world if going head-to-head against men.
Same for soccer and most of the other sports. Women can play in, and win, the FIFA Women’s World Cup, because there are no men in the tournament. If you did away with segregation, there might not be a single national FIFA soccer team in the world that would have a woman on their roster.
Abolishing sex segregation would be a de facto death knell for a lot of women’s athletic careers.