What problem would that solve?
It would enable girls to play in on the A team. If it was just skill based, girls aren’t going to make the A team in any significant way. Either they won’t make the cut or if they do make the team, they will be at the lower end of the skill level and won’t get much play. But if the team always has to have 50/50 boys and girls on the court, then the girls will get the same play time as the boys. And since the opposition would be doing the same, the relative skill level between the teams will be about the same and be fair competition.
And it would immediately devolve into men vs men with the women taking a back seat.
Do you think that if there was an awareness campaign telling girls that they’re allowed to try out for the men’s team, thatyou’d see a bunch of female athletes try out for the open team instead of the girls’ team?
But I think it kind of is about demographics and not individuals.
[hopefully not a hijack]
This is one of the challenges facing a lot of policy around social issues. There are always individuals who are helped and individuals who are harmed by enacting a set of rules. Rules and policies are designed for the group, not for the individual. If not, how could we talk coherently about any social policy?
I like to imagine that there are ways to design systems where every individual has an “equal” or “fair” experience, but in practice those systems are impossible to create.
[/hopefully not a hijack]
This is a good point, and sometimes even extends to different rules. Men’s and Women’s lacrosse are completely different games, despite the same name. Neither would be able to effectively play the other even if their physical skills were comparable.
I think some would and others wouldn’t. I think some would like to train with the best, and play with the best. And others would like the chance to be a big fish in a small pond. Just like with many other endeavors where people make that choice.
Co-ed leagues are primarily recreational, there are no sports played at the highest competitive level that I can think of that require a minimum number of men and women to play (except perhaps in the case of certain fringe and non-professional sports such as kickball, etc.)
Mixed doubles tennis? That’s still around, right?
I think that’s trivially true, but I think the number of female athletes who would try out for the men’s team if only they knew they could is vanishingly small.
That said, I could be very wrong. So, rather than doing what the OP suggests and immediately making sweeping changes to our sports system, wouldn’t it make more sense to start with a public awareness campaign to let girls and women know that they’re entitled to try out for the boys JV team or to play Minor League Baseball instead of professional softball?
yes of course, but that is not considered the highest competitive level of tennis, or even doubles tennis. Men’s doubles would be.
Oh, I wasn’t taking it as a literal superlative, but a general class of “highest level.” Gotcha.
Let’s stop right there. You already have some faulty logic. Yes, there are benefits to school sports. They are not necessarily from playing time. Plus, this is why (at least in my area) most sports have a “Junior Varsity” team. Top talent goes Varsity; the rest go JV. And, if you’re not good enough to play regularly on JV, you ride the bench and get in for “garbage time” when the game is out of reach (either winning by a lot or losing by a lot). The benefits of school sports are the training and the discipline and team comradery. You get better by practicing, and you also learn by being out on the field, but the long-term benefits of sports lie in the intangibles. If done right.
As I’m responding and reading other comments, it hit me - your initial contention is part of the problem. You are starting from the standpoint of “the only benefits of sports come from being on the field” and this simply is not the case.
The problems that @vbob and @Northern_Piper had came from poorly-run programs, not from the sports themselves. The coach needs to stop that atmosphere immediately. I coach, and I don’t allow players to humiliate other players, and I certainly don’t do that to my players. Great example - at an 8u baseball game (in-house, not travel); we lost the game in the last inning. One of my players blamed it on the pitcher, and I went off on him (I shouldn’t have) along the lines of “Did you get a hit every time? No. Did you make every play perfectly in the field? No. They scored on you when you pitched. This is a team game and a team effort. All I ask is that you try your best.” I’m sure there was a lot more in it. Later, I went to his father and apologized for losing my temper, and Dad said “Good - he had it coming.”
If the coach has a “win-at-all-costs” mentality, and if they berate the kids at practice and in the game, yeah, it’s miserable for the kids. I work with a local youth baseball league, and we are doing our best to stop that. My kids played youth football. Football has the absolute worst reputation for that type of thinking. My oldest absolutely stopped playing because of that. There is a lot out there trying to change the attitude, but a lot of coaches have the mindset of “This is how it was when I went through the program, so it must be the correct way.”
Youth sports (pre-highschool) in our area is really broken into two parts - in-house and travel. In-house, everyone plays; most leagues even have rules about equal playing time. Travel is elite - you try out; you may or may not be chosen, and the best players are on the field. What you are proposing sounds like in-house sports at the high school level. I got no problem with that. Heck, many colleges have intramural programs for students outside of official school athletics.
I’ve seen plenty of videos out there of girls in competition wrestling boys. Since wrestling has weight classes the boys don’t have the weight and muscle mass advantage and some of the girls do really well. Anyone objecting to the girls being allowed to wrestle the boys are uptight parents that really have no argument besides it just doesn’t feel right.
A better way of categorizing this may be scholastic vs private athletics.
My problem, when I was in the field and now too, is that many scholastic athletic programs cut kids from teams with no alternatives. This is why I advocate so hard for rec programs. Private athletics can do whatever they like, but if we’re using taxpayer funds to do school athletics, there should be a way to involve any kid who wants to play.
Kids are not usually excluded from the chess club / team, the school play and other activities. In my experience.
I say agin, youth sports are very stupidly prioritized and venerated.
I… actually think this particular thing is a feature rather than a bug?
My daughter, in addition to doing cross-country, also does math competitions, which are vastly male-dominated. (It’s a whole other topic as to why this is, and that prowess in math competitions seem not to accurately reflect the same thing, or even the same gender distribution, as whether one is good at math on an undergraduate-graduate-professional level, but let’s ignore that for now – whatever the reason, math competitions are very male-dominated.) She has always been the girl who can easily beat all the boys around here; there are a couple of other girls (the top 10%, I suppose) who do pretty well compared to a lot of other boys. And it’s really good for the boys, who often think they’re All That with a side of fries, to get taken down a notch – and also to know that being a girl doesn’t mean “bad at math.” A little humility is a good thing!
However, I also think that her experience with math competitions does illustrate some of the issues in sports as well. The math competition culture has been very boy-dominated, with a focus on competition and bragging that a girl-centric culture doesn’t have. And I know this because there has been a push in recent years to have parity for girls in various math events as well as more girl-math-competition spaces, and even a competition or two that is only open to girls. And although my daughter is really into math competitions and math events in general, she has come back from the girl-centric and girl-parity ones just so happy and so thrilled that she can be with other girls who love talking about math but who aren’t as brash and in-your-face as the boys that she’s used to being around at these competitions.
It depends a lot on whether it’s pre-high-school and also how many slots are available. Before my kid got to high school, there was definitely a push to try to include anyone who wanted to join in. In my kid’s high school, there is definitely a limit to how many people can do the school play, or the robotics team, or Mock Trial, based on how many people can go to competition, or how many mentors they have, or how many people they can fit on the stage. And people do get excluded from all those activities, though they try to include as many people as they reasonably can.
It’s true that no one is excluded from the chess club or the science club, but that’s because the number of people who are interested in chess club or science club is always far less than the resources available, partially because it’s a small number of people but also because those are basically completely student-run (while the school play, robotics team, and mock trial that I mentioned above all have adult mentors/coaches – like sports).
Now, at my kid’s school, one can always start a student-run club – in fact, a bunch of kids who got cut from the robotics team decided to form their own team. That team doesn’t have the mentor/coach support of the “official” school team and they don’t do particularly well, but they have fun. (You could probably make that work for sports too – in fact I think there are a couple of “club sports” at my kid’s school that fill that niche – they don’t count for school credit, just as a club, and they don’t have real coaching, and they meet at lunch for a short period rather than last period/after school for a full training period.)
Absolutely disagree. I’m talking private clubs on both sides. Travel Baseball is a huge industry. Our in-house program is $200-$300 a year; travel programs are $2,000 a year. Our in-house club (not park district) has specific rules on playing time (can’t sit out a second inning until everyone has sat out an inning) so team sizes are limited. Yeah, we get more players, we add another team (and, yes, finding volunteer coaches is a PITA!). Travel is tryout; fill needed positions on the team; anyone else is cut. Hell, Travel is worse than scholastic sports programs because you have to pay an exorbitant price for the honor of possibly sitting on the bench.
I live in a county that has boys’ sports, girls’ sports, and recreation level sports, for students who just want to play to have fun, get exercise, etc.
I hear you; I understand that this is a truth; I absolutely do not understand why this is. When I was in High School 45 years ago, we did participate in some math completions. I won some; a female teammate won some. Quite frankly, I don’t remember the makeup of the team; didn’t think about the gender parity.
Fast forward 40 years, one of my sons was on the math team, participating in local competitions (gotta brag here - he qualified individually for state all 4 years!). Looking at state qualifiers, yeah, they always leaned heavily male. I simply don’t understand it. You would think that scholastic competitions would be one place where gender had ABSOLUTELY NO effect.