There’s a huge amount of strength and stamina involved in goaltending as well. Goalies are some of strongest skaters on the ice, and they’re burdened with the heaviest gear. There have been some excellent female goaltenders but even the ones that played in exhibition and minor league levels have a ways to go.
Manon Rheaume and Anne Meyers have been mentioned, but even there, I don’t think the teams were ever serious about adding them to their rosters. Both had genuine skills, but neither had a prayer of playing at the highest level. I think both were (willingly) used as publicity stunts.
When an MLB, NBA or NFL uses a first round draft pick on a woman, ANY woman, I’ll take the idea seriously. Not before. I don’t see it ever happening.
Now, to repeat a hypothetical I once brought up here, SUPPOSE a truly elite female athlete like Jackie Joyner-Kersee had devoted herself to baseball instead of the heptathlon. Is it POSSIBLE that she could have become a mediocre pro baseball player rather than a magnificent women’s track star? MAYBE.
A related question: What team sport is the most likely to have a competitive female member?
My guess would be something like curling. Other candidates?
Well, Michael Jordan was a mediocre (actually less than mediocre) pro baseball player so it has to be harder than it looks.
Which is interesting, because in vanilla marathons, the women mostly get murdered - you might see one finish in the top ten, and three in the top hundred.
London Marathon 2014, just pulled ex ano, the tenth-placed man finished ten minutes ahead of the first woman - IOW, the tenth man would have had a hard time spotting the first woman if he’d used binoculars. And he was five and a half minutes off the pace as it was - a whole mile, more or less.
I don’t think any of them technically played “on the tour”. I think they were all given sponsor exemptions.
What is your standard for “competitive”? I don’t think that there’s any woman good enough to start on an NBA team, but I feel fairly confident that there are some All-WNBA caliber players good enough to be the fourth or fifth guard on a team, and most NBA teams carry at least that many. Like, I don’t care if men have a natural size and strength advantage, you’re not going to convince me that Jimmer Fredette is a better basketball player than Maya Moore, or Elena Della Donne. If Jimmer can hold the bench down for the Pelicans, I’m sure that one of those women could, too.
No post player would stand a chance, obviously (the average height for a WNBA center is something like 6’4" and a half), but i believe that there are some women who are as good as some of the third-string point guards in the NBA.
If in 5 or so years she’s throwing 90MPH, sure. Most likely, though, she’s topped out at 70+. She’d be lucky to be an effective high school pitcher.
Three women have made it as Harlem Globetrotters: Lynette Woodard, Jackie White and Joyce Walker. Admittedly, these all joined after the Globetrotters had basically become a group of entertainers that presented their show in the context of a basketball game instead of the legitimately top-grade basketball team they had once been.
It depends on your definition of “team sport.” The NCAA has a team national championship in rifle shooting, where men and women compete together, and one year, a team consisting entirely of women won.
Do equestrian team competitions count? Women are certainly on an equal basis with men there.
I watched the US Nigeria game yesterday and it shocks me that someone would think these players could play professionally against men. Ignoring the pace of the game you had a high percentage of the passes behind players, crosses shanked out of bounds, slow moves off the dribble.
I remember the last WC in a more positive light.
Someone has to be the worst player in the NBA, and I doubt it is Jimmer. That in no way raises the profile of Maya Moore or Elena Della Donne. They couldn’t make a NBA Developmental League team except as a publicity stunt. I doubt Maya Moore would make it as the last person on the bench at Idaho State in a fair competition.
Not only that, a woman has actually won one of its majors, which I always felt was very under-reported. Of course I’m biased, as I’ve known her since high school since we grew up in the same area.
I respectfully disagree. I don’t believe that is true.
That’s fine, but you’ll need something to back it up more than just your belief. What makes you think she could make in the NBA even as a benchwarmer? Have you ever seen women’s teams play men’s teams?
You could be right- but SO FAR, no men’s college basketball team has seen fit to put any woman on its roster.
Why not? If there’s a woman good enough to be an NBA benchwarmer, why hasn’t there been a woman good enough to be a benchwarmer at Delaware or Lehigh?
As a matter of fact, I have, because I’m a big fan of the WNBA, so I’ve seen the local team play competitive games against men. That’s a false premise: whether a women’s team could beat a men’s team is an entirely different proposition, and an entirely different question from, can any individual woman play on any men’s team, and the former does not disprove the latter.
The question is not, nor should it be, “Can the Lynx beat the Timberwolves?” That question is asinine, and anybody who thinks that it should be the question, or that whether a women’s team can beat a men’s team should be the standard for whether women’s sports are worth watching, is watching sports wrong. The only thing that the fact that a women’s team can’t beat a men’s team proves is that there are no five women who could play a competitive game against five men. Which is an entirely different question than whether there is a woman anywhere, such that her plus four men would be competitive against five men, which is what I think the actual question was?
Saying that there’s no woman in the world good enough to play on a men’s team, on the basis that no women’s team could beat a men’s team makes as much sense to me as saying that there’s nobody on Duke’s 2015 Men’s National Championship basketball team good enough to play in the NBA, on the basis that that team couldn’t beat the Charlotte Hornets.
If I had to guess, I’d say that, since Title IX means that any university with a men’s team also has to have a women’s team, why go through the trouble? That’s a lot of bullshit to have to put up with, just to sit the bench, especially when women have other options. If Title IX were overturned, and women’s college basketball were eliminated, I suspect that might change.
It seems to me like you’re looking at this from the point of view of, why hasn’t any woman made a men’s team, whereas I guess I’m looking at it from the point of view of, why would a woman bother trying out for a men’s team, as long as she had other options?
Maya can shoot it. She doesn’t seem to handle the ball much. But she can’t play in the NBA because she’s a 6’0" forward. Delle Donne is a 6’5" 170lb forward. Neither of those ladies can play forward in the NBA. If any WNBA player has a shot at some level of professional men’s basketball, it’s probably Britney Griner.
No, the question was is there a woman who could beat out available men for a roster spot. I have no doubt you could put a good female player on a men’s team and play competitively, but it would be a downgrade compared to hundreds of other available men. It’s not enough that she’s good - there are many good female players. But to meet the criteria of the OP she’d have to win out in a direct competition with other men for the roster spot.
And that isn’t going to happen any time soon because for any roster position there are available men who are significantly better than any current WNBA player at the NBA game. Perhaps it would be possible in Olympic style basketball where there’s less contact, but not in the NBA.