The Closest A Woman Has Gotten To A Roster Spot On A Professional (Traditionally Male) Sports Team

The Game Room
101

I think you’re underestimating how hard an MLB player (or a decent NCAA player, or a very good high school player) can throw to first (the average throw is mid-80s), but Barkis is overestimating how often they need to throw the ball to first as hard as they can.

There’s no question at a woman is not going to be as effective as Cal Ripken on throws from diving stops in the grass that need to beat a fast runner. But most plays are not that, and you can avoid the need to beat non-Billy Hamilton runners with arm speed by positioning yourself to pick up the ball in a more optimal position.

Keep in mind that all I’m arguing for is that “a team that started a great woman shortstop would not automatically lose, because she may be, overall, as good defensively as a bad-to-average MLB shortstop.” There’s no question that she can’t be a great defensive shortstop (because she can’t make hard throws) and there’s no question that she will be the worst hitter to ever play in the majors. We’re talking about “if a team 15 games out started a woman at shortstop on the last day of the season as a gimmick, could they still potentially win that game?”

102

They’d embarrass the men by not flopping down on the pitch and crying the way the men do.

103

Women’s soccer (at the international level, I don’t watch club soccer anyway) is more watchable to me because it seems like the women are limited only by their physical capabilities, not by an utterly broken coaching culture that teaches bad habits like in basketball. Also, because the U.S. is good at it and my desire to see Europeans embarrassed at a sport they think they own is higher than my desire to watch the best possible gendered version of each sport.

104

An adequate level of dexterity and skill to manage a car safely or write legibly is not remotely comparable to the extraordinary level of dexterity and skill needed to play sport at a highly competitive level, and I’m astonished that you would think otherwise.

105

“objection” is a strange choice of words. You make it sound like people are saying women shouldn’t be allowed in the men’s game. I haven’t heard anyone say that and I certainly say that, if someone is good enough then they should be picked. I also think that it is massively unlikely to happen. Perhaps a freakish outlier could happen or for commercial reasons like Michelle Wie but on pure merit? unlikely.

That is a silly comparison. being able to satisfactorily write with a pen or drive a car under normal circumstances is well within the capability of most humans regardless of gender, we wouldn’t expect to see any bias towards men. It may even be that for a given metric (neatness of writing of lower accident rate) a greater proportion of women may be better.
But that is not the area of the ability bell curve from which we pick top sportspeople.
They come from that tiny sliver at the top end of the tail and it is not a region that is occupied with any regularity by women.

but even when professional women play against part-time boys teams they get trounced.
The level of competition in tennis or field hockey is pretty high for women but I can’t imagine women would come close to the top men. Netball is pretty much only played by women but I reckon it would take very little time to put together a men’s team that would thrash any current world champions.

I think you underestimate just how spectacularly good the men’s game is when compared to the women and how much soccer demands excellence in speed, explosive pace, strength, stamina, skill, touch, vision, speed of thought, spacial awareness, all areas in which the best men outrank the best women.

106

Can’t believe I forgot about the Colorado Silver Bullets, the only professional women’s baseball team in the 90s. I believe they played mostly amateur men’s teams, but also some low minor league and semi-pro teams. Their first couple years were not good, but by their last year in 1997 they put together a winning season.

Looks like their biggest problem was they couldn’t hit. But their pitching stats were somewhat respectable. The more they played the better they got.
http://www.coloradosilverbullets.org/

From that team, Julie Croteau is recognized as the first woman to play NCAA men’s baseball. She and teammate Lee Anne Ketcham are the only women ever to play in MLB sanctioned league (Hawaiian Winter League).

107

Why do I doubt many Europeans are embarrassed about a loss in the WWC?

108

This post is so wrong thinking that I find it hard to be able to address it.

Why would anyone say women can’t write? The skill necessary to do that is minuscule and the athleticism is nil. The skill and athleticism necessary to play soccer at the highest level is phenomenal! A better comparison might be saying women can’t write backwards in Latin with their left hands and Russian with their right while singing opera, especially if millions of woman have tried and failed for decades.

Why you would think your USMNT comparison is at all valid is similarly baffling. Soccer in the US is extremely deficient in culture, coaching, competition, seriousness, etc. compared to the rest of the world. You’re comparing apples to oranges. Now if you took 1 million Americans and transported them to the Germany, had them raised and trained in a soccer culture, and they failed to play at a high level at similar rates to other populations then you’d have a point.

Plus, the USMNT does compete against any team in the world and doesn’t get embarrassed! There are literally thousands of boys soccer teams in the world that would crush every team in the Women’s World Cup. There are zero teams in the world that would reliably destroy the USMNT, and only maybe 15 that would regularly beat the US.

109

Because soccer is only the beautiful superior sport when they can flop and bribe their way to being better than the U.S. at it, and they suddenly forget about it otherwise?

110

I agree with some of what you say. It’s obvious a certain level of athleticism is required in football, along with a certain amount of technical skill. Some positions require more athleticism(im including 6ft 4inch tall lumps of a centre back here); some positions require more skill.

You are being a bit misleading about Gascoigne. Gascoigne was not exactly overweight at Euro 96 and had played over 40 games that season. Despite the drunkeness im quite sure Gascoigne was fitter than over 99% of the general population for most of his career( periods of injury and alcoholic breakdowns excluded).

111

I was exaggerating to make point, poorly, when I brought up cursive and driving.

But let’s talk driving–there are women who can and have competed with men in racing. Shirley Muldowney, that Force woman, and most relevantly Danica Patrick. F1 or IndyCar or NASCAR all require skill, stamina, reflexes, and situational awareness. Patrick is not the best race car driver, but she competes with men, and she doesn’t have to be better than every man for purposes of our discussion.

Now, to team sports. I thought it was still a commonplace that the USMNT punches below its weight, so to speak, because the quality of play in MLS lags the Euro leagues, and the college system doesn’t develop players as well as the academy system. But put that aside. Let’s stipulate that the USMNT competes on a fairly level field with the other world powers now.

Let’s go back to the 1960s. The US is a non-entity in world soccer. Soccer is non-existent here. The few who do play are nowhere near competitive with the rest of the world. Over decades, in fits and starts, the US begins to develop a soccer culture and pro leagues arise, and the quality of play across the board develops. The USMNT is now good enough to lose tough matches in the WC instead of going 0-3 in group play. The problem in the 1960s was not that there were no Americans with the potential to play at the top level, it’s that that talent was never developed.

Women’s soccer has gotten better too, but there isn’t anything like the same infrastructure to develop female players to their full potential, and it started from an even lower base level than men’s soccer. There is only occasionally a professional league and when there is, it pays so poorly that even a top women’s player would have to think hard about whether she really wanted that career. I’m going to assume that the quality and quantity of coaching, training and care lags way behind too.

In the absence of a system that challenges women to develop to the fullest I don’t see how you can flatly declare that a woman could never compete at a high level in a soccer match against men.

Here’s another way to put it–if women’s teams lose a couple matches against men’s U15, that tells you they’re not as good now. If they played 30 matches against U15s, (instead of 2 matches plus another 28 against women, or whatever the numbers are)–30 matches a year, and never improve the quality of their play, THEN maybe you can fairly say that a woman will never be able to compete with men. You only get better by playing better players, right? And maybe they never beat the U15s, or maybe the do and their Waterloo is the U17s. But we won’t know unless we know.

Again I confine my argument to soccer because I really don’t think there’s a chance that women could compete in any of the other big America sports (hockey, baseball, basketball, soccer) no matter how talented or what the level of competition, their physical limits are just too much to overcome.

112

The women’s team has finished in the top 3 in every Women’s World Cup, the top 2 in every Olympics, and won every CONCACAF cup save one in which it finished third.

Soccer is the second most popular youth sport for girls, after basketball, and essentially every high school has a girls soccer team.

I don’t think you can make any argument that is based on soccer not receiving its due of institutional support in the United States. This is actually one of the better countries to play women’s soccer, and has more girls going into the lowest level of the system than any country but China. There is no hidden pool of talent that can compete with men being ignored.

113

TSBG
A woman player playing against/with men.

Speed
She will be much slower then the opposition. She wlll be unable to stop forwards (if a defender) or get away from the (if a striker).

Physical
Tackles which easily stopped women players, will be brushed off, male-leve tackles might put her in hospital.

Even if she has excellent dribbling skills, that won’t be enough. Even small men like Messi and Maradona for instance have been contained (when the happens) usually when the opposition has managed to get physical with them (and the difference is not as lopsided as it would be here).

She also cannot jump as high, kick as hard (losing ball speed) as any men.

Spatial Awareness

She will be less capable in making the right pass or marking.
I am sorry, she has no chance.

114

The physical demands of soccer may be less obvious than, say, basketball, but they are every bit as intense. I’ve played against semi-pros when I was in my physical prime and was ruined within 45 minutes, the physical effort required to chase and harry skillful players is utterly insane and even when you get into contact with them their physical conditioning means they have massive core strength. (Yes, even the little fellow like Messi and Maradona) And fine, you may choose not to play that chasing game but in that case they are going to pass around you and run the spaces at speeds that the women are not ever going to match. Watch the destruction that fast players such as Ronaldo or Gareth Bale can wreak against top quality defences purely through speed and then imagine fielding a whole team of relative Gareth Bales against any womens team on earth.

Any moderately speedy semi-pro could give the best female defence a 5 yard start and still beat them to a speculative through-ball.

115

My wife played on a NCAA Division 1 championship team. Her college soccer career was ended by a tackle by a male. Today, 30 year later, she still has problems with the ankle that was blown out.

116

They often hit against men. After all, most of them have male coaches. However, I recall the Williams sisters being criticized for training with men too much as it created an environment that did not reflect the conditions they would encounter in matches. It’s not just a question of power and speed - the men also hit with more spin, so the type of ball you get from a man is different from a woman.

Still, you can hardly make a case that it hurt the Williams (particularly Serena).

117

So professional women soccer players in the US have had write training and less ability to develop than 16 year old boys?

118

You are vastly underestimating the amount of strength required to play the game at all levels. It isn’t that they lack strength, it is that strength is used in many ways that are not immediately obvious and thus those that have greater strength, ie. men, have a huge advantage.

It really is that simple.

ETA:
Must remember to refresh the page before posting. I see that loads of other people have responded - and probably with a more intelligent response.

119

Viona Harrer (→ Viona Harrer - Wikipedia ) was the goalie for the German women’s national ice hockey team for many years. From 2012 to 2014, she played for a team in the 3rd division of German men’s hockey (which is semi-professional). Her team (including Ms. Harrer) made it to the play-offs in 2012 and would have been promoted to the 2nd division (which is professional). Eventually, the team couldn’t meet the financial requirements to be admitted as a fully professional team. Ms. Harrer stayed with the team (and they would have kept her as goalie in the 2nd division because she was that good).

Last year, Harrer announced her retirement and she now plays for a 1st division women’s hockey team. Apparently, she considers that more or less recreational.

(She is quite a looker, I might add: https://www.google.de/search?site=&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1366&bih=683&q=viona+harrer&btnG=Bildersuche&oq=&gs_l=#tbm=isch&q="viona+harrer" )

120

In Europe most care far more about their club than their country.

I’d happily see England lose every game for the next decade if it would see Coventry back in the Premiership.