In [del] Europe [/del] the UK and pre 2008 Spain most care far more about their club than their country.
Fixed that for you.
Top women’s teams do often practice against boys’ teams, the main problem is that once you get to a certain age the boys team will almost be playing a different game to the women’s team, mainly because they will be that much quicker in all respects. A top women’s team will tend to have some advantages over a decent boys’ club team such as organization and tactics, but in soccer it is very, very difficult to play against a team where their slowest player is faster than your fastest player - even more difficult than playing against a much better organized and coached team.
In basketball I dont see why a woman cannot be say a point guard because basically there job is to dribble down, setup the play, and pass off the basketball. Many woman have those abilities but I think most top basketball teams need players with more overall abilities because they still need to be able to go on defense.
While watching the Harlem Globetrotters, I noticed the single woman players they had were generally the worse in terms of making basic layups and overall general basketball skills.
My son plays sports and you see girls playing baseball and hockey with the boys, and generally being pretty good often being the best on the team, up until about age 13 when the boys just take over.
In hockey one thing not mentioned is girls are allowed to “play down” meaning a 13 year old girl can play on a 12 under team so yes, they can dominate. By about age 14 girls in hockey are switching to all girls teams and you seldom see them playing with boys past age 16.
Pity you’re wrong, though.
In a youth sports or recreational league, there is no reason they can’t.
In the NBA or NCAA DI, the answer is “because they can’t pass the ball hard enough to avoid it being stolen every time, they can’t protect the dribble well enough to avoid it being stolen every time, they can’t shoot accurately enough or from a high enough release point to avoid it being blocked every time, they aren’t fast enough to play defense without the opposing PG blowing past them every time, and they aren’t strong enough to avoid being knocked to the floor every time.”
A woman playing pro basketball would turn over the ball literally every single time she touched it, destroy her own team’s defense, and be put in the hospital in five minutes. Some people in this thread are very delusional about the difference between “playing in the backyard with mixed-gender friends” and what professional sports are.
I think you hit the nail on the head. We as parents, see some girl on a youth team playing head on with the boys and think “why cant they do this at the pro level?” and dont realize just how darn hard it is to move up to that level.
It comes down to really knowing a game. I once watched a pro womens basketball game and I knew enough about basketball (shooting, passing, dribbling) to know they would get beaten by even some 8th grade boys teams.
The part I don’t quite understand is the skill thing. I always thought that skill was something that could be trained. If so, why can’t it, as a mental ability, be infused in women just as in men? Is there some connection to physical strength that I’m not seeing?
I don’t think anyone could say that Serena Williams (for example) is not skillful. She is extremely skillful and, for a woman, quite powerful. Her power is just not on the same scale, quite, as that of top men tennis players. I’d guess she is about as skillful, though.
That’s why I was confused by the insistence of previous posters that women were inferior in skill as well as strength in general compared to male athletes. I was wondering why this was, or why this impression was out there. Was there some kind of assumption that women could not be trained in skills? Am I completely wrong about what “skill” is?
Look at Haberdash’s post, 4 posts up. Most of what he’s talking about relates to strength - leg strength, arm strength, in particular, upper body strength. A woman could be very skilled at shooting the ball, etc. yet at the same time, by being so badly over-matched physically, she would never get the chance to display her skill if she couldn’t leap high enough to get a shot off without it being blocked, or any of the other things he mentions.
Part of the issue with women’s basketball specifically is the skills are very bad. I can identify a few reasons for this:
*The sport is relatively young. The NCAA only began sponsoring women’s basketball in 1981. In some states, basquette, a 6-on-6 sport similar to basketball but with crucial differences, survived and kept girls basketball from being sponsored by high schools, until as late as 1995. The first generation of women’s basketball coaches are just now starting to reach retirement age – the sport is about where men’s basketball was 30 years after James Naismith nailed up the peach baskets.
There are tens of thousands of men who make their living as basketball coaches – in Europe, in Division III, in high schools – who are the beneficiaries of more received knowledge about the game and how to coach it than some of the people coaching Division I or WNBA women’s teams. It takes a lot of time and work to build a worldwide coaching tree, and that time and work hasn’t happened for women’s basketball yet.
*Basketball is the only one of the three culturally prominent American sports that women generally play. Women’s football is rare, and women play softball instead of baseball. As a result, it is the sport to which people who don’t know anything about sports shuttle women, and is laden with a lot of ra-ra girl power baggage that has a deleterious effect on coaching. Any 10-year-old boy will have bad basketball habits drilled out of him in a rec league; women play in the Final Four and the WNBA while still staring at the floor on the dribble and shooting from their bellies. There is no impetus at all to actually treat the sport like a sport instead of a big empowerment-fest, and it shows in the play. You don’t see this problem in tennis, golf, soccer, or other sports that women play out of passion or skill – there, the coaching can be as good as in the men’s game, and the limits really are much more just physical capacity of the sexes and not cultural problems within the sport.
*Thanks to the above, the sport is extremely top-heavy. The same small circle of teams makes the NCAA final every year; it’s not like the men’s game where the 200th-best team like Mercer or Florida Gulf Coast is good enough to take advantage of Duke or Lousville slipping up for a minute. If the players have any talent at all and the coach has any sense at all, you’re immediately a top 25 team with no incentive to work the way men do. The top women are never pushed to do the monumental effort needed to move from “good enough” to the incredible level needed to go out and win 4 games against LeBron James, because good enough wins you 10 titles in women’s ball.
If you want to see women at their full potential, watch them play tennis, golf, or soccer, or even college softball. Don’t look for it in women’s basketball.
I’d say there’s a larger skill gap between genders in soccer than in basketball. Women’s soccer was almost completely killed-off until the early 70s and it’s only been in the last few years that women’s teams have gained access to coaching and resources from the men’s game. Women’s soccer is in a state of fast improvement at the moment, but that is improving from a very low level.
I love you for this. 
[Strawman alert] Of course, then they’ll probably resort to the argument that it’s just “women’s soccer” so it doesn’t really count anyway. Whatevs.
As to the OP and women competing against men - why? It’s an interesting thought exercise, but it’s not going to happen realistically. By definition, competitive sports are about speed and strength, and that’s where men will always excel and trump women. I don’t think any woman is up to that sort of setup, or ever has been a serious competitor against men.
That’s not a slam against women. It’s just reality.
For example, I love to watch women’s soccer; I love to watch men’s soccer. It’s the same game that’s executed differently by each gender. It’s a completely different style, but both are enjoyable to watch on their own merits.
Women have to play more strategically and employ more tactical plays. They can’t “bull” their way through with pure physical strength and speed. To be successful, they have to have better teamwork - a more cooperative effort - and understand how their teammates play and react, then adjust accordingly. Communication is a vital component to success in soccer, but more so in a women’s game. These things play to women’s strengths, so that’s what they use to prosecute their games.
As we’ve seen repeatedly in these Women’s World Cup games, it takes more than having one or two superstars on a team in order for a women’s team to win. Many teams’ games were lost because, despite some stellar individual efforts, teamwork and/or communication broke down (or never got started). This has more disastrous ramifications for a team of females, because their strategies rely more heavily on competent teamwork.
Men generally play with less tactical elegance, less finesse, and more brute strength and speed. It’s more likely that having one or two superior individuals will pull you through wins, at least for a while. A really strong, fast, and talented male can compensate quickly for poor play by other teammates simply by covering ground more quickly and mitigating the disaster on a physical level. That, too, is a thing of beauty to watch.
Ultimately, I guess I’m saying that enjoying sports competitions by women isn’t dependent on how they stack up against men, or vice versa.
At the high school and college levels, I’ve seen very talented women’s soccer teams get beaten by mediocre men’s teams in friendly scrimmages. The best result I saw was a 2-1 loss by the women.
The women were relatively successful in this scrimmage because they realized they needed to find good positions on the field and get off really quick passes to each other, lest they get mowed down by that big hulk coming at them at twice the speed of any woman they had ever faced. Plus, they had trained together and played together for so long that they could practically read each other’s minds, thus allowing them to get into good spaces and receive quick, accurate passes.
Again, they used tactical maneuvers to compensate for the men’s superior physical prowess. The women were brave and absorbed some hard-hit balls without flinching (although the spectators were flinching), and they double teamed attackers to take away balls (more strategy), but they couldn’t win in a foot race or pure physicality. And, the women had a great keeper who was agile and always read attacks well. She made a lot of stops, but ouch! Eventually the women were just steamrolled, despite their smarts and courage.
Women’s soccer is tactically behind men’s soccer. The kind of tactics employed by the USWNT are reminiscent of the USMNT circa 1994 and the USMNT at that time was hardly the most sophisticated team.
Tactics and organization is a strenght of women’s soccer, but comparing the high-level men’s game vs the high level women’s game, the men’s game still wins hands down.
In terms of technique and skill the gulf is much larger. Part of the reason the USWNT U-23 team can be beaten by a U-14 German village boys team is that the women don’t necessarily have the advantage in terms of skill and technique. I don’t think it is impossible for a woman to be just as skilled as male player, but realistically there’s gulf.
The big difference is the time and space the women get on the ball and the slower speed of play. just for comparison, the last time I played any sort of serious soccer was in a five-a-side league and a five-a-side cup where some of the players also played for semi-pro 11-a-side teams (and some had previously played for the youth/reserves of professional teams). Though 5-a-side is naturally a more compact and intensive game, so maybe the comparison is not fair, but I can say the women’s teams at this WC get far more time and space than I could’ve ever hoped for.
The result of this for women’s soccer is the ‘purer’ aspects of soccer, particularly passing, organization and the skill of players is accentuated which in many ways vastly improves the games as a spectacle. But I’d question how much men’s soccer you watched if you thought that the skill-level on display was even close.
I think at the high school and college level they could try having 1 or 2 coed exhibition basketball and soccer games a year.
My idea for basketball, have teams of 5. Play 4 quarters. In 2 of the quarters a team can have 3 women 2 men, and 2 others 3 men and 2 women and all substitutions must keep that ration BUT, they dont have to tell the other team what quarters they are playing what.
Well, you’re right that I haven’t had time to see much soccer in quite a few years, but I recall a lot of boomball in men’s play - kick the ball far downfield from the back and hope your offense can outrun the other team’s defense and get to it first. That doesn’t really scream “tactical” to me. It seems to be more of a Hail Mary play/wish.
In hindsight, yeah, better teams did play more tactical ball (thinking of Brazil and Germany here), so maybe I’m just recalling the weaker teams using desperate tactics or perhaps the memory is not so good.
I’ll make it a point to catch a few games and see what’s going on these days. Are there any specific teams you would recommend? Thanks.
Anyhow, coaching in women’s soccer could be better, and I think it’s reasonable to expect more of the women’s game. I have lots of criticisms there, but still don’t expect men and women to achieve parity in speed and strength. If they could improve on tactical skills, that’s fine. But women certainly rely more on tactical skills because they can’t compensate with so much speed and strength.
While a professional women’s team should be able to handle a U-14 boys team (no excuses there), that would be more iffy as the boys age up. Certainly by U-19 or so, as males acquire their greater muscle mass and get through their klutzy years, it’s a different situation entirely. Women wouldn’t have much of a chance by then against a decent men’s team unless they drugged the guys before the game.
Your experience and insights are appreciated. I liked your comment about WC players getting more space than you could hope for. Good one.
Is the 5-a-side like indoor soccer where 5 people play on each team? I’ve watched games in that (indoors) venue locally on a non-professional level. The tighter space does remove the foot speed advantage that men would have because the space is so small and no one needs to cover much ground. I’ve seen women adeptly compete with and against men because running speed and pure strength don’t confer any real advantage. Women were just as quick at getting and passing the ball and scoring.
It’s fun to watch because it is so intense and fast.
Women are no worse and no better.
A through ball which is what you are describing is not a “Hail Mary” play, (had to look it up). It requires skill, placement, spatial awareness on behalf of the passer and speed and spatial awareness on part of the Centre Forward… a good example would be Torres goal in the 2008 Euro final
I thought he was more referring to teams playing the long ball game, which few teams do even in the top leagues never mind internationally. It is a very much looked down upon tactic.
Personally I think it has its place, but I hate it when a team bases their whole attack plan around it.