I’ll preface this by saying I love sports. And I especially love women. I believe women should get equal pay for equal work and equality in every aspect of life
If I’m going to watch sports though I want to see the best athletes play that sport. I think that makes sense. It’s the entertainment business so why not watch the best? You don’t go to the theater to watch second rate actors. I have zero interest in watching women play any sports. I will use basketball as an example but it applies to all sports:
NBA players are incredible athletes soaring above the rim, making incredible athletic plays. The women look like shorter, less athletic versions of the guys in the old film clips of the men in the fifties. Dribbling with their heads down, flipping up two hand set shots. “But their fundamentals are so good, their two hand chest passes are sublime"
If I want to watch fundamentals I can do a YouTube video of that.
So let me ask what level of men’s team you think can beat the best WNBA team
A. The Sacramento Kings
B- A top 25 D1 team
C- A good lower college division team
D- The top high school team in the country
E- A solid top level high school team in Baltimore
[Moderating]
I’ve gotten multiple reports on this thread. Yes, it’s a position that a lot of people will disagree with. @mglambo is still allowed to hold his position, and to debate it, provided that he does so politely. If you disagree with him, you’re also free to post your disagreement, again, politely.
[Not moderating]
I’ll also point out that there are plenty of sports where the top athletes aren’t even human. A horse can beat a human in most races, and a motorcycle will beat the horse. Doesn’t stop people from wanting to watch humans race.
The thrust of the OP is, “I don’t enjoy women’s sports, I think it’s inferior to men’s sports in all ways, help me quantify how much worse it is.” Meh.
Of the sports I like to watch, I like the competitive and technical aspects of the game. I don’t need to watch “the best”. Watching go kart racing is hellaciously fun, and the WNBA’s take on fundamentals like moving the ball, actually running plays, boxing out to get rebounds, etc, make it enjoyable for me.
You know what turns me off from “the best”? They’re mostly becoming mercenaries.
Playing by whose rules, and with whose equipment? Because the experiment’s been done for various sports, and whose rules and equipment are being used generally matters more than the gender of the players. A bigger, stronger, highly skilled male will lose badly to a woman who has been actually trained properly for the game they are playing instead of another one.
Well, as regards soccer, more than once has a boys’ high school team beaten a national women’s team (made up, presumably, of professionals). However, context matters, and these matches are/were “friendlies” in the most literal possible sense – so, bench players, coach trying new tactics, players not giving their all because they don’t want to risk injury, etc. Would the high school boys beat the women if the stakes were higher? Who knows, and unless and until someone offers to pay all of the competitors a high prize if they win, we’re not going to see a “for realzies” match between boys and women.
As for who can beat the best WNBA team: I think they would be absolutely shredded if they competed against A or B. A game against C would be close, and I think they would absolutely destroy D or E. That’s because the WNBA women are a) taller than high school boys, and b) will have had more experience, by several years, over the lads.
Ok.. I will politely just say that I asked a multiple choice question and what I’m getting back is “just don’t watch it” ( I don’t ) and “this is a stupid question” (sorry)
I was just wondering what level of male play folks might think would beat a WNBA team.
I thought folks on here might answer that. I guess one person did but that might have been snarky.
Then I will politely respond that your OP didn’t just ask that multiple choice question. You also spent the first half of your post elaborating on your POV that women’s sports are fundamentally inferior to men’s sports, that you only want to “see the best athletes play that sport,” and that you “have zero interest in watching women play any sports.”
As @Chronos said in their mod note, you are certainly entitled to your opinion. However, in this thread, IMO, you poisoned the well before you actually asked the question.
High school or high school aged? The occasions when the USWNT has played youth teams that I’m aware of were either youth national teams or professional academies (the most commonly cited game was against FC Dallas’s developmental squad).
D beats the women by like 40. E depends a lot on what’s meant by solid, but I think many big cities would have high school teams that would beat the WNBA champions.
Yeah that was my bad for not looking closely enough. The matches that I skimmed were high-school aged boys, playing for developmental teams. Though it does make me wonder if the boys’ team from any random reasonably well-funded public high school would be competitive against grown women?
As I understand it, most of the most-talented under-18 male players in the U.S. are playing on club/developmental teams, rather than their high school teams. So, barring an exceptionally good high school team, it’d be a distinctly lower bar.
I pay less attention to the youth game now than I did years ago, but high school soccer is mostly just the local talent. That is you don’t generally have schools like Montverde Academy where top basketball players go to get more attention for recruiters. The equivalent players would be in developmental academies.
Now, you still have plenty of people that aren’t good enough for the LA Galaxy youth teams, but still are going to play soccer in college. Harder to get a full starting lineup of them compared to basketball, but there will still be some normal high schools that have enough they could compete with the USWNT and state champion level teams are likely to be better.