Make-up game: Boys against the girls

Tom Watson's concerned that I've given up writing about politics to devote this space to obsessing over "every camera angle and lighting trick" on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip just as the fall elections are heating up and we need every voice raised in encouragement and protest to help get out the vote.

I object.

First on the grounds that in all my posts about Studio 60 I never once mentioned camera angles or lighting tricks, although, by the way, the camera work on the latest episode, directed by Timothy Busfield, was pretty darn zippy and brought the show the kind of life the three previous episodes desperately needed.

And second, I hadn't given up writing about politics for Studio 60.  I'd given up writing about everything except Studio 60.

I'm better now.

Actually, although it may have seemed the last couple weeks that this had become a Studio 60 anti-fanzine, I've written about other things.  And one of the posts that got lost in the shuffle is called Boys against the girls and I'm sorry about that because I liked the post myself and because it generated some interesting comments from the handful of people who saw it and read it before the Studio 60 blogging pushed it down the page, out of sight and out of mind.

The post was about the way the girls defer too much to the boys on the ten year old's soccer team and how it makes me wish there was an all-girls division in our league so that they could develop their skills and their talents without having to worry about the boys hogging the ball.

It was also about why, although I'm for sex segregated sports, I'm not a fan of the trend towards sex-segregated education.

You can go back and read the post if you want.  What I'd like you to do is read the following three comments.  Three good comments by three good bloggers.

Bill Altreuter, of Outside Counsel:

I was in the stands today, watching my middle daughter play soccer. She is a high school senior now, and these will probably be the last soccer games I will see her play-- I doubt that she'll even bother with intramural soccer next year, although she might play rugby. It's been a long time with CLA, who just took to the game, and was, for a long time, usually the best player on her team. You know, the one about whom the other parents say, "Whose kid is that? She played co-ed ball a lot longer than any of her friends did, which might have hurt her game, but she enjoyed the physicality of it, and liked playing with boys. When, at 14, she was told she could no longer do it, she went the travel team route, and I think may have been frozen out in the girls team politics that had time to develop in her absence.

Or possibly that's just me, projecting. Certainly her athletic career has, to this point, been more storied than mine was in high school. She is now a dependable sub, good off the bench, a smart ball handler who seldom makes mistakes and who never flinches from contact. She was good today-- she looks lovely on a soccer pitch, if I do say so myself.

My oldest daughter will, at the conclusion of this school year, have completed eight years of single sex education: four years of high school, and four years at a woman's college in Western Massachusetts. While I wouldn't recommend it for everyone, for some girls, and for some women it is exactly the right thing, just as, I think, the "historically black colleges" are also exactly right for some young African Americans. Would I fell that way in a perfect world? Oh, man, I don't even understand the question. What would a place like that be like? My daughter-- the one in Northhamton, actually, might be able to tell us-- she is a Logic major, and apparently her chosen field allows her to speculate mathmatically about possible worlds. In my profession, speculation is a basis for objection, so I seldom indulge. I will say, however, that I like choices, particularly when it comes to my children. I'd have never attended an all male high school, but my friends that did (it is the norm for Catholic schools here in the Queen City of the Lakes) seem to have emerged unscathed. Choice is good.

Blog on the Run's Lex Alexander:

Our local league is same-sex down to the 5-year-olds, and I suspect that's a good thing. My daughter, now 8, has been the shortest girl on her team four years running; she has enough problems without having to deal with Y-chromosome blindness as well. (She also has the rep of being the toughest on the team, and drama queen/hypochondriac though she can be the other 167 hours of the week, during the game it's absolutely true. She takes shots to the face at point-blank range and complains about nothing except her glasses getting bent. I should have been half so tough at her age.)

But even same-sex teams don't solve all problems. I remember reading a Sports Illustrated article about UNC women's soccer coach Anson Dorrance in which, among other things, Dorrance talked about the psychology of coaching women and dealing with things like, "I don't want to pass it to her." "Why not?" "She's a bitch." What I found interesting about his description of the exchange, even though it plays into some unflattering stereotypes, is that he didn't pass judgment on it; he simply treated it as one more coaching obstacle to overcome. Put another way, he seemed to be saying that he just accepted his team members as they were and proceeded from there.

And grasshopper from Diary of a Heretic:

Third or fourth grade is the best time to separate the boys and girls into separate soccer leagues. But life is NEVER going to be fair, Lance. Every once in a while, a girl develops into such a strong player, the boy's coach will recruit her. And the girl is generally thrilled (her father certainly is), because to play on the boys' team, she really needs to be conspicuously better than most of the boys. The argument circulates that she would present unfair competition to all the other girls playing because she's light years ahead of everyone. That's how some people are. But right away, then, the other girls realize that the girls team is basically a "B" team. And rather than be relugated to that division, they decide it might be fun to try ballet lessons this semester...

Many times communities knock themselves out trying to level the playing field for girls. These communities go to significant lengths to make sure the girls get the same attention and encouragement in science and math. But life continues to be unfair. Prejudice against females pervades our lives so thoroughly we can not see half of it, or maybe more--ever. My younger sister was reared in a time and at a place where the parents worked strenuously to ignore any and all differences between male and female. Boys and girls wore the same overalls. They sported the same haircuts. Even by sixth and seventh grade they were expected to be the same playmates they were in Kindergarten. And you know what happened? The girls still turned into women and the boys into men, and life was still grossly unfair...

This does not mean I'm a defeatist. Some things are better. More women are doctors now than a couple of generations ago. Many unspoken subterranean prejudices have long since been rooted out. My point is merely how unfair everything is for everyone all the time. Male or female, some people are born with talents and assets and all the love anyone needs. And some must live without any of those advantages. And if we're so busy spooning up equal amounts of sugar for every child, if we don't acknowledge how different (as well as similar) we all are, we'll learn to live with graditude, or begin to recognize the unique beauty in everyone who crosses our path.

I've got nothing to add right now, but I hope you do.

By the way, the ten year old's team has lost two more games in the meantime.  They were tough, close games, and in the first of the two the girls were in the thick of things the whole way and the boys were passing to them and letting them take the ball and we scored some goals.

Second game, though, things reverted.  The girls flinched and shied.  The boys passed to each other.  The coach steamed.  The final score was 0-2.

Comments

[Tom W.]

In my son's baseball league, there is now a single girl left from his early days when there were girls on every midget team - she's 12 or so. And she's a terrific player, definitely top 10 in the league: strong pitcher, shortstop, contact hitter for a high average, runs pretty well, knows how to play the game.

And her Dad's the coach. Nice kid too, but the father pushes hard. I've seen her crack under the strain in a couple of games.

And your commenters are right, where does go from here? Our league has a very actie softball program, and all the girls switched. She didn't.

Girls baseball is not played anywhere in our region at the high school level; the best she can hope for is some club activity. On the other hand, softball is huge throughout high school and college and she'd clearly be an All-County type performer (and here's a little factoid - back in the day I covered high school sports for the local Gannett papers, so this is a semi-expert opinion). I'm not sure she's well-served by sticking with hardball - though the other kids like her and she's well-accepted.

My own daughter is starting girls-only high school this fall, and it's a wonderful thing - truly. It's serious, difficult academically, and the social pressures are not as great. She loves it already.

An Lance, good to see the S60 drugs wear off!

[MoXmas]

Weird, reading that comment about the UNC Women's soccer coach, as if that kind of attitude is unique to women's sports, or soccer.

I can't ever remember doing this during a game, personally, but it is extrememly common during football practice for offensive lineman to teach the quarterback and running backs exactly who runs the friggin' offense by showing them what happens when blocks are missed. I can remember letting a defensive tackle hammer the crap out of one of our halfbacks because the back wouldn't learn to hit the right hole. Funny how a shoulder pad in the rib cage at full speed is a good memory aid.

All that said, when my sister was an athletic director at IU, I noticed that, this many years after Title 9, a distinct and different female jock culture is starting to form. I can't describe it perfectly, but it has much different elements of (internal team) teasing and harassment than male jock culture, though it seems ot have both those things.

[monkyboy]

No comments about "30 Rock?"

It actually made me laugh a couple times...something "Studio60" has yet to do.

[grasshopper]

My original comment to BOYS AGAINST GIRLS tried to cover way too much ground, a particular fault of mine I do try to temper, just without noticable success. But the business about life being unfair, for me, was the primary glory organized sports offers kids. Boys or girls, together or not, if a kid is playing an organized, team sport he or she soon realizes (especially if someone in the family keeps harping on it)that you can do your best and lose. Everyone on the team may play the sharpest game ever, with finesse the team has never shown before, combined with laudable unselfishness...and still lose. It works the other way, too. They can find themselves playing against another team only to discover that because of an array of unexpected conditions that no matter how sloppy they are, they happen to win. Does a sloppy, accidental win feel as good as a spectacular squeaker, where they totally outdid themselves? The kids say better. Despite my personal fascination with virtue as its own reward, almost every kid I've ever known (except for myself, many years ago) prefers to win no matter what. Sitting on the bench the whole game? Yeah, if they win. Playing a lazy or bullying game with their ref winking between plays? Yeah, if they win. And older kids insist they would much rather lose than tie.

[Judy]

I hope that some day boys and girls can find reason to play effectively together. The separation that occurs in sports is as much or more to do with social relationships than physical prowess. If teams were selected not by age but by height/weight, it would create better matched players irrespective of gender. It would benefit not just girls but also slightly- built boys. The boys have an intense need for using their muscles, running, jumping, etc, and they not surprisingly think the girls are wusses (and adults tend to pooh-pooh their comments while also reinforcing them. Better for each gender to learn an appreciation for the other's limitation --after all, boys mature more slowly, affecting their judgment. I think boys tend to see the differences and then further ostracize the girls. If coaches did not take the boys' performance as the default standard but emphasized skill building, however talented the kid is, then perhaps some middling ground of accomplishment could be attained. But I don't think it will happen. We all cling to our notions of differences, even when we don't like the derision the boys and girls often spout for each other.

My 35-yr old son has detested Title IX for what he felt it has done for men's sports. Last year, he went back to college and, for a writing class, decided to develop a paper on the negative impact of Title IX on men's sports. Not long into his research, he started an almost-daily call to me to exclain about what he was finding: it is women who are still disadvantaged! All the claims that he himself had made in the past began to fall away, one by one. I got used to conversations beginning, "Mom, did you realize....." In the end, he changed his thesis topic to something like "Title IX needs to be enforced to provide women with equal opportunity." The most startling finding that had to hit the wastebasket was that Title IX had forced the elimination of revenue producing college sports for men. In fact, he found that 80% of college football teams aren't making money (and nobody object!) (clear exception for Big 10 and some other major programs, of course.) Anyway, I mention this because it is at the grade school level that these ideas about the negative impact of playing with girls begin to take root. And we should try to change that more than we have. Perhaps a first step is to encourage coaches to undertake the great task of having coed teams a little longer than they do (and not to accept girls' not passing to friend, etc -- after all, the real value of playing sports is about learning teamwork and building character.)

I vote for keeping coed sports teams at grade school level but I support separate education at high school level and beyond (girls learn to set higher expectations for themselves from single sex colleges, at least that's what I learned at Douglass College, an all-women's college in NJ). The issue is how adults treat the students. In all women schools the teacher has to call on a girl! Thus, the girls start taking themselves more seriously.

[Steve Knepper]

Interesting Blog to me as I just did a College Thesis on Title IX. I kind of agree and dis agree a little bit. Now I have heard many many times and Mine is Defenently an Expert oppinon, that This girl can play with the boys No problem, Funny thing is though It never happens and Honestly Girls dont get Guys best game, Mostly becuse lets take football If I hit a girl with everything I had on the field There is NO Chance she will get up on her own power, Guarenteed, Now that being said I think women have gotten the raw end of the deal with regard to athletics and Title IX.

Steve Knepper

[Sandy]

hi