Eimear Ryan: Does the future of sport lie away from segregation by gender?
EXAMPLE: Rachael Blackmore celebrated winning the 2022 Cheltenham Gold Cup on A Plus Tard. Blackmore has shown that, given the opportunity, women can surpass the courage, skill and competitive drive of men. Pic: David Davies/PA Wire
Sports journalist Julie DiCaro broke an unusual story on her Twitter account (@JulieDiCaro) last weekend. The author of the excellent book , DiCaro always has an eye out for gender inequality on her reporting beat. At first, the facts of this particular story seemed outrageously sexist. Under the headline of 'Girls hoops team beats boys, denied title anyway', the article on Deadspin told the story of a girls’ basketball team who won the final of a boys’ league in Hoover, Alabama, only for the trophy to be handed to their beaten opponents.
The girls’ team, Spain Park – made up of fifth graders, or eleven-year-olds – had played together in a girls’ league for three years, but were told that in order to keep their practice facilities, they would have to play in the local recreational league, made up of boys’ teams. The girls’ team did as they were told, as they didn’t want to lose momentum at this crucial juncture in their development; we all know how hard it is to keep girls playing through their teens.Â
So they entered the recreational league to keep their access to the city’s municipal gyms. They didn’t meet with immediate success – according to one of the players’ moms, who posted about the team on Facebook, they were middle of the pack at first, losing several close games by one or two points. But playing against the boys made them up their game, both as individuals and as a team. They made it all the way to the final and won – only for the trophy to be handed to the runners-up.
If ever there was clickbait created just for me, this was it. The story had a number of familiar elements to anyone with a stake in women’s sport: access to playing facilities; the difficulties of encouraging girls to stay in sport past childhood; the general second-class citizenry, even when girls literally best their male counterparts. But something in the story didn’t quite click. Why were the girls not awarded their trophy? Not that we look to Alabama to be a beacon of progressive gender politics, but this seemed too moustache-twirlingly evil to be real.
As the fella says, there was a context – and a complicated rulebook. The girls’ team was a little different than the recreational teams they were playing against. They were an ‘Over the Mountain’ or OTM team – essentially, a development squad for talented players from the same school district. Normally, OTM teams of both genders are precluded from winning local rec leagues, and are also obliged to play in the next age-grade up, to make the competition more equitable. However, there was no next age-grade up for the Spain Park team, since female participation in sport falls off a cliff at age 13/14. Instead, the team stayed in their own age-grade, but competed against the boys as a counterbalance. But they still won anyway.
Speaking to local press, the girls’ coach, Wes Russell, said that both he and the girls knew going into the final that they would not receive the trophy even if they won. However, it seems some of the parents were unaware of this, and certainly the general public was unfamiliar of the nuances and by-laws of local youth basketball in Alabama – hence the internet outrage. Certainly, the optics were terrible: plucky girls’ team beat the boys at their own game, only to be denied the trophy? Male fragility, how are ya, etc etc. It’s probably fair to say that the organisers never thought a girls’ team would be good enough to put them in this unfortunate position, and the city wisely moved quickly to save face; the girls were presented with a trophy of their very own by the Mayor of Hoover himself the day after DiCaro’s story went viral. All’s well that ends well.
I keep thinking about the boys in this story – that group of eleven-year-olds who were beaten on the day but still received their trophy. I hope they were not humiliated by what happened; I hope there were no adults in their lives who demeaned them for being beaten by a bunch of girls, fair and square. In a best-case scenario, the incident might have fostered in them a respect for the athletic abilities of girls; a recognition of the similarities, and not just the differences, between the genders. The truth is that the difference between boys and girls in terms of sporting ability is negligible, but boys rarely get the opportunity to view girls as teammates or worthy rivals.
The Women’s Sports Foundation, founded by the legendary Billie Jean King, offers guidance on how girls and boys can equitably compete against each other: ‘If the skill, size and strength of any participant, female or male, compared to others playing on the team creates the potential of a hazardous environment, participation may be limited on the basis of these factors, rather than the sex of the participant.’ Michaela Musto, an assistant sociology professor at the University of British Columbia, conducted a study on a swim team in California where the kids were divided by ability rather than by sex; it changed for the better how the swimmers viewed and related to one another.
Does the future of sport lie in segregation by weight-class or ability rather than by gender? After all, a strict gender binary is an increasingly unstable concept, with young people in particular interrogating its limitations. While sex segregation in sport is often put down to wanting to preserve the safety of women, this idea deserves further parsing. There can be a physical gulf between the sexes, yes, but there can also be a huge physical variance even within the genders, but no one worries about the slip of an 18-year-old competing with a tall twentysomething with a decade of S&C under their belt. In some sports, such as shooting and archery, separating competitions by gender seems purely arbitrary. And we know from Rachael Blackmore’s example that, given the opportunity, women can surpass the courage, skill and competitive drive of men.
Sport gives so much to young people – health, fitness, friendship, routine, commitment, the joy of competition, the humility of being bested. And all of these are gender-neutral.
