A female tee-ball player looks out into a field of boys. Creating coed sports for kids younger than 12 could lessen the divide between genders in athletics. Illustration by Audrey Kennedy
There is no benefit to keeping boys and girls on separated teams as young children.
When I was a little girl, around 7 years old, I played on an all-girls tee-ball team. I remember playing against teams that had all girls and playing against teams that had all boys, but I never saw girls and boys playing together on the same team.
I didn’t think about it at the time, but this caused me to lose confidence in my athletic ability.
Whenever we would play a boys team, I felt as though we had no chance, even though we were a respectable team competition-wise.
I accepted the fact that girls could not play at the same level as boys.
According to the University of Miami sports studies professors, Robin Vealey and Melissa Chase in the book “Best Practice for Youth Sport,” genders are separated in professional sports predominantly due to differences in physiological makeup.
In short, boys are often faster and stronger than girls after puberty, and it would be unfair to make girls compete against them.
According to Vealey and Chase, after puberty “males develop larger skeletal muscles, as well as larger hearts and lungs and a greater number of red blood cells (which absorb oxygen for an aerobic advantage).”
However, this argument has no valid basis in prepubescent organized sports when girls and boys are fundamentally on the same level.
Some may say separating sexes in youth sports is that it encourages camaraderie among children of the same gender. Young children play team sports to make friends, so it would be best for girls to remain with girls and boys to remain with boys because they have more in common with each other.
However, this kind of mindset assumes that girls and boys don’t have the same interests. This kind of mindset is what perpetuates negative gender stereotypes, like the idea that girls don’t enjoy playing sports and therefore don’t have much in common with boys in the same age group.
According to the Women’s Sports Foundation, girls drop out of sports at twice the rate of boys after the age of 14, mainly due to the social stigma around female athletes.
If youth sports teams were truly inclusive, it could change the way society views female athletes. As it is right now, if one is a female in a sport, she is special and an outlier.
Female athletes aren’t special for being involved in sports while also being girls. They are just athletes who happen to be female.
If teams keep separating young athletes by gender before it is necessary to make competitions fair, it is sending a message that boys are more acceptable as athletes.
