A 6th grade girls team from Kentucky was set to go for the year-end championship tournament, but was told they were banned due to fears boys teams might ‘retaliate’ if they lost to the girls team.
Once again, girls are somehow responsible for boys’ inability to behave 🤦
Once again there appears to be more to this story than the poor quality article linked suggests.
Here’s the quotes:
SWOB President Tom Sunderman expressed concern in a statement:
“Doing this for 28 years, what we have worried about is a boys team losing to a girls team (especially in the year end tourney), they may get frustrated and retaliate against a girl.” "Then we have liability issues.” Prez, a social media user on X (Formerly Twitter), didn’t buy it.
“What he meant to say was they can’t have their boys being emasculated by a better girls team… it would be a blow to their developing manhood to get beat by girls.”
What context am I missing?
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Retaliating against your opponents for beating you in a game isn’t normal, but on Patriarchy it is.
Patriarchy, not even once.
Once again, girls are somehow responsible for boys’ inability to behave
That’s really not what i am getting from this article at all.
made the call because they believed that 11 to 12-year-old girls and boys competing against each other on the court could pose a liability risk leading to violence, even though the girls team had been winning 7-1 all season without incident.
they may get frustrated and retaliate against a girl.” "Then we have liability issues.”
McGraw said the girls were never in any real danger during the games, aside from the occasional side-eye.
“They got giggles, they got laughs, and people talked about them… you know, the looks.”
[emphasis added]
Where “once again” is the boys inability to behave? All i see is adults wanting to dodge POTENTIAL liability.
Beyond that there is the question about their participation in the league itself. Here there are as i see it two sides:
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They participated through deception (listing as mail AND apparently fielding a male team in the first game)
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Or one can be on the side that the system is broken and they should have been allowed to participate in the first place.
Again something that adults decide. Not sure if we have enough information to judge this properly.
Not sure why i spend much time on this nonesense, especially since i find this to be a pretty poor article (as is any that just randomly quotes social media users to make its point).
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“…what we have worried about is a boys team is losing to a girls team (especially in a year end tourney) they may get frustrated and retaliate against a girl,” a text allegedly sent by the tournament directors reads.
“Throughout the season we had a few teams come to us about this and raise concerns about it. Because of this we decided to keep them out of the tournament,” another text reads.
Oh, so the teams were threatening to commit violence against the girls. Why not just kick those teams out?
“For their safety” :vomits:
I don’t want to be an old man, but if you hit a girl when I was in 6th grade, you were an instant social pariah. Everyone would beat your ass.
Kicking them out doesn’t solve the problem. They’d just blame the girls instead of being introspective. Let one of these loser little boys throw hands and learn really fucking fast that the meanest, hardest hitting monster on this planet is a pissed off 12 year old girl. When he’s getting his hair ripped out a fistful at a time, he’ll understand why he lost.
but if you hit a girl when I was in 6th grade, you were an instant social pariah. Everyone would beat your ass.
And this is why male violence against women is non-existent, children.
There is a whole world out there to pay attention to and you’ve taken the performative utterances of tweenage boys desperately trying to become men as evidence to deny everything else. WTF?
FWIW, the ones who were shouting the loudest are absolutely the most likely to be dominating, coercing, and hitting their female partners now. They’re performing masculinity because they don’t know what it is and that terrifies them.
And because the world is dominated by these frightened little boys, we punish girls and women for the violence of men and boys. This story is not an outlier, it is the fucking story.
Yeah a lot of boys forget that girls don’t fight “fair”. Due to societal pressures on women to surpress heir emotions, when it comes time to fight that’s it. Boys are taught by society fighting is normal and even is encouraged in how they play.
6th graders generally don’t fight fair. They don’t generally fight well at all.
The typical fight between 6th grade boys is every bit as much of a slap fest as the typical fight between 6th grade girls.
6th grade boys haven’t hit puberty yet. Given that these girls are kicking their butts at basket ball I’ll assume they slap harder than the boys do.
They’re probably taller than the boys, too which plays into them beating them at basketball since height is such a big advantage and girls tend to hit their growth spurts earlier.
How about policing the boys’ damned behavior for one fucking time in their lives, then?
They’d have to not agree with the behavior in the first place.
Sorry, but boys-will-be-boys. So we have to ban girls from competing, because we literally cannot continence telling any of our precious little superstars to cut that shit out.
That’s not why they were kicked out. The coach lied, to get them playing in the boys league, since they were so good.
So of course they got kicked out. What you expect the league to do?He explained:
“In November of 2023, Next Level and Larry McGraw deceptively registered a girls team into the 6th grade boys league and under the gender listed as MALE.”
“We entered them into the league assuming they were a boys’ team as conveniently no roster was ever provided.”
“Subsequently, their first game was filled in by a boys 6th grade Next Level team because they played the 6th grade boys Cincinnati Royals team - coached by myself, so there was no reason to suspect anything different.”He continued:
“It wasn’t until late January/early February that several teams from the 6th-grade division started traveling down to Kentucky to play their scheduled games, that it became apparent that the Next Level team was, in fact, a girls team.”
“Several complaints from coaches and teams were filed because of this deception.”Social media users, however, saw SWOB’s statement as deflecting from another issue, one that accused the league of trying to keep their feelings from getting hurt in the event the boys were defeated by girls.
that is some selective bullshit
Seriously. What this tells me is that 70+ people either didn’t read the article or they just really have a thing about mixed gender sports. You quoted only the pathetic backpedalling lies he said to try to further justify his actions. BUT FIRST AND FOREMOST he said this (the man you are quoting, Sunderland, is the president)
The city-wide basketball league, Southwestern Ohio Basketball (SWOB), made the call because they believed that 11 to 12-year-old girls and boys competing against each other on the court could pose a liability risk leading to violence, even though the girls team had been winning 7-1 all season without incident.
IT IS WHY THEY WERE KICKED OUT.
It wasn’t until late January/early February that several teams from the 6th-grade division started traveling down to Kentucky to play their scheduled games, that it became apparent that the Next Level team was, in fact, a girls team.
You’re telling me it took multiple games AND teams for them to become "apparent that it was a girls team " ??? And become a problem. But only until they got far enough because maybe they wouldn’t and then SWOB could avoid PR problem all together.
this is a reminder to read the fucking article people
You might come up with a similar conclusion as me, or completely opposite. But OP is patently false and deceptive with their quote and definitive ruling on it, claiming the headline is deceptive! Fuck that.
So if I understand it correctly, it’s a boys only competition, not an open competition. And since these girls were so good, they wanted to be able to compete against the top teams, so they pulled of a superb ruse to be able to do just that, in the process upsetting some men who don’t want to compete against girls for reasons, especially if they end up losing. That’s going to make a good sport movie one day.
Many (most?) sports have a top “open” competition that anyone can enter and then several restricted competitions (age, sex, handicaps, …), but even if you qualify for one of the restricted competitions, if you’re good enough, you can still play in the open competition. Except in bible belt country apparently, no girls allowed in the top competition.
He also said it wasn’t unheard of for a girl to play on a boys’ team or for a girls’ team to compete against boys.
It sounds like it’s not a boys only competition. It’s not entirely clear whether this quote is just referring to in general or this specific league, but based on the context the latter appears to be the intended reading.
These are 6th graders. There’s no “top” competition for 6th graders at all, which is why this is a region specific league, and most of the sports are divided into boys and girls divisions at those ages.
Why is it divided by sex?
I can only speak about my nation’s club football (the world kind, not the us one): the normal competition is open to anyone, with smaller competitions for other groups. Those smaller competitions have discriminatory rules for entry, but players that meet those criteria, can still chose to play in the normal competition if they want to. The “normal” competition has many more brackets than the smaller competitions because there’s just way more players, which also means that if you want to play vs the best, that’s where they are. It’s the same principle for all ages.
I can imagine that at one point the football competition in my country had similar “no girls allowed” rules, but when I grew up in the nineties, the football competition that I played in was already mixed.
I don’t know. I didn’t go to school near Ohio, but my state had some sports divided by sex and some not at that age. In my area, it seemed to be largely that the popular sports were divided, and the less popular sports were not.
The way to change it is either to ask for it to be changed by the existing organizerd, or form a new league if they won’t, and enough parents want that.
Even if you are technically right, you are morally wrong. They should be allowed to register in that league, and if they weren’t then the coach lying about their gender was the correct and moral thing to do.
Crazy to watch people twist themselves in knots bending over backwards to try and excuse sexism.
But I don’t even think you are technically right. All those quotes stink like excuses and BS.
That’s a whole different kind of sucky.
I’m completely bumfuzzled about this.
In the statement on their website, Sunderman literally quotes himself telling McGraw that the girls couldn’t play because if they beat a boys team in the playoffs then the boys might get frustrated and physically retaliate, causing a liability issue.
He didn’t say they couldn’t play because they registered as a boys team. That was more of a supporting anecdote presented because of social media blowback.
The way I see it, when you’re a sports executive, you have two options in this situation: 1) exclude the girls’ team because “dem’s the rules” or 2) let them play because seeking out the boys’ competition will help them develop into a stronger team.
Personally, I think 1) is a weak choice, especially when arguments like “someone could get hurt” are both ripe with misogynistic sentiment and refuted by the games played without incident.
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It wasn’t until late January/early February that several teams from the 6th grade division started traveling down to Kentucky to play their scheduled games, that it became apparent that the Next Level team was, in fact, a girls team. Several complaints from coaches and teams were filed because of this deception.
At that point we allowed the team to finish the regular season schedule, but would move them into a girls’ tourney at year end.
This is a direct quote from the Southwestern Ohio Basketball website.
They allowed the girls to play until the end of the season in the boy’s category, so your take on it is incorrect.
So the article is wrong, but this still doesn’t make it OK. The article should have just been accurate. That would have been nice.
Did you read the article? I think you should. I’m not being snarky, promise.
The headline is misleading. What I pulled was from the article.
What was in the article is that the girls team was kicked out of the league when the only game left was the championship game. You’d think if it was just the “no girls allowed” issue that would have been dealt with much earlier…
Oh no, how dare you bring FACTS to a lemmy post?!
LoL. Lemmy is definitely feels over reals so far. And my feeling appreciates that.
So the league decided to preemptively retaliate on behalf of the hypothetical violent boys?
This is how most sex segregated sports came about
- women beats men
- women banned
- segregated division created because of “biological differences”
I wonder why people are downvoting your comment. It’s literally what happened. See for instance this paper on the history of gender segregation in the Olympics: https://theworld.org/stories/2016-08-17/see-120-years-struggle-gender-equality-olympics.
Quote: “Margaret Murdock from the US won a silver in a tie in the 1976 Riffle Event, one of the events in the shooting categories. The rifle event was split into men’s and women’s events in 1984.”
Sports without contact mechanics I’ve always wondered why the split. Like men’s and women’s chess… what?
But men’s and women’s football? That kind of makes sense, not saying women’s should be banned from the men’s leagues, but let them make that choice themselves
Women’s chess leagues exist for women who want to compete without facing misogynistic behavior. They can also compete against men, however, unlike in other sports, and many do. If you ask me, what should have been done from the start would have been tackling the misoginy.
I think it is a bit more difficult than that. I have really enjoywd watching downhill bike racing in the past, and both the men’s and women’s races are incredible.
If you don’t know, It is a single rider time trial down incredibly technical courses on a mountain bike.
Unfortunately I don’t think it would be good to mix men and women, because the men are faster. This year’s world champs race had the men finishing 30s faster, the fastest woman would have been 66th. Results
I would love to see more mixed competitions in the elite level of sports where it makes sense.
I often think of the Olympic skier that was interviewed by NPR a few years ago. She described how the boys around her were encouraged to do riskier jumps, whereas when she’d bring it up coaches, parents etc would all express concern about “what if you get hurt?”
There are a lot of social factors I think we should consider before writing women off as inherently lesser in competitive sports. We don’t know how many women are held back by these narratives if they aren’t even given the chance. Even if it’s the case now, I really wonder how much is purely biological
Sports without contact mechanics I’ve always wondered why the split
Look at world records for any sport that requires raw strength/power, speed, and endurance. The split is pretty extreme. The marathon world record is 2:00:35, set in 2023. The women’s world record is 2:17:42, 13% slower. For the 100m, the top time is 9.58s for men. Over 180 men have broken the 10 second barrier. The top woman is 10.49; no woman has ever broken the 10 second barrier. Given that power lifting is harder to do direct comparisons (…in a way that readily makes sense to people that aren’t competitive power lifters…), I’ll just note that it’s not even close.
Any sport that has a significant speed, endurance, or strength component is going to tend to be dominated by men. When it’s purely a skill issue, the splits are much more even. When you look at archery, for instance, women sometimes beat men; the split is fairly even.
In a lot of ways, it makes sense to have a hard gender split in sports, and not try to make a solid delineation between what sports require enough skill to overcome a physical gap versus which ones don’t.
Even then. They’re 11 years old here.
I suspect because this being what has happened in “most sex segregated sports” is a very very bold assertion. In which of those sports are women holding top positions? I mean women athletes are awesome, but the idea that separation happens because the poor men can’t keep up is just… I don’t know, maybe I’m a confused old man.
But I thought it was so that women could compete at the top levels of their sport in sports where their times, weights, etc. are not really proximal. They should of course be combined where the physical implications are negligible, but the idea that what’s preventing that is that the men just can’t compete with the women seems strange to me.
But is there some support for that?
Cherrypicking
One of top posts here is selective as fuxk quoting only the president’s backpedalling after their official initi statement being the fear of retaliation. I’m getting way too annoyed watching the upvotes (aka misinformation) grow just because this asshat added a quote.
Oh by the way, sunderman.- the president - coached one of the boy teams that played against the girls team. And they are trying to say it took time to realize, to justify why they were allowed to play up until the championships. FFS this is garbage sportmanship
(Edited to correct autocorrect)
The president’s team got beaten by girls, and now he’s throwing a hissy fit because they’re going to beat him again in the tournament. Don’t project your own fragile masculinity on the next generation.
Actually, that’s the twist in this story. The president’s team was beaten by boys who were then subbed out for girls later.
Oh by the way, sunderman.- the president - coached one of the boy teams that played against the girls team. And they are trying to say it took time to realize, to justify why they were allowed to play up until the championships. FFS this is garbage sportmanship
You should include the whole context if you want to note that. The game he coached against was the first game and the girl’s team roster was all boys. After that game they switched out the boys for girls. The whole situation is still dumb.
Y’all Qaeda strikes again.
God damn Talibangelicals and their Shakira law.
Hymns don’t lie 🎶
Sexist, ignorant and disappointing. 3/3 for Kentucky
you try telling 6th grade boys to be more sensitive
Somebody has to, or else they’ll grow up to be toxic incels.
Can confirm. Was 6th grade boy at one point. Was never really taught to be sensitive and was inundated with pressure to be a cold emotionless machine. I’m getting better though. Wish it hadn’t taken me the better part of 50 years to realize that was fucked up.
You recognizing it means you’ve already broken the cycle. A lot of people don’t make it to where you are. Don’t be upset that it took you fifty years, be proud you made a change for the better.
That seems like a reasonable lesson to teach at that age. There’s a lot of social development that happens during that part of life.
It may not be easy to teach at any age, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be taught.
You try telling
6th gradeboys whose parents failed to raise them properly to be more sensitiveThere. Fixed that for you.
Place the blame where it should be: on the parents, for raising misogynist, violent little shits. And the boys for, you know, being misogynist, violent little shits.
I’m seriously sick of people arguing this stuff is “just boys being boys”. It’s not. It’s learned behavior. All of it.
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yes, everything is learned behavior, but 6th grade boys aren’t taking social queues from middle aged women giving them lectures on playing nice.
Stop excusing their shitty behavior. If the boys can’t be trusted not to get violent then the BOYS need to sit out. “Well, they’re violent, and we can’t talk to them about it, it’s just easier to make the girls sit out” is extremely fucked up.
You have to understand that by saying “well the boys are already like this, so what are we supposed to do?” you allow the whole thing to be perpetuated. You are shifting the conversation away from where it should be.
Like, I get what you were saying, and you’re not exactly wrong but this is the wrong time to bring it up. It’s a distraction from the actual problem. And that only serves to enable these boys and their parents, and the administrators for failing to hold the right people accountable
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All men should when the opportunity presents itself. Guys have an obligation to steer boys in the right direction. We need to be role models and guides. If a middle schooler says it’s unmanly to cry, you immediately confront them and say no it isn’t. Manliness is accepting and processing and expressing your emotions.
Eminem is hardly anyone’s idea of a “weak” male, but he’s got an entire album where he basically talks about his feelings and what a shitty time he’s had. Beautiful opens up with him saying he’s depressed and in a rut.
Shouldn’t a big part of 6th grade sports be sportsmanship? Things like losing with grace? If they’re not capable of learning that lesson they shouldn’t be in sports yet.
Easy. Tell them if they retaliate against a girl then they are banned from the league. Easy.
I mean, yes, we all should. Don’t be a fucking dickhead should be common knowledge to every 6th grader regardless of gender.
ITT: People who have never met a child before. you can tell them anything you like and they will just look around at the society we’ve built and copy what works. the rot goes a hell of a lot deeper than a few bad parents.
Sounds like you’ve never met a kid. They are capable of learning and receiving consequences.
I guess I’m saying don’t project your failures onto kids you’ve never met. Most are perfectly capable of being better people without you creating excuses for them.
While I understand you may often get called a manchild, you shouldn’t extrapolate those personal urges to children in general. Believe it or not, they are capable of concrete rationalization.
Whats that say about how the boys have been raised? And this just reinforces that.
I doubt they had anything to do with it.
Can relate. I was beat up by another kid of my age after practice because I beat him in a really small and unimportant Judo tournament. We were both 12 and his parents, my parents and the trainers all agreed that he just overreacted because he was scared the other boys would bully him. I switched to ballet afterwards.
That’s a shit dojo 100%. Everywhere I’ve trained if someone pulled that shit, they’d at the very least get sat the fuck down for a good long chat with the sensei, if not kicked out entirely… not to mention pushups, so, so, so many pushups.
Have you talked to your parents about it since? Do they still feel that way? How do they justify it?
More sources that go into depth on what happened and the fallout …
https://www.rawstory.com/next-level-basketball/
https://www.wvxu.org/sports/2024-03-04/kentucky-girls-basketball-team-banned-southwestern-ohio
And maybe this is why the girls were shut down … On Feb 28 in an event in Alabama the girl’s team, who were forced to play in the boy’s league, won the championship but the trophy went to the losers instead.
Thanks for those extra links, when I saw that site’s address I thought “is this another onion?”
My favorite sport to watch is girls volleyball…I don’t like to watch sports in general
Most people treat me like a creep when I bring it up, but it’s way more dynamic and interesting than men’s volleyball. I used to scorekeep the sport, women’s volleyball is just more entertaining
IDGAF about basketball to start with, but if the boys can’t compete we should throw them by the wayside. I don’t get why this is even a question
If people’s first thought about women’s volleyball is that it’s purely a sport for Voyeurism, then that’s their bag to unpack on their own time. I watch Women’s Gymnastics and Figure Skating since my wife got me into it and I won’t entertain that shit with my friends. If I wanted to watch something just because there’s hot people in it, then I’ll just watch some regular ass porn.
I definitely won’t shy away from the fact that there are incredibly attractive women participating at an elite level in these sports, but I’m all about equal opportunity and will also absolutely recognize some hot bros doing gymnastics and figure skating. Usually shuts people up when I start talking about how hot football players are on the team they like to rattle on about forever.
If people’s first thought about women’s volleyball is that it’s purely a sport for Voyeurism, then that’s their bag to unpack on their own time.
Tell that to the International Volleyball Federation who mandated bikinis for female beach volleyball players until last year.
Which is an entirely different format to general women’s volleyball…
Yes. Both indoor and beach. Those women are amazing athletes.
That’s 11 years old.
Okay let’s hear all the excuses for 11 year olds needing to be super competitive and separated by gender.
At 11, girls tend to be taller than boys. So all that estrogen is providing them with a competitive advantage.
Then they should make 2 leagues: one where everyone is allowed to participate, and another one where only boys can participate, so they can win too. Just like we have with every sport’s women’s league.
Of course the prizes in the boys-only league should be lower since they play in a less competitive league.
Of course the prizes in the boys-only league should be lower since they play in a less competitive league.
Sadly, the way these things tend to work is that a handful of patriarchs make all the rules, from who gets to play to what goes in the prize pool.
We should have two leagues based on skill. Not gender or sex. We can still create space to have awards and prizes based on gender or sex to ensure everyone is recognised if necessary.
Which we care about… Why? Is there some million dollar prize for 11 year old basketball I’m not aware of?
Then you can’t have it both ways when they get to high school. Or are you saying Girl Sports shouldn’t exist? If a girl can’t compete in high school basketball against boys, then too bad?
School sports shouldn’t be competitive in the same way. It’s not the point of student sports. That’s for learning to operate in a team, learning social dynamics, building hand-eye coordination, and physical fitness.
But this wasn’t a school league. So for apples to apples, yes once they reach high school age in private leagues they should be grouped by ability.
Better to prepare those boys for all of the ass-whoopings women will serve them in their future professional careers, no?
