Photo by shutterstock.com (baseball)
Single-sex Sports Teams
On spring evenings, a few years back, Annabella Rozin and her family would walk over to a neighborhood park in south Minneapolis for baseball practice. From kindergarten through second grade, Annabella loved playing with her neighborhood friends, many of them boys. But in third grade, most girls in the park league switch over to softball. Though she tried and liked softball, she much preferred the camaraderie and competition of her mixed-gender team.
“I got to become friends with everybody,” she says, “not just a girl or a boy.”
The boys on that team still play together. Annabella wishes she did, too.
Annabella isn’t the only one who might be missing out on an opportunity. Most kids benefit from mixed-gender teams before adolescence, according to sports researchers at the University of Minnesota. A recent report from the Women’s Sports Foundation debunks the idea that girls drop out because they don’t want to play with boys. As long as there are plenty of other girls on the team, researchers found, girls like playing on both all-female and mixed-gender teams.
Kids split into gender-specific teams at various ages, depending on the league. The cutoff has shifted younger, especially in competitive travel leagues, where it’s a byproduct of the trend toward year-round specialization in a single sport. Minneapolis United, the popular soccer league, and St. Paul Capitals Hockey Association separate into boys’ and girls’ teams after kindergarten, for example.
In other cases, the gender split tries to serve the objective of getting more girls involved. (While girls in the park system can technically play on “open” teams, after the split they rarely do.)
While the division seems preordained, some parents may wonder about the motivation and the effect: What are we teaching kids—and what message are we sending—when we separate girls and boys? If real life is mixed gender, why aren’t sports? What are both genders missing on single-sex teams?
Sports and health researchers study the question of gender separation with a sense of urgency. Youth participation in team sports is declining (a recent study of kids ages 6–12 puts the number at 37 percent). And the gender gap has persisted: The rate of girls playing sports lags 10 percentage points behind the rate for boys. Reversing that decline means figuring out what might get kids, especially girls, to fall in love with sports.
One strategy that might help? Increasing mixed-gender play, says Tom Farrey, who founded the Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program with the mission of developing healthier children. Urban park systems faced with low enrollment may be able to recruit enough kids to run one mixed-gender team when they can’t sign up enough boys and girls for separate teams, he says.
Minneapolis Park and Rec teams follow roughly that system, while seeking to establish girls-only teams: “We don’t split the kids by a certain age. If there are enough girls for a team, and teams to form a league, then we do it,” says Mimi Kalb, director of recreation services. “We continually work with the recreation centers in recruitment of girls into sports.”
It’s a win-win, Farrey says, going beyond the enrollment issue. “Playing with mixed genders teaches empathy and demands respect,” he says. “Good players are good players. You come to see whoever’s on the field with you as an athlete first and not a boy or a girl first.”
(In a somewhat tangential vein, gender nonconforming kids feel more welcome in mixed-gender settings, notes Marjorie Snyder, senior director of research and programs for the Women’s Sports Foundation.)
Boys may have even more to gain than girls, says Nicole LaVoi, director of the U of M’s Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport. “They learn to see girls as equals, to respect them, to work with them, to see women as truly equals and equal members of the team,” she says.
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Aside from researchers, what do the kids on the fields, courts, and rinks—the real experts—think? I asked around, and many friends and acquaintances responded.
One sixth-grade boy, for example, talked about the best player on his ultimate team: a girl.
A second-grade boy surprised his mom by telling her he wished girls played on his hockey and soccer teams, because everyone gets along better when girls can even out the energy.
One friend’s seventh-grade daughter took a sharper view: “It’s so obvious,” she said, that when teams divide by gender, priority goes to the boys, who are perceived as better athletes.
LaVoi backs that sense of favoritism: “The big-picture question is: Who benefits when we separate boys and girls into different teams at early ages?” she says, “And how does that keep the current hierarchical structure of sport in place? If boys and girls don’t compete together, then boys are always perceived as better, faster, stronger than girls.”
Though it may seem obvious—especially to parents with a boy and girl—it’s worth noting that perception is wrong. “We know from the data that sport performance lies on a continuum, where some girls can outperform some boys, and vice versa,” LaVoi adds.
Because girls and women are the underrepresented sex in athletics—they make up about 43 percent of high school and college sports programs—girls (under Title IX) should have the option to try out for boys’ teams. The reverse is not true, says Snyder, from the Women’s Sports Foundation—though not everyone agrees on this point. Take the recent settlement in April in which the Minnesota State High School League allowed boys to dance on competitive teams. Many see this as a reversal of rigid gender stereotypes.
The takeaway for LaVoi and other sports researchers and advocates? At least until adolescence, when physiological differences provide some justification for separating genders, everyone should play together.
Opportunities would be greatly reduced for girls if they had to try out for mixed-gender teams at older ages, Snyder points out. Yet even into and after adolescence, mixed-gender teams can work as long as rules ensure equitable playing time. In Minnesota Ultimate’s middle-school league, for example, all teams are mixed-gender, with a requirement to play with equal numbers of boys and girls on the field.
St. Paul’s Highland Groveland Recreation Association league embraces the mixed-gender philosophy, with one notable exception: Girls and boys split up during the tween years of 10–14. The separation came at the behest of Dennis Merley, now the president of the association, whose daughter played coed soccer in the summer. That is, until one season when all the girls seemed to have matured and become better athletes than the boys, he says. The boys didn’t take it well and started hogging the ball in response.
“So all of us parents got together,” Merley says, “and suggested they should consider going to single-sex leagues for that small period of time when boys and girls don't play well together.”
At that point, it’s time for everyone to grow up.
