team sports, boys sports, rant

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I hope this is okay for the Women's Discussion forum. It's not an spectrum issue. It's about this pissy problem I'm having with the local school. It is the same school I graduated from and in 20 years, nothing's changed when it comes to which sports are important.
Volleyball's always referred to as "the other sport" when football season comes around, and nobody pays attention to girls basketball.
Cheerleading, oh, that couldn't possibly be a sport. The dance team, oh, no, couldn't be considered a sport at all.
Cross country? Oh, don't even ask. How is running five miles in the morning and five in the evening every single day for all those months be a sport? Because they're not a "team" they don't work together to win anything. I call total BS! I can't do any of those things. If it's physical, and I can't do it, it's a sport. So you can tell that football's important around here - never mind they've been on losing end of the league for years. Boys basketball? Important, even when they're losing. Girls basketball? Regional champions, but they're just girls. Not that I think losing is bad and that a losing team isn't worth cheering! Don't get me wrong. But I wish this "supportive community" would put their money where their mouths are.
Not a whisper around here about Scholar's Bowl, forensics, chess team, or anything involving any kind of singles competitions. I don't expect cheerleaders to be made to go to the chess matches, but when the teams go out with fundraising one time a year, and the chess team has do a half-a-dozen fundraisers in a year to get the same money, and still have to rely on their parents, I think that is SAD. I would hate to be a child violin prodigy in this town. I'd be called that kid who plays the fiddle pretty good. Three years in a row, the high school's cheerleaders won all the awards given out at cheer camp, and brought home the spirit stick, with no acknowledgement from even the teams they cheer. I don't even like watching sports, or cheerleaders, or the scholars in action, but this is just not right.

I recall reading an article a while back about how in one town here, the boys little league team just got a brand new, state of the art playing field while the girl's soft ball team didn't actually have a field and had to play in an abandoned lot with weeds growing everywhere.

It's unfortunate but true that there just isn't the same amount of interests in team sports for girls/women as for boys/men.

This really has to do with society as a whole though. Remember, until recently, American society was actually very gender polarized and even though there certainly were women's softball teams, and so on, sports just wasn't considered very womanly, and a lot of girls and women had little interest in most team sports, whether by nature or nurture.

Given that, personally, I think it's fairly phenomenal that there is a WNBA and though it's certainly not as big as the NBA, enough people seem to care about it such that the games do get televised and are covered by news and media outlets.

That's society for you. Men are considered more important than women and activities that does not require intelligens (such as kicking a boll or looking pretty) are considered more important than intellectual activities (such as science clubs and chess clubs).
Life's not fair because people are not fair. People are like that because it's human nature.

Thank you! Very, very much. Chess team sparked my post. One of the kids has a physical trait similar to one of mine, so she feels comfortable with me, so she told me how the fundraising was really going. Alphabetically, I was close to the bottom of their list, and they'd barely made 20 percent of what they were looking for. All they want to do is travel to a tournament, it isn't anything huge or all that expensive to do. I gave them what I could and made a list of other sympathetic people and businesses for them to try that weren't on their list. Hopefully they'll raise enough money to go, because they are very very good chess players, they're like a little army.

I'm so glad I went to an all-girls' school. The idea of girls' sports not being important never even occurred to me! We had a boys' school across the street, and once in a while we'd go to their games (like if my boyfriend or brother were playing) and they'd come to our (for similar reasons). I also chose to attend an all-women college. When I got to college, learned that many of the women athletes were feeling validation for the first time. At my college, their sport, no matter what it was, was admired, taken seriously, and well-attended. I felt sad that they'd never had that acclaim before. (Some had, most had not.) I played field hockey and volleyball, and while I was not especially good at either, I never felt that the sport/team as a whole didn't count. I have no idea why girls' sports don't count as much as men's -- they're just as physically demanding, and some (like cheer squad and dance) require a lot more coordination! It's really a shame when a female athlete is made to feel that her skills don't count just because she has boobs and a vagina -- I do sympathize, though, because when I played shows with my industrial band, people always assumed the bad was just the guys. It was intensely frustrating that guys -- folk guys, indie guys, hardcore guys, whatever -- always assumed that my gender meant I couldn't play/sing industrial music!

I agree and I find it DISGUSTING that no matter how CRAP male sportspeople are they seem to get credit anyway.

You watch the MMA at all? If so you might have noticed how even a boring fight between two male UFC fighters where they spend half the bout being careful and just circling each other still gets taken seriously...

But watch a female fight, between two skilful women with lots of action, and you STILL hear from a dozen dickwads how the women's fights just aren't as high quality or as relevant as those of the males. VOMIT.

Some sports do require somewhat of an intelligence.
Most of the quarter backs and centers in the NFL have above average intelligence because they need to know whats the right thing to do at the right time. Without intelligence, they may not make correct plays or get any touchdowns.

You also need physical build too but intelligence is a big factor