Hurt Girls (NTTimes on another downside to Title IX)
Former Member
Anyone catch the NY Times Sunday Magazine Article "Hurt Girls" two weeks ago which posited the politically incorrect fact that female athletes propelled by Title IX are ending up as physical wrecks by the time they are young adults? Dealing mostly with girls in soccer, lacrosse, and basketball, there were some hard figures showing, for example, that female athletes in soccer get ACT tears at five times the rate of males. (As expected, swimming did not come up as a source of injury). Most of the letters published this week in response were the reflexive defense of Title IX by the Title IX athletic establishment.
I purposely winnowed the article down to its sexist essence (The Times was much more periphrastic). Most on this board already hate Title IX for destroying men's swimming. But this article raised to me a totally unexpected other issue- the well being of these female athletes.
Behind it is a more fundamental question: what is the purposes of sport? In addition to physical fitness, sports are suppossed to be play. And they are suppossed to teach values about team work, fair play, good effort, hard work etc. The whole system is so warped with kids specializing in a sport before middle school and giving up all the other activities- totally against the play mentality. And now all the colleges have this voracious appetite for female athletes. So a girl in her Junior year of high school plays through a knee injury or shoulder tear or concussion so that her college acceptance is not derailed. Boys do the same. (Apparently, the article says girls tend to be tougher and try to play through injuries more than boys thus compounding the situation).
But the apparently irrefutable physical evidence is that girls are five times as likely to have serious life long debilitating injuries in the new sporting culture. It is politically incorrect and I suppose illegal to assert that as a broad rule, males are more athletic than females and that participation in sports should follow nature not an unnatural demand for absolute parity. BTW, this is just talking broad averages and I have a daily experience of being obliterated by many woman on my masters team, my sister played college hoops and could probably beat me on one and one. I still think this is yet another reason to scrap Title IX- that and the fact that it has meant the demise of the great sports hero of all time, the walk on wonder (now anathema to Athletic Directors because walk ons upset the Tiitle IX balance.).
So what are you suggesting be done? If you eliminate the periphrastic vertiginous rhetoric, you want to eliminate sports that are too tough for women so more men can compete?
Parents and coaches can be loco. They don't seem to understand that taking a few weeks off won't ruin the kid's "career" forever.
I think women tend to have more shoulder problems than men in swimming. But isn't that partially because women have more rotations and perhaps looser tendons?
I purposely winnowed the article down to its sexist essence (The Times was much more periphrastic). Most on this board already hate Title IX for destroying men's swimming. But this article raised to me a totally unexpected other issue- the well being of these female athletes.
Behind it is a more fundamental question: what is the purposes of sport? In addition to physical fitness, sports are suppossed to be play. And they are suppossed to teach values about team work, fair play, good effort, hard work etc. The whole system is so warped with kids specializing in a sport before middle school and giving up all the other activities- totally against the play mentality. And now all the colleges have this voracious appetite for female athletes. So a girl in her Junior year of high school plays through a knee injury or shoulder tear or concussion so that her college acceptance is not derailed. Boys do the same. (Apparently, the article says girls tend to be tougher and try to play through injuries more than boys thus compounding the situation).
But the apparently irrefutable physical evidence is that girls are five times as likely to have serious life long debilitating injuries in the new sporting culture. It is politically incorrect and I suppose illegal to assert that as a broad rule, males are more athletic than females and that participation in sports should follow nature not an unnatural demand for absolute parity. BTW, this is just talking broad averages and I have a daily experience of being obliterated by many woman on my masters team, my sister played college hoops and could probably beat me on one and one. I still think this is yet another reason to scrap Title IX- that and the fact that it has meant the demise of the great sports hero of all time, the walk on wonder (now anathema to Athletic Directors because walk ons upset the Tiitle IX balance.).
So what are you suggesting be done? If you eliminate the periphrastic vertiginous rhetoric, you want to eliminate sports that are too tough for women so more men can compete?
Parents and coaches can be loco. They don't seem to understand that taking a few weeks off won't ruin the kid's "career" forever.
I think women tend to have more shoulder problems than men in swimming. But isn't that partially because women have more rotations and perhaps looser tendons?
