Hurt Girls (NTTimes on another downside to Title IX)

Yeah, this is terrible. Their knees are so bad they aren't able to push vacuums as well as they should.

now anathema to Athletic Directors because walk ons upset the Tiitle IX balance. Not if they are female. No question injuries in sports are a serious issue. Even more so when you consider other sports such as figure skating and gymnastics where the top competitors are not competing collegiately. For example Tara Lipinski probably never skated injury free after the age of 15 and there are plenty of other examples of skaters needing hip replacements in their teens or early twenties.

Invoking Title IX is a red herring, to me anyway. Kind of like how ASU is hiding behind it for their recent decision. knelson is right about the issue with injuries. I've known two teen girls with major ACL tears. However, Real Sports on HBO recently profiled the huge damage to teen arms from baseball. I think parents go crazy, and baseball, soccer and gymnastics parents are about super loco to begin with.

(As expected, swimming did not come up as a source of injury) Is this expected, though? I don't have any stats, but it seems to me more girls suffer injuries in swimming than boys, too, but this is purely based on anecdotal evidence. In college I saw lots more girls with ice packs strapped to their shoulders than boys. The article seems to suggest that the problem is with the fact that now girls are being driven and coached as if they were boys Or is it because girls are tougher than boys and tend to train harder?

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?

Yes,females have more joint problems than men,yes Title IX hasn't been a panacea,but look at the alternative!Athletic women have better self esteem,feel better about their bodies,are less likely to get in abusive relationships,are less likely to get pregnant as a teen,etc.Anyone who doesn't think athletic participation has been a boon for females isn't paying attention.For boys,far and away the greatest cause of severe injury is football,I guess we should outlaw it.Also we shouldn't let boys pitch and just play T-ball through high school,preferably with a wiffle ball for safety.

I would think women probably get awfully tired of continuously hearing they can only have qualified equality. There's always gotta be someone telling them "I know better than you." When I got smoked by (S)he-man I didn't blame Title IX or say I got killed by a girl, I just got beat by a flat out better swimmer.

I need to duck out of this conversation, I'm agreeing with our two resident commies, lindsay and knelson.

I always knew you were a closet pinko, geek! I guess by the same reasoning you could make an argument that USMS is causing injuries. Many of us probably wouldn't train as hard without the competitve opportunities provided by USMS. Heck, you might even say swimmers and coaches in USMS are training us like we're kids or something.

Those stories about how sports are just too dangerous for our little princesses, I think about them in early August, when the fat kid goes out for the football team, runs the final mile after a week of two-a-days, collapses from heat exhaustion and dies.