Girls Competing with Boys

After writing the post, Baseball Team Balks Over Facing Team with a Girl, I was inspired to find articles of instances of mixed gender sporting competitions. With that I found the article about ‘gender blind’ sports.

The sports they refer to as being gender blind are the ones in which, “men and women can compete against each other… because the game requires finesse and thought as much as power” (Delaney). The sports they specifically talked about within this article are golf and tennis.

In some areas of New York, the smaller schools do not have the funding or amount of people to have a male and female team. These schools have been combining genders in these sports since the early 1970’s (Delaney). These programs have proven to be extremely successful at allowing all to compete in a sport, while advancing the individual’s talents. They were not judged based on their gender, but for their skill set they encompassed.

This made me question what other sports could be considered gender neutral, the first one that came to my mind was dingy sailing. I grew up racing sailboats, and in the smaller sized boats, the strength is not as essential as the finesse and thought behind the tactical approach of the sport.

In the future, I think schools including those from my past article could learn much about this gender blind sport mentality.

For original article click here.

Carleigh Smith

Kin 577