There’s No Crying in Basketball
Submitted by Boys and Schools Blog
So, this video apparently comes from some CBS news report, but I’m not sure exactly when it aired. Still, I think it’s pretty interesting in light of the battlefield that Title IX and athletics in general have become. Apparently, it has become common at many colleges to have a practice squad made up of guys to help the women’s basketball team practice.
To be honest, this didn’t really surprise me at all. I never played basketball, but I did play a lot of tennis, where it wasn’t at all unusual to practice with someone of the opposite sex. I (and really most female tennis players of any ability level) wasn’t really likely to beat an equally ranked male tennis player in an actual match, but it was good practice to hit with the guys, as they helped you to learn to play with someone with a certain amount of power and quickness–what’s more, since men and women don’t play each other, you wouldn’t be practicing with a potential opponent, so the world of strategy didn’t have to enter into the practice session.
Obviously, the situation is somewhat different with a college practice squad, since a practice squad is by definition made up of people who (for whatever reason) would not be able to play on the team. But while I may not have found it particularly shocking to hear of male practice squads for women’s teams, apparently some people are a little offended. I understand that it takes little to no effort to be offended in this day and age–heck, sometimes I wonder if it’s a new national pastime. But I do think the objectors here are way off the mark. Is it so hard to accept that men are often faster or more powerful or that they might be good practice partners? Clearly, these squads are not made up of players from the men’s team, but I think that if the women’s teams and coaches are able to determine that this is the practice squad that will help their team win, then they should be able to use it. Do we need to be so ridiculously even-handed that we need a gender quota on practice time for people who didn’t make the team, regardless of what might be best for the team? Seriously, I find the whole controversy absurd.
What gets me most of all (and this is my tennis bias showing through again) is that the objectors seem to assume that this is some kind of denigration of women’s athletic skills instead of an attempt to refine them. Really, at upper levels, a lot of sports are so markedly different (not better or worse–just different) between the men’s and women’s levels, that I don’t know why we can’t stop trying to measure them against each other and just enjoy them for what they are.
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