"Girls sports pose problem" from the February 12, 1974 Door County Advocate
JIM ROBERTSON
JIM ROBERTSON
Girls sports pose problem
The provocative series on girls sports in Door county by the Advocate's Linda Adams cannot pass without editorial comment by this writer, astute observer of the county sports scene for 23 years that I am.
But before I am stamped as the male chauvinist that I am, I would like to point out that I feel girls are as deserving of participation in sports as boys but that I also feel that now is the time to consider both the good and bad of boys sports and try to avoid the bad in girls sports before it's too late.
I should also say that I was one of those who told Linda that I fear the upgrading of girls sports cannot be done without degrading boys sports, simply because there are not the facilities in at least three Door county schools to accommodate a full program of interscholastic sports, basketball in particular, for both sexes.
Sturgeon Bay could be the one exception, simply because Sturgeon Bay has two gyms, one in the junior high and one in the senior high. Make that three if you count the west side crackerbox, four if you count Corpus Christi.
Now take Southern Door, which competes in the same Packerland Conference as Sturgeon Bay. Although Southern Door now has two gyms in the new elementary school, they are restricted to elementary use. High school sports, including freshman, are confined to the high school gym. Although freshmen boys now practice during a morning school hour, they play their home games at 4:00 Thursday afternoons. Girls practice after school Mondays, leaving varsity and junior varsity boys with only two nights, Tuesday and Wednesday, for late practice the weeks the freshmen play home.
While Gibraltar and Sevastopol are in much the same boat if not worse as far as facilities are concerned, they are at least competing in a conference of schools with comparable situations. Not Southern Door, where not only does every other Packerland school represent a "town" but has better facilities, particularly down south although even in the north the other four towns have built new high schools and as such have the old gyms for junior high and freshman use.
You might compare the squeeze in facilities with the squeeze a newspaper faces if it is to attempt to give equal coverage to girls sports. Advocate sports coverage has expanded from a page when I came here in 1951 to sometimes three pages during the high school season. We're already up to our ears in sports and if the girls are to be given equal coverage we'll simply have to hire another sports writer and add another page, not so easy to do when there's a newsprint shortage. The alternative, of course, is to degrade our coverage of boys sports.
But while facilities can be cited as the major problem in planning an interscholastic program of girls sports comparable to boys, the big questions might just be, do we really want comparable programs?
Let's face it, the primary objective in boys sports today is winning. Not participation but winning. So is the quest for equality a quest for more participation or in reality a quest for equal emphasis on winning?
Take the average boys varsity basketball team. If we're honest, we'll admit that the competition is limited to six or seven boys. A few more might play but generally the only time they do is when the game is either won or lost.
The same holds true in many other cases, from grade school up through junior varsity. While there are those at the lower echelons who try to get everybody into the game, it's generally a case of not how you play the game but whether you win or lose.
So before we say we should upgrade girls sports we should ask, upgrade them to what? Do we want them to be the same showpieces that boys sports are, susceptible to the same civic pride or disgrace, the same downtown quarterbacking, the same rivalries?
But more important, do we want them on an equal plane with boys as far as it's not how you play the game but whether you win or lose? If we do, then we might just be doing less for the girls than we're doing now. We're going to have coaches and first strings who think winning is the only thing. Or do we have that already?
Let's face it, as soon as girls sports become a showpiece, as soon as they attract crowds, they might not be near as much fun for the girls involved. Not that it's any fun to lose but at least it's not as bad when you don't have a bunch of sore losers looking on.
Courtesy of the Door County Library Newspaper Archive
Other posts about girls sports
https://doorcounty.substack.com/t/girls-sports