Boys school football team should have boys in??

[plastique]

So son has come home from school, disappointed not to get in the yr 8 school football team. Ok fair enough, there must be better players than him.... Well that's life move on etc!!! Oh no that's not the case. Two girls are in the boys football team.. Fair enough too if boys are allowed in girls football team... But oh no girls only... Trying to teach equality etc but this goes against everything!! Thoughts please....

You can have mixed teams up to 18. Girls play far less sport than boys (especially in the teenage years). They should be encouraged to play as much as possible, and if they are good enough to make the 'boys' team, then that's where they should play.

I can see it seems unfair that boys cannot then play in the 'girls' team, but many girls of lesser ability would be put off if boys played in their team, and both teams would end up being mostly boys.

You'd be getting totally different answers if you had a daughter and 2 boys had taken places on a girls team

This ^^

Actually Waffles, within the sporting world that is exactly what I think.

Hahahaha, shakira, that's hilarious.

Even if they were better than some of the boys, they weren't good enough to be picked to join the girls team so should wait until next time rather than stealing a boys place

I would assume that they are better than most of the girls team players, which is why they are on the boys team.

me it's likely that they are better than all the girls, that's why they're on the boys team- they've beaten the girls and some of the boys.

Sorry X post

To those who asked yes I earn the same as men in my profession. I expected that I could achieve anything. No I wouldn't feel happy wondering about in a bikini but my husband got horribly bullied when young and has had a harder time than me. My son is also getting picked on for his appearance and so these are not problems just for women and girls.

Equality should be equality not advantAge for one sex over another.

A lot of sports aren't boys or girls, generally it's open and girls, so the "boys" team is actually an open event i.e. people of any gender. Obviously in adult sport generally open teams are all male as men tend to have a weight/strength edge on women, but at 12 the differences are less apparent. They were better, they got on the team, such is life! If anything, I would say it's a good lesson that boys aren't automatically better than girls...

I would say at 11/12 girls have a physical advantage from what I can see. The girls are taller and have hit puberty more often. Most of the boys are still little boys.

Year 8 is 12/13 so may be slightly different.

Holy moly. I am glad for you that you have not experienced gender bias or disadvantage but that is not the case for everyone.

And yes of course there would be different responses if it were boys in the girls team. It is positive discrimination but in my opinion it is not wrong.

Op, ask the teacher who made the decision to explain the rationale behind the decision and compare the number of opportunities available to the girls and the boys and see whether it really is unbalanced. (Eg in our school there are twice as many boys teams as girls and the boys have more training hours.) Your town might have lots of girls teams, are there as many as the boys teams, what about the tournaments, oppositions, match opportunities etc. You won't have to get far up the ladder to find the opportunities diminishing.

Seems unfair - either run three teams (boys/girls/mixed) two (boys/girls) or one mixed. if it is mixed maybe have two teams so more children get to play.

if it is mixed maybe have two teams so more children get to play

If both teams are mixed, both teams will be made up predominantly of boys. By having a mixed team and a girls team, it encourages girls in sport, while keeping the participation as close to 50/50 as possible. Yes, there'll be a slight bias towards girl participation, but not as big as the bias would be towards boys if both teams were mixed.

If you chose to have a boys team and a girls team, then girls who are very talented will never really progress as there isn't the experience/high level of play in the majority of girls teams.

The FA recently increased the age of mixed teams to 18 for exactly this reason, I believe.

My competitive activity is chess, where tournaments and team competitions are either "open to all" or "women only". Seems reasonable.

In practice, very few females play in the open section, where both groups are offered.

Canadia

I may be being stupid, but why does Chess need different classifications? It's not physical it's mental isn't it? And if you're capable of playing, then that's that? Isn't that demeaning to women mentally?

Canadian *

If I saw a girl playing against me at that age I'd slide tackle her into next week you play with the boys expect to be tackled like a boy

Totally not fair OP.

Louisville... you are right, but the fact is that boys/men are in general more successful at chess than girls/women. There is only ONE woman in the top 100 players in the world - she is #95.

If a team was picked on the basis of "the best 10 players" then in most cases it would be all males. The world under-16 championship has teams of 5, which must include at least 1 girl.

Also, the powers that be in the chess world are trying hard to get chess recognised as a sport, and in many Muslim countries males and females play in different groups.

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I think that's the point the girls can play as well as the boys and want to play against the boys teams so they continue to improve.

1sttimedaddy you might find that the girl slide tackled you into next week before you got chance

I'm in Wales, FAW rules are slightly different to FA. Girls have been able to play with/against boys for years. DS1 plays in the u14 league and although he is in a (currently) all boy team they play against mixed teams and all girl teams as well as all boy teams. DD plays u11 and is the only girl on her mixed team. Again they play against mixed, all boy and all girl teams.

Playing together really helps raise the standard of girls football. All girl teams are great for encouraging participation. Two different sides of the coin.

FAW rules also allow girls to play down an age group in order to encourage participation. So DD could play u10 if she wanted to. A lot of the girls who play in u14 are in Y10, whereas the boys have to be Y8 or 9. This means they are often taller and bigger than the boys.

I think anything which encourages girls to take up sport is a good thing. Boys will always play football, society expects them to. How many male England football players can you name? And how many female ones? Yet the women's team did a lot better in the last World Cup than the men's team did.

1sttimedaddy Wow.. What an attitude. You would deliberately attempt to injure someone because you don't approve of their gender? I hope you don't have daughters, have children who you teach that attitude to or ever come across women in any domain you think is the domain of men.

And yes of course there would be different responses if it were boys in the girls team. It is positive discrimination but in my opinion it is not wrong.

These girls weren't "suffering" discrimination though so there was no need for any "positive" discrimination (that phrase makes me 🙄 anyway).
The girls have a team, they didn't get in to it, so got put in to the boys team. The only people I can see being disadvantaged here are the boys.
Again, the girls have a team, so are not in any way being disadvantaged.