Boys being pushed into girls’ football league

[PriOn1]

I found this article on Twitter and find it rather odd. It’s about a boy who wants to play in a girls’ football league. It doesn’t say that the boy “identifies as a girl” or anything similar. From the way it reads, he’s a boy who wants to play in the girls’ league because it’s easier.

What I don’t understand is the reaction of the Football Association, who seem to be insisting he must be allowed to play.

So I found myself wondering whether they missed out the fact that he claims to be a girl, or whether it might be more nuanced. For example, if there are already boys in the girl’s league who do claim to be female, does it then become discriminatory to exclude other boys?

Any thoughts or enlightenment? I shall now go off to search for other sources of information…

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13149771/west-riding-girls-football-league-boy-footbal-association.html#comments

Exactly! There are mixed-sexed teams he could play in ( says so in ghe article). But he wants to play in the girls' team.

BTW - can I propose three cheers for the Daily Fail here for covering this story!

Absolutely this! The entitlement is staggering & once again girls lose out. Fuckers!

puffyisgood
My sons all left around the age 11/12 mark, I remember ds14 turning up to practice and staring around like wtf at people doing keepy uppies and other tricks. The kids had changed overnight and were shouting at him that he was too slow, the trainers were pushy, put him on the bench etc. After a few weeks he said ‘I think I’ll just play at home from now on’. A lot say this is generally what happens at that age

that sounds about right. during u-12s the weakest players will start to wonder if this is really for them. by the end of u-13s, if they're still there, they'll know. generally they'll face a 'jump or be pushed ' decision in the summer before either u-13s or u-14s. maybe now that's 'jump, be pushed, or try for the girls' league'.

@puffyisgood agree. I've been involved with junior footy for years.
Early years loads girls
Primary the girls choose to migrate to girls teams; even if great players. Due to the social side.
The strongest girls often stick with boys or dual with two teams: one girls and one mixed.
Some girls teams play in boys / mixed leagues.
Girls teams can opt to play in a mixed league down one year if that's there best option. Eg they winning everything in local girls league or want a faster more physical challenge.
There are 6x more boys teams than girls at least. Boys have wide range of ability teams to join.

It's so frustrating seeing opportunities that have been so hard worked for, so cheaply being given away. It all starts at grassroots, children's opportunities, and feeds up to adults. Single sex sports/ activities and all abilities should be the norm.
Children who have their confidence knocked aren't going to be keen to continue into adulthood. Once adults, a whole new raft of objects gets put in the way.

We wonder why so many adults, particularly women, do not exercise, play sports, or do physical activities.
Clubs that expect subs but do not include everyone, coaches who think that Chelsea are going to offer them jobs, clubs that don't have adults training times, I looked around and so many clubs starting at 6-6.30. Most adults are only just getting home at that time! Yet if you look in the window of any gym, it's empty at 6.30 rammed at 8.
Women often find gyms intimidating places due to male egos! Single sex sports might be their outlet.

Given there's about a gazillion more boys' than girls' teams it's more than perverse to complain about girls taking up boy spaces. As to sex segregation, the new pattern of separating into women's/girls' and open categories has been argued convincingly imo.

It does make sense.. you’d think .. but shocker (for swimming but I’m sure it would be the same in football)…

https://www.sportresolutions.com/news/view/swimming-world-cup-open-category-scrapped-after-it-receives-no-entries

You don't have "open" as well as "mens"... it should be instead of mens. Having both is just daft. The female class is a handicap class essentially, if women wanted to they could "run up" and enter the open. For the most part, most women, most sports that would be daft. But some running events for example have different distances for women, at least the used to, so I can see where a woman would want to run up to challenge herself.

I overused "daft" there. But hardly surprising when the world has genuinely gone proper daft.

Given there's about a gazillion more boys' than girls' teams it's more than perverse to complain about girls taking up boy spaces.

I am not in the UK, but In my area there are just as many girls club teams as boys club teams if not more. It is very likely we just don't have the same soccer infrastructure and league capacity that you do....I am just speaking from my own personal experience.

In the UK there’s probably 20 boys teams every girls and that’s conservative estimate

Given that you're calling it soccer suggests it is very different where you are.

In the UK football has predominantly been played by boys. It's the most popular sport by a long way. The girls game has exploded in the past 5 years but the availability of coaches and clubs are not there yet - and can't really keep up with demand. Once this generation grow up they'll also feed the next generation of coaches and volunteers but the Mums of this cohort were banned from even playing at school.

Preventing girls who want to from taking up places in mixed leagues would be a massive backwards step.

No kid can just suddenly do keepy-uppies or tricks. They haven't changed, they've trained. They've worked hard, quite often a lot of repetitive hours.

No idea why your son thinks at 14 he can rock up and expect to compete against kids who've put the effort in. It's like going to an exam without revising or going to lessons and complaining you don't get an A.

Here you go..

https://www.womensrights.network/sporting-body-policies

Gruhgahkle
He was 11, and up until then it was literally ball games and relaxed, fun matches. I’m saying everyone went from 0 to 100 mph over a summer whereas he was still in the ‘let’s go play and have fun mode’. The few that were there to have fun got shouted and yelled at, pushed. They’re just kids, some of them don’t want to be a professional footballer, they just want to see their friends and have a kick about and this is the type of things that gets them out of having a pastime and into their rooms, saying they can’t do sport, they’re rubbish etc

They’re just kids, some of them don’t want to be a professional footballer, they just want to see their friends and have a kick about and this is the type of things that gets them out of having a pastime and into their rooms, saying they can’t do sport, they’re rubbish etc

@stayathomer I actually think this is a wider issue that needs to be addressed across all sports actually. There seem to be very few sports/physical activities that you can just do for fun, rather than being pushed into a competitive role without any input.

My daughter quit gymnastics for that reason. She liked doing it, but being tested every 8 weeks so they could spot those with potential just became really disheartening. Same as swimming - she stopped doing it because she had no interest in swimming butterfly stroke - something that was only invented for competitions.

Unfortunately, I think there seems to be a huge drop off in sport from teenage onwards where its impossible to be in a "formal" environment without the "formality" - does that make sense?

ParkRun of course tried to circumvent this, and swimming, I know you can go into leisure pools, but what about other sports like Judo, gymnastics, anything which you wouldn't necessarily do on your own without others, but more for the social/physical activity side of things than a competitive aspect

This emphasis on 'teams': a zillion years ago, when I was a young boy, we used to down the local recreation ground for a kickabout. Every night, pick sides, jumpers for goal-posts etc. In fact, there be a "little uns' game, roughly for primary school kids, and in the next field, the "big uns" game for older boys. Some of these were adults, aged anything up to 21, 22. None of which 'organised', by a school or anyone else. Nowadays, nobody does this. Maybe parents won't let their kids out, but whatever the reason, it doesn't happen. Obviously, this is just about boys. For encouraging girls' inclusion in football, say, nowadays different approaches are needed, teams being one of them.

Just to add my son played cricket after enjoying an aged 8 taster session-got a partipation trophy and was so pleased as a younger lad. Get to U13s and they're playing with big lads and hard balls - he gave up. It wasn't fun, it was training for professionalism.

However, never in a million years would I have suggested he join the girls or women's teams - nor would he have wanted to!

Sports turning serious in your teens is not new. Back in the dark ages I enjoyed playing netball at my junior school. Moved up to big school and I joined the netball club. I knew I was never going to be good as generally I preferred a book to sports, but I enjoyed it anyway. By October half term the teacher had sorted out the “club” into A team, B team and C team, and C team (where I was placed along with a couple of other non-sporty girls) were told they didn’t have to come any more. So at the age of 11 I was already turned off sports by a bitch of a PE teacher and her obsession with getting into the Nationals. I’m still bitter - I joined a club and had no idea as a naive 11 year old that it would turn so competitive. Spent the rest of my school years lurking at the back of her classes and doing all I could to bunk off PE.

i would really hope that the message about enjoying exercise at whatever sport and level suits you, for both physical and mental health benefits would mean this didn’t happen anymore but reading this thread I’m not so sure.

I agree with the comments that team sport for tweenagers up gets quite competitive and potentially toxic quite quickly, but I'm not sure what the alternatives are.

grass roots sport rests on the efforts of volunteer coaches who are, individual failings aside, complete heroes who do a great job for the community in return for no reward at all. huge headaches every week. deviating more than half a step from nearly always fielding the most competent team you can, whose components all feel they can rely on each other, is an almost guaranteed shortcut to those huge headaches taking on skyscraper-sized proportions.

Sorry to hear that, bet there are a lot of similar stories.

Some schools, if they have the resources, do have lots of teams at different levels. Eg. A team to E team. With the objective that everyone gets games and all are included. No judgements. Sadly with lack of sport investment in schools these days, these schools are few and far between. Tragic how little sport / drama / art / music schools do these days. Sport and drama especially don’t cost a lot, it must be resources and motivation.

Stoodley · Today 07:30

I didn't even know that women played American Football in the UK!

✋🏼

The boys parents have suddenly seen the light.