“A League of Their Own”

As adults we are often guilty of reminising about the glory days of our youth, and I must admit, the growing controversy over biological males competing in women’s sports has brought to mind my glory days spent on many a soccer field across our fair state playing for the 78- game undefeated Indian Trail Athletic Association girls high school soccer team coached by Ken Silvestri.

A team so good other teams dropped out of our league in fear of having to play us.

At a time when Mia Hamm and Brandy Chastain were kicking butt all over the world for ‘Merica- we were scaring teams across the state. Our team looked up to the USA Olympic team, because we couldn’t look up to the girls soccer team at Wingate- we beat them too.

Down to a woman, we believed the biggest moment in women’s sports to be a testament to how far women have come, as we understood what females like us had endured across the spectrum of all sports in order for that 1996 moment to happen.

It was the first time women’s soccer was allowed in the Olympics and when the USA Women’s Soccer team beat China, Brandi Chastain took off her shirt and flung it around her head in a victory salvo seen the world over.

It felt like we had finally arrived- like the glass ceiling I’d heard so much about all my life had been shattered in one celebratory gesture made on a soccer field in Atlanta. I still get misty-eyed.

Recently, I have become very disheartened to hear of my fellow females having to prove themselves against biological men all over again, this time in their own league.

Women’s leagues in sports are the result of the hard fought battles of women who came before us- starting in the 1940’s and over WWII with the All American Girls Professional Baseball League, the movie “A League of Their Own” is loosely based on.

It took an act of Congress- Title IX to officially implement regulations in men’s and women’s competitive sport- finally separating boys’ and men’s sports from that of girls’ and women in 1972.

Our soccer team routinely scrimmaged the ITAA boy’s team and we never lost.

However, that does not mean they did not come at us hard – they did- and it doesn’t mean they took it easy on us- they did not. After all, who wants to lose to an amazing group of talented girls who know each other’s play well enough to carry a ball down field and score- all without even looking at each other- sometimes while tying up one’s hair?

I feel the boy’s team prepared us for going up against teams with bigger girls and kept us ready for anything. We only stepped out on a field unprepared once before a game, and even though we won, it resulted in coach making us run laps through the mud for the entirety of the next practice- thanks Ken!

There is a difference between playing against males versus females, and from my experience, males are faster and come at you with more force than the most brutish of girls I ever encountered on a soccer field. Because of these differences, I don’t feel we should have played them or any other boys’ teams in regular competition- I don’t think boys or men are any more comfortable playing against girls or women athletes.

Statistics resoundingly confirm the male biological body is significantly stronger than that of a female. Womens’ bodies are designed to perform different functions in life so this data really should not be surprising.

No matter what decisions the president makes moving forward, I, for one, feel he got signing an executive order for women’s sports to remain being played by biological women- right. Any other group has every right to fight as biological women have been doing since 1943 to get “A League of Their Own.”