Multi-Sport Imperative
September 15, 2015
Each single-sport organization promoted its own sport, and coaches of those sports tended to pressure athletes to focus on a single sport early in life and eventually exclusively. Parents bought into the fantasy that this early single-mindedness was the key to a college athletic scholarship and even a professional sports career.
While we spoke of a high-minded philosophy, on the local level, as a practical matter, more and more coaches and athletes were pursuing an ever-narrower sports experience. Until now.
Starting very recently, the conversation has changed, or at least it’s been joined by new voices. We’ve learned that Big Ten football coaches favor recruits who play more than football in high school. We’ve learned that our fantastic Women’s World Cup Soccer champions were almost all multiple-sport athletes in secondary school. We’ve learned that the hottest young U.S. golfer on the Men’s PGA Tour was a multiple-sport enthusiast in his teens. We’ve seen a half-dozen high profile sports executives with school-aged children advocate for a more balanced experience for their kids. And now we see several dozen amateur and professional sports organizations have joined a campaign to oppose the negative trends in youth sports and to promote a more balanced, healthier sports experience for children and adolescents.
And there it is – a healthier experience. Suddenly, our philosophy that multiple-sport participation is better for youth than sport specialization has been made a health and safety issue, which we’ve known all along but have not emphasized enough.
Now, with attention to over-use injuries and burnout, sport specialization has become a health and safety crisis on the level of concussions, heat illness and sudden cardiac arrest. Multi-sport participation has become a health and safety imperative. A matter of good public policy.
We need to catch and ride this wave for all it’s worth. In the same way the environmental movement catches fire when presented as a human rights issue – that people everywhere have a basic right to clean air and water – we must present sport specialization as a threat to young persons’ health and safety – a risk as great as head trauma, heat illness and heart failure, requiring the kind of bold policies and programs we’ve implemented in recent years to address those equally serious problems.
Cheering for Equal Opportunity
February 14, 2017
Guided by the spirit of Title IX, the Michigan High School Athletic Association created girls competitive cheer in 1993 for the express purpose of providing an additional winter sport for girls to equalize athletic opportunities between the sexes. Before that, girls in Michigan had fewer athletic opportunities in the winter than in fall or spring and fewer athletic opportunities than boys overall.
Like all girls sports under MHSAA regulations, participation in MHSAA Girls Competitive Cheer Tournaments has been limited to girls. Since the 1977-78 school year (after a team of four boys won an Illinois High School Association girls state bowling championship), the MHSAA Handbook has included the following rule: “Boys may not participate on a girls team in MHSAA sponsored postseason meets and tournaments.” The MHSAA also encourages member schools not to permit boys to participate on girls teams during regular season play.
Without a policy prohibiting boys from displacing girls from teams and from the playing surface, athletic opportunities for girls would be in serious jeopardy, as many courts examining this issue have concluded. In short, permitting boys to displace girls would be antithetical to the fundamental purpose of Title IX.
The overwhelming majority of federal and state courts have concluded that “no-boys-on-girls-teams” rules are lawful and necessary. These cases conclude that maintaining and promoting athletic opportunities for girls and redressing past discrimination against women in athletics are important objectives. And, second, they conclude that excluding boys from girls’ sports – even if girls may participate on boys’ teams – is substantially related to that important interest.
Case law provides two separate, simple explanations; each of which, standing alone, establishes the legitimacy of the rule. First, having all-girl teams creates or maintains opportunities for females that would not otherwise exist, thereby providing females opportunity to develop programs equal to boys.
Second, because there are recognized, innate physiological differences between the sexes that give boys inherent advantages in most athletic events, to permit boys to participate on girls’ teams – irrespective of the sport – would displace girls from competition to a substantial extent, thereby diminishing female opportunity in athletics.
- A federal court in a Tennessee case wrote in 1977: “[it] takes little imagination to realize that were play and competition not separated by sex, the great bulk of females would quickly be eliminated from participation and denied any meaningful opportunity for athletic involvement.”
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A federal court in Arizona wrote in 1989: “If males are permitted to displace females ... even to the extent of one player ..., the goal of equal participation by females in interscholastic athletics is set back, not advanced.”
The MHSAA created girls competitive cheer expressly to provide overall equal athletic opportunity for girls that did not exist before it was added as an MHSAA sport. That a boy now wishes to participate on a girls competitive cheer team, despite the abundance of athletic opportunities for boys in other sports, does not establish a violation of Title IX. And Title IX has never been so construed. The MHSAA’s rule creates for girls the opportunity to enjoy highly competitive athletic opportunity in the same number of sports as boys – precisely satisfying Title IX.
The MHSAA made its move toward girls competitive cheer two decades before entrepreneurs invented coed “stunt” for schools’ and colleges’ consideration. By that time, participation in girls competitive cheer had tripled in Michigan high schools. Girls competitive cheer is now the eighth-most popularly sponsored high school sport in Michigan, above sports like tennis, golf and swimming & diving which had a 20-year head start.