Sports Specialization
June 21, 2012
Since the 1950s, when high school sports was the “talk of the town” much more than so-called higher levels of sports, before television put college and professional sports on its shoulders and lifted their profiles above local high school teams, it was commonplace for students to participate in multiple sports and for coaches to coach a different sport each season. Neither is the norm today.
It is likely that the natural tendency to keep testing one’s talent against the next greater challenge is a significant factor in the trend of students practicing and competing in a single sport year-round, but the introduction of non-school youth sports and the zeal of those programs (often commercially driven but sometimes more purely motivated) to expand those programs to every day of a child’s life has greased the skids toward runaway specialization.
Much of youth sports is well grounded in philosophies which provide safe participation for maximum numbers, but too much of youth sports makes distinctions between the abilities of children too early, and schedules children for too much competition in too-distant locations at tournaments that are too lavish and where trophies are too large. All of which gets their parents thinking too soon about how special their children are and how far they might go in sports, thinking college scholarships and beyond. In pursuit of this dream, they push their children harder, drive them further and pay increasing amounts to get them on the most elite teams.
Some youth sports programs – especially in ice hockey and soccer but also volleyball as well – will require nearly year-round play by students as a condition to be on the club or travel team, promising college scholarships to those who commit to this schedule, but ironically, with the costs of this non-school participation far exceeding the value of the partial athletic scholarship only a few will ever see.
Non-school youth sports is not the sole cause but it is a primary enabler of specialization, an addiction to a single sport that, like all addictions, puts a portion of life out of balance, generally to the detriment of the individual and the people around that person. The research is convincing that while specialization can be positive for a few young people, it is far more likely to have negative than positive consequences, most frequently physical and emotional for the child, and financial for the family.
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.