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Women Can Play Too: Coed Competition
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13145 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1987 |
3,337 Words |
| Author
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Eli Flam
Eli Flam is a free-lance writer who has traveled widely in
Appalachia and is a son of immigrants. |
Back in the fourth century B.C., Xenophon wrote that Lycurgus of Sparta "instituted races and trials of strength for women competitors as for men." But he wasn't looking to develop their talents for any other reason than to help women produce more vigorous offspring.
In contemporary times males and females increasingly compete with and against each other in sports, although custom, physical differences, and regulations still stand in the way of widespread mixing of the sexes for dozens of games. The question is: Are sports better performed on separate-sex teams or in mixed settings?
Consider the following female athletes and their experiences:
· Beth Balsley, a hard-charging guard for the North Hunterdon High football team in New Jersey, said most of the boys looked forward to beating her up at practice. She's five feet five inches and 125 pounds, but she likes contact sports and has "learned something that only football could have taught me: how far you can push your body."
· Wynne Haemisegger, who finished a second season on the men's lacrosse team at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, is the first woman to play this fast, physical game on a U.S. men's college squad. Teammates and competitors knock her down - she's five feet seven inches and 130 pounds, and pigtailed - but she returned the favor to a husky University of Texas ball handler (his teammates razzed him the rest of the year), scored her first goal, and said, "I'd never be able to go back to playing women's lacrosse."
· America Morris, a trim, blonde wrestler at Clairemont High in San Diego, pinned a boy in her weight class (she's five feet five inches and 107 pounds). He later said he was thrown off by accidentally touching her breast at the start. Her boyfriend called this "a well-played excuse for losing." Her opponent was behind on points, 9-4, at the time.
· Robin Belt, an eleven-year-old weightlifter in Marlton, Maryland, who stands four feet eleven inches and weighs 129 pounds, is unable to compete legally until she is fourteen. Yet she can already dead-lift and squat-lift 240 pounds, and raises 130 pounds in the bench press.
· Charlene Scully is a senior at Douglass High School in Southern Maryland who has squat-lifted 305 pounds in a meet and is
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