Girls Basketball Team Kicked Out Of Boys League Championship After Defeating Boys Teams
Girls Basketball Team Kicked Out Of Boys League Championship After Defeating Boys Teams
A 6th grade girls team from Kentucky was set to go for the year-end championship tournament, but was told they were banned due to fears boys teams might 'retaliate' if they lost to the girls team.
Once again, girls are somehow responsible for boys’ inability to behave 🤦
Once again there appears to be more to this story than the poor quality article linked suggests.
Here's the quotes:
SWOB President Tom Sunderman expressed concern in a statement:
"Doing this for 28 years, what we have worried about is a boys team losing to a girls team (especially in the year end tourney), they may get frustrated and retaliate against a girl." "Then we have liability issues.” Prez, a social media user on X (Formerly Twitter), didn't buy it.
"What he meant to say was they can’t have their boys being emasculated by a better girls team… it would be a blow to their developing manhood to get beat by girls."
What context am I missing?
Retaliating against your opponents for beating you in a game isn't normal, but on Patriarchy it is.
Patriarchy, not even once.
Once again, girls are somehow responsible for boys’ inability to behave
That's really not what i am getting from this article at all.
made the call because they believed that 11 to 12-year-old girls and boys competing against each other on the court could pose a liability risk leading to violence, even though the girls team had been winning 7-1 all season without incident.
they may get frustrated and retaliate against a girl.” "Then we have liability issues.”
McGraw said the girls were never in any real danger during the games, aside from the occasional side-eye.
"They got giggles, they got laughs, and people talked about them... you know, the looks."
[emphasis added]
Where "once again" is the boys inability to behave? All i see is adults wanting to dodge POTENTIAL liability.
Beyond that there is the question about their participation in the league itself. Here there are as i see it two sides:
Again something that adults decide. Not sure if we have enough information to judge this properly.
Not sure why i spend much time on this nonesense, especially since i find this to be a pretty poor article (as is any that just randomly quotes social media users to make its point).
"...what we have worried about is a boys team is losing to a girls team (especially in a year end tourney) they may get frustrated and retaliate against a girl," a text allegedly sent by the tournament directors reads.
"Throughout the season we had a few teams come to us about this and raise concerns about it. Because of this we decided to keep them out of the tournament," another text reads.
Oh, so the teams were threatening to commit violence against the girls. Why not just kick those teams out?
"For their safety" :vomits:
I don't want to be an old man, but if you hit a girl when I was in 6th grade, you were an instant social pariah. Everyone would beat your ass.
Kicking them out doesn't solve the problem. They'd just blame the girls instead of being introspective. Let one of these loser little boys throw hands and learn really fucking fast that the meanest, hardest hitting monster on this planet is a pissed off 12 year old girl. When he's getting his hair ripped out a fistful at a time, he'll understand why he lost.
but if you hit a girl when I was in 6th grade, you were an instant social pariah. Everyone would beat your ass.
And this is why male violence against women is non-existent, children.
There is a whole world out there to pay attention to and you've taken the performative utterances of tweenage boys desperately trying to become men as evidence to deny everything else. WTF?
FWIW, the ones who were shouting the loudest are absolutely the most likely to be dominating, coercing, and hitting their female partners now. They're performing masculinity because they don't know what it is and that terrifies them.
And because the world is dominated by these frightened little boys, we punish girls and women for the violence of men and boys. This story is not an outlier, it is the fucking story.
How about policing the boys' damned behavior for one fucking time in their lives, then?
They'd have to not agree with the behavior in the first place.
Sorry, but boys-will-be-boys. So we have to ban girls from competing, because we literally cannot continence telling any of our precious little superstars to cut that shit out.
That's not why they were kicked out. The coach lied, to get them playing in the boys league, since they were so good.
So of course they got kicked out. What you expect the league to do?
He explained:
"In November of 2023, Next Level and Larry McGraw deceptively registered a girls team into the 6th grade boys league and under the gender listed as MALE."
"We entered them into the league assuming they were a boys’ team as conveniently no roster was ever provided."
"Subsequently, their first game was filled in by a boys 6th grade Next Level team because they played the 6th grade boys Cincinnati Royals team - coached by myself, so there was no reason to suspect anything different."
He continued:
"It wasn’t until late January/early February that several teams from the 6th-grade division started traveling down to Kentucky to play their scheduled games, that it became apparent that the Next Level team was, in fact, a girls team."
"Several complaints from coaches and teams were filed because of this deception."
Social media users, however, saw SWOB's statement as deflecting from another issue, one that accused the league of trying to keep their feelings from getting hurt in the event the boys were defeated by girls.
that is some selective bullshit
Seriously. What this tells me is that 70+ people either didn't read the article or they just really have a thing about mixed gender sports. You quoted only the pathetic backpedalling lies he said to try to further justify his actions. BUT FIRST AND FOREMOST he said this (the man you are quoting, Sunderland, is the president)
The city-wide basketball league, Southwestern Ohio Basketball (SWOB), made the call because they believed that 11 to 12-year-old girls and boys competing against each other on the court could pose a liability risk leading to violence, even though the girls team had been winning 7-1 all season without incident.
IT IS WHY THEY WERE KICKED OUT.
It wasn’t until late January/early February that several teams from the 6th-grade division started traveling down to Kentucky to play their scheduled games, that it became apparent that the Next Level team was, in fact, a girls team.
You're telling me it took multiple games AND teams for them to become "apparent that it was a girls team " ??? And become a problem. But only until they got far enough because maybe they wouldn't and then SWOB could avoid PR problem all together.
this is a reminder to read the fucking article people
You might come up with a similar conclusion as me, or completely opposite. But OP is patently false and deceptive with their quote and definitive ruling on it, claiming the headline is deceptive! Fuck that.
You might have quoted the wrong part. This is what you're looking for:
Doing this 28 years, what we have worried about is a boys team losing to a girls team (especially in the year end tourney), they may get frustrated and retaliate against a girl. Then we have liability issues.”
Also it looks like the guts of the article is the media statement here:
It's a daft thing to say, and just pours fuel on the conflagration, but it does reveal some insights into the character of the guy.
So if I understand it correctly, it's a boys only competition, not an open competition. And since these girls were so good, they wanted to be able to compete against the top teams, so they pulled of a superb ruse to be able to do just that, in the process upsetting some men who don't want to compete against girls for reasons, especially if they end up losing. That's going to make a good sport movie one day.
Many (most?) sports have a top "open" competition that anyone can enter and then several restricted competitions (age, sex, handicaps, ...), but even if you qualify for one of the restricted competitions, if you're good enough, you can still play in the open competition. Except in bible belt country apparently, no girls allowed in the top competition.
He also said it wasn't unheard of for a girl to play on a boys' team or for a girls' team to compete against boys.
It sounds like it's not a boys only competition. It's not entirely clear whether this quote is just referring to in general or this specific league, but based on the context the latter appears to be the intended reading.
Even if you are technically right, you are morally wrong. They should be allowed to register in that league, and if they weren't then the coach lying about their gender was the correct and moral thing to do.
Crazy to watch people twist themselves in knots bending over backwards to try and excuse sexism.
But I don't even think you are technically right. All those quotes stink like excuses and BS.
In the statement on their website, Sunderman literally quotes himself telling McGraw that the girls couldn’t play because if they beat a boys team in the playoffs then the boys might get frustrated and physically retaliate, causing a liability issue.
He didn’t say they couldn’t play because they registered as a boys team. That was more of a supporting anecdote presented because of social media blowback.
That's a whole different kind of sucky.
I'm completely bumfuzzled about this.
The way I see it, when you're a sports executive, you have two options in this situation: 1) exclude the girls' team because "dem's the rules" or 2) let them play because seeking out the boys' competition will help them develop into a stronger team.
Personally, I think 1) is a weak choice, especially when arguments like "someone could get hurt" are both ripe with misogynistic sentiment and refuted by the games played without incident.
It wasn’t until late January/early February that several teams from the 6th grade division started traveling down to Kentucky to play their scheduled games, that it became apparent that the Next Level team was, in fact, a girls team. Several complaints from coaches and teams were filed because of this deception.
At that point we allowed the team to finish the regular season schedule, but would move them into a girls’ tourney at year end.
This is a direct quote from the Southwestern Ohio Basketball website.
They allowed the girls to play until the end of the season in the boy's category, so your take on it is incorrect.
So the league decided to preemptively retaliate on behalf of the hypothetical violent boys?
This is how most sex segregated sports came about
I wonder why people are downvoting your comment. It's literally what happened. See for instance this paper on the history of gender segregation in the Olympics: https://theworld.org/stories/2016-08-17/see-120-years-struggle-gender-equality-olympics.
Quote: "Margaret Murdock from the US won a silver in a tie in the 1976 Riffle Event, one of the events in the shooting categories. The rifle event was split into men's and women's events in 1984."
I suspect because this being what has happened in “most sex segregated sports” is a very very bold assertion. In which of those sports are women holding top positions? I mean women athletes are awesome, but the idea that separation happens because the poor men can’t keep up is just… I don’t know, maybe I’m a confused old man.
But I thought it was so that women could compete at the top levels of their sport in sports where their times, weights, etc. are not really proximal. They should of course be combined where the physical implications are negligible, but the idea that what’s preventing that is that the men just can’t compete with the women seems strange to me.
But is there some support for that?
She got a silver and 8 years later it was split into men and women's events?
She didn't even win...
It's sad the mental gymnastics and revisionist history you all perpetuate to support your biased agenda.
Just another reason why the vast majority of people on these forums are not worth taking seriously.
Cherrypicking
Lol, what?
One of top posts here is selective as fuxk quoting only the president's backpedalling after their official initi statement being the fear of retaliation. I'm getting way too annoyed watching the upvotes (aka misinformation) grow just because this asshat added a quote.
Oh by the way, sunderman.- the president - coached one of the boy teams that played against the girls team. And they are trying to say it took time to realize, to justify why they were allowed to play up until the championships. FFS this is garbage sportmanship
(Edited to correct autocorrect)
The president's team got beaten by girls, and now he's throwing a hissy fit because they're going to beat him again in the tournament. Don't project your own fragile masculinity on the next generation.
Actually, that's the twist in this story. The president's team was beaten by boys who were then subbed out for girls later.
Oh by the way, sunderman.- the president - coached one of the boy teams that played against the girls team. And they are trying to say it took time to realize, to justify why they were allowed to play up until the championships. FFS this is garbage sportmanship
You should include the whole context if you want to note that. The game he coached against was the first game and the girl's team roster was all boys. After that game they switched out the boys for girls. The whole situation is still dumb.
Sexist, ignorant and disappointing. 3/3 for Kentucky
you try telling 6th grade boys to be more sensitive
That seems like a reasonable lesson to teach at that age. There's a lot of social development that happens during that part of life.
It may not be easy to teach at any age, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be taught.
You try telling
6th gradeboys whose parents failed to raise them properly to be more sensitive
There. Fixed that for you.
Place the blame where it should be: on the parents, for raising misogynist, violent little shits. And the boys for, you know, being misogynist, violent little shits.
I'm seriously sick of people arguing this stuff is "just boys being boys". It's not. It's learned behavior. All of it.
All men should when the opportunity presents itself. Guys have an obligation to steer boys in the right direction. We need to be role models and guides. If a middle schooler says it's unmanly to cry, you immediately confront them and say no it isn't. Manliness is accepting and processing and expressing your emotions.
Eminem is hardly anyone's idea of a "weak" male, but he's got an entire album where he basically talks about his feelings and what a shitty time he's had. Beautiful opens up with him saying he's depressed and in a rut.
Shouldn't a big part of 6th grade sports be sportsmanship? Things like losing with grace? If they're not capable of learning that lesson they shouldn't be in sports yet.
Easy. Tell them if they retaliate against a girl then they are banned from the league. Easy.
Y’all Qaeda strikes again.
God damn Talibangelicals and their Shakira law.
Hymns don't lie 🎶
More sources that go into depth on what happened and the fallout ...
https://www.rawstory.com/next-level-basketball/
https://www.wvxu.org/sports/2024-03-04/kentucky-girls-basketball-team-banned-southwestern-ohio
And maybe this is why the girls were shut down ... On Feb 28 in an event in Alabama the girl's team, who were forced to play in the boy's league, won the championship but the trophy went to the losers instead.
Thanks for those extra links, when I saw that site's address I thought "is this another onion?"
Next Level Girls Basketball is a youth team based in Wilder, Ky., that coaches girls from the 3rd grade level through high school. The team's highest level players are competing for scholarships to play in college, but many others are there just because they like playing basketball.
I'd like to know the age of the competing teams. These were sixth year level students, the first game was played by, as I can make out from the article, a stand-in team of 6th graders (boys).
I'd want to know if they only met other 6th grade teams after that, or what the age composition of both teams were, because I feel like that could potentially be a factor.
"Subsequently, their first game was filled in by a boys 6th grade Next Level team ... It wasn't until late January/early February that several teams from the 6th grade division started traveling down to Kentucky to play their scheduled games, that it became apparent that the Next Level team was, in fact, a girls team."
Whats that say about how the boys have been raised? And this just reinforces that.
I doubt they had anything to do with it.
Can relate. I was beat up by another kid of my age after practice because I beat him in a really small and unimportant Judo tournament. We were both 12 and his parents, my parents and the trainers all agreed that he just overreacted because he was scared the other boys would bully him. I switched to ballet afterwards.
That's a shit dojo 100%. Everywhere I've trained if someone pulled that shit, they'd at the very least get sat the fuck down for a good long chat with the sensei, if not kicked out entirely... not to mention pushups, so, so, so many pushups.
Have you talked to your parents about it since? Do they still feel that way? How do they justify it?
That's 11 years old.
Okay let's hear all the excuses for 11 year olds needing to be super competitive and separated by gender.
At 11, girls tend to be taller than boys. So all that estrogen is providing them with a competitive advantage.
Then they should make 2 leagues: one where everyone is allowed to participate, and another one where only boys can participate, so they can win too. Just like we have with every sport's women's league.
Of course the prizes in the boys-only league should be lower since they play in a less competitive league.
My favorite sport to watch is girls volleyball...I don't like to watch sports in general
Most people treat me like a creep when I bring it up, but it's way more dynamic and interesting than men's volleyball. I used to scorekeep the sport, women's volleyball is just more entertaining
IDGAF about basketball to start with, but if the boys can't compete we should throw them by the wayside. I don't get why this is even a question
If people's first thought about women's volleyball is that it's purely a sport for Voyeurism, then that's their bag to unpack on their own time. I watch Women's Gymnastics and Figure Skating since my wife got me into it and I won't entertain that shit with my friends. If I wanted to watch something just because there's hot people in it, then I'll just watch some regular ass porn.
I definitely won't shy away from the fact that there are incredibly attractive women participating at an elite level in these sports, but I'm all about equal opportunity and will also absolutely recognize some hot bros doing gymnastics and figure skating. Usually shuts people up when I start talking about how hot football players are on the team they like to rattle on about forever.
Yes. Both indoor and beach. Those women are amazing athletes.
I like men's sports only, I think girl sports suck.
Is this ok to feel? Or are my feelings invalid, and I'm a woman hating psychopath who should kill myself?
I will let your raging downvotes decide.
Better to prepare those boys for all of the ass-whoopings women will serve them in their future professional careers, no?
cue counterstrike audio: "Terrorists Win"
Of course you can play with the boys!
No not like that - you have to let them beat you!
Regardless of the prejudice angle in this story, I feel bad for the girls for being excluded from possibly winning the championship, especially when they were performing well.
Honestly curious about the downvote on that comment?
Don't worry about it, some people just throw downvotes around everywhere. You could make the least divisive post possible that everyone universally could agree is correct and still get a downvote, so it's best to just ignore it. This is especially true on news communities, infamously the preferred hunting grounds of many a troll.
That makes perfect sense - only grown-ass adults whittle gurls could ever be afraid that someone might lose a game!
Nice.
So it basically boils down to this.
We as Kentuckians realized we failed as parents at a state wide level therefore we will continue to be shit parents and ban the girls for having better parents to appease the shitty parents and their shittily raised boys so they don't get a bruised ego for failing as parents and humans.
Again, very nice.
Sunderman should have kicked them out for lying, not out of "concern" for the potential behavior of boys. As soon as he made that claim he went into the wrong. If the boys can't behave properly then kick them out. It's like how a gal shouldn't have to worry about being raped because of what she is or isn't wearing or doing or not doing. We're telling females what to do or not to do and not males what to do or not do.
If the 6th grade boys teams might retaliate because they lost a game, they got some shitty coaches that haven't instilled a sense of sportsmanship into them.
So they are punishing the victims?
No just the girls
Sounds like the boys forfeit and the girls won
The true tragedy here is not giving prepubescent children anabolic steroids.
Typical "alpha male" response
I sort of realize that if I was on a team of guys and learned that we were going to face a team of girls, it'd be a lose-lose scenario. Either we beat up a bunch of girls trying their best, and "celebrate" over defeating a group that has (on average) physical strength disadvantages, OR we're mocked for losing to girls.
The premise of most athletic competitions would be that it's a fight on generally equal footing. Either way that becomes imbalanced, it can perhaps ruin the feeling. Still sucks that the girls didn't get to demonstrate themselves there.
Boys Basketball Team Kicked Out Of Girls League Championship After Defeating Girls Teams.
If this headline would look like that and you would react differently, regardless of how you have reacted to the original, I think there is something wrong with you view.
It's the exact opposite. Your view is wildly skewed
At their age girls have a significant height advantage over boys.
It's literally the same thing, unfair biological advantage.
Explain why.
\
My position, where hypothetical girls and hypothetical boys teams are being kicked for the same reason should be treated the same is I think the default one. If you think I should react to one of the headline different, tell me a reason, because I may not know one.
Just another reminder that sports are segregated by gender because men got upset at women beating them, not because of "muh muscle mass" or "muh bone density".
It's why Chess is fucking segregated by gender. The most "giga brained chess grandmasters" didn't like being beaten by women.
This girls team was winning because the boys haven't gone through puberty yet. Not saying it was ok to ban them, but it's false to claim that differences in bone mass and muscle density are imaginary. It just doesn't happen until after puberty.
And chess isn't exactly segregated by gender. The women's league exists to make women in chess more visible, to make it easier to pursue sponsorships, and to encourage more women to join the game. But women are free to compete in the "men's" category (which is actually called the "open" category), and often do. The reasons women haven't gotten to the top of it yet are cultural; women are discouraged from starting to play the game at a young age as all the top players do, and so far fewer women attempt the climb in the first place. But it will happen eventually.
Now if you want to talk about how transphobic FIDE is, there's some real merit in those accusations. Their rules around people who are transitioning are nonsensical, punishing people for absolutely no reason. But the women's league itself exists for good reasons.
This is a super good point. When my daughter went to 6th grade the girls towered over the boys by more than a foot in many cases. The boys looked so little.
Yeah, the story clicked when I saw it was 6th grade kids. From the headline I'd assume late teens.
If it was 4th grade it wouldn't have been an issue, but basketball is a very height based sport.
Howdy queue -
From where does your belief arise?
I asked (in a left-leaning space) whether sports segregation was sexist, and it was explained to me it was necessary.
Just like it’s hard to argue men aren’t massively bigger murderers than women, I thought there was no contest in the majority of sports too.
I see claims like “no woman in the world is competitive with any top-rated male athlete in any sport except shooting.” redditors add equestrian sports and a few others to the mix (SafeReddit source).
Everyone deserves visibility, and segregation apparently helps.
From Wiki:
In tennis, "Battle of the Sexes" describes various exhibition matches played between a man and a woman, or a doubles match between two men and two women in one case. The term is most famously used for an internationally televised match in 1973 held at the Houston Astrodome between 55-year-old Bobby Riggs and 29-year-old Billie Jean King, which King won in three sets. The match was viewed by an estimated fifty million people in the United States and ninety million worldwide. King's win is considered a milestone in public acceptance of women's tennis.
https://theworld.org/stories/2016-08-17/see-120-years-struggle-gender-equality-olympics
Margaret Murdock from the US won a silver in a tie in the 1976 Riffle Event, one of the events in the shooting categories. The rifle event was split into men's and women's events in 1984.
For example, Judit Polgar. Chess grandmaster, and excellent player, her highest rank in unsegregated rankings, like maybe top 100 right? Yeah, by age 12 she was 55th. Peak she was 8th in the world. Not 8th among women, among men and women.
It's unsettling how she was regarded by some, and this was in the 90s. If I remember right, even Kasparov was less than kind. He might have turned around in his later years.
If I remember right, even Kasparov was less than kind. He might have turned around in his later years.
You say that in past tense as if he's dead or something, but Russia put him on its list of "terrorists and extremists" only a few days ago. I dunno if he's still bigoted against women chess players, but as an anti-Putin activist he can't be all bad.
For some sports yes. Chess is bullshit, as is shooting and a couple of others.
Most sports are based on physical strength though, and men would dominate them.
I noticed a long time ago that there is "basketball" and "women's basketball" and have considered so much of sports machismo being about male fragility ever since.