The largest college sports governing body in the country made the change following President Trump’s executive order banning trans girls from girls’ school sports.
The largest college sports governing body in the country made the change following President Trump’s executive order banning trans girls from girls’ school sports.
So not going by weight at all then.
Look, I get that there are limits on how many teams you can feasibly have, but there are also plenty of smaller dudes who never play sports because they’d also get mauled. It’s also not a huge mental leap to think that maybe some coaches/administrators might deliberately try to get the girls to give up and be “out of their hair.” Not saying that happened in your anecdote, it may have genuinely been a well-meaning attempt at inclusivity by everyone involved. But it’s also not super relevant if there wasn’t also an attempt to balance it by weight - something that has already been shown to lower injury rates and severity for existing players if we would do it.
Do you think there are weight classes in football?
We definitely did not put them up with varsity or anything unless they specifically asked for it. The kicker and linewoman would take their hits and move on.
I genuinely had respect for both of them. Hell I tried teaching the linewoman everything I knew to help her, but even after 3 years she still couldn’t make varsity even though the drive and want was there.
So I guess yeah, they did keep her in her weight class by keeping her on JV all through my time there. Everybody wanted her to succeed, just there was a natural difference between what she and us guys could do.
We never intentionally tried to make her feel differently, but nobody ever had to point out there was a massive difference.
Most of my original point was that there should be weight classes. I’m well aware there aren’t currently. Perhaps I didn’t make that point clearly enough.
Thank you for doing your part to try to make them feel welcome and trying to help them succeed.