As summer time turns to fall, roughly 1.2 million U.S. teens are suiting up to play high school football. However one thing is shifting on this annual autumn ceremony. Tens of hundreds of these younger athletes at the moment are women, and so they gained’t be donning shoulder pads or helmets as a result of they’re not taking part in deal with soccer.
“All eyes are on flag soccer as the next emerging sport” for ladies, in keeping with Karissa Niehoff of the Nationwide Federation of Excessive Colleges. By 2024, Niehoff famous, 11 states (together with California) had sanctioned flag soccer competitors for highschool women, whereas 17 others had launched pilot packages. Given how women at the moment are flocking to the game, it’s a positive wager that extra states will likely be stampeding to supply flag soccer for ladies.
The explosion of enthusiasm for ladies’ flag soccer has led some to marvel why women don’t play deal with soccer, just like the boys? As a scholar who has studied gender and sports for the reason that Eighties, I’m eager about how women’ and boys’ sports activities have developed traditionally alongside parallel however distinct tracks, and what the similarities and variations in women’ and boys’ sports activities inform us about our present gender relations and beliefs.
The straightforward reply to why most highschool women are channeled into flag soccer appears to be that individuals see deal with soccer as too violent and too harmful for ladies. However it’s not simply women’ soccer that will get particular remedy: There’s a lengthy historical past whereby the foundations of women’ and girls’s sports activities have been tailored and constrained to accommodate women’ and girls’s supposed bodily limitations. Boys play baseball; women play softball (regardless of a deep history of girls’ and women’s baseball). And because the recreation of lacrosse has expanded in American excessive faculties lately, the boys’ full-contact recreation requires gamers to don helmets and protecting gear on their fingers, arms and shoulders, whereas women, shielded by guidelines that restrict contact, put on solely eye guards and protecting mouthpieces.
Critics say that flag soccer and different tailored sports activities for ladies echo outmoded protecting labor legal guidelines that handled girls as “the weaker intercourse,” in impact barring them from taking part in higher-status positions in public life. However too typically one other query goes unasked. If we all know that deal with soccer is harmful for ladies, and now perceive the human costs of playing football — how each 2.6 years of taking part in deal with soccer doubles one’s chances of developing the degenerative brain disease CTE, how taking part in deal with soccer appears to render an individual more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease — why will we tolerate this recreation, even have a good time it, for boys?
In a time of feminist progress for women and girls, we’ve not but thought as deeply about the health dangers of narrow forms of masculinity for boys and men. Boys are nonetheless too typically taught to inflict ache on others, as they’re rewarded for ignoring or even celebrating their own injuries. And the public celebration of tackle football, for athletes and for followers, is a nationwide pedagogy by means of which boys internalize this self-destructive underbelly of patriarchy. Furthermore, the long-term well being prices of taking part in soccer are disproportionately paid by young working-class men of color.
American excessive faculties are deeply invested in soccer — emotionally and financially. I noticed this in my evaluation of 120 years of sports, cheering and student life at Salinas Excessive Faculty, in Central Coast California. At that college and across the nation, soccer stays on the middle of a ritual advanced — homecoming celebrations and all-school rallies led by cheerleaders, drill groups and marching bands — that anchor highly effective traditions by means of which college students, college, alums and neighborhood members have a good time a collective identification. Sustaining these traditions takes ongoing investments of time, labor, emotion and a great deal of cash to pay for stadium repairs, turf upkeep, coaches, journey, uniforms and different gear for lots of of soccer athletes and coaches on every campus.
Given this civic funding in boys’ deal with soccer, it isn’t shocking that tough questions in regards to the well being prices of taking part in the sport are routinely brushed apart. However this wasn’t all the time the case. The beginning of the twentieth century was a time of appreciable turbulence in highschool sports activities. In 1911 — and echoing related developments at Stanford College and UC Berkeley — Salinas Excessive Faculty deserted soccer for rugby, a recreation that was deemed to be much less tarnished by playing, spectator violence, on-field violence, accidents and deaths that had spiked nationally in 1909.
Soccer’s return to campus after World Warfare I — once more, following the lead of the Stanford and Cal collegiate groups — was coloured by the militarization of bodily schooling, driven by postwar anxieties about Military draftees’ supposed lack of toughness. By the Thirties the “soccer hero” had grow to be the paragon of masculinity on campus. Within the post-war years — fueled by the rise of tv and Chilly Warfare fears of the feminization of U.S. boys and males — soccer seized the excessive floor on highschool and faculty campuses and came to represent “the American way of life.”
Highschool soccer, and its accompanying spirit rituals, stays a key nexus of group pleasure and collective identification. However the risks of taking part in deal with soccer are seeping into the public consciousness. A 2023 Washington Post article examined how rising public consciousness of “the toll of a sport linked to mind harm” has contributed to a decline within the variety of boys who play deal with soccer. In the meantime, according to NFHS’s Niemoff, “The recognition of flag soccer — for girls and boys — has been rising on the youth ranges for the previous 10 years. In 2023, about 500,000 women ages 6-17 performed flag soccer — a 63% enhance since 2019.”
Generally, after we take into consideration gender fairness we ask the unsuitable questions, primarily based on the idea that fairness means women and girls striving to do what boys and males have been doing for many years. On this case, as a substitute of asking why women don’t play deal with soccer, more people are starting to ask why boys do, whereas suggesting that it might be time to begin shifting boys — beginning with youth sports activities and increasing into center college and highschool — into flag soccer.
Michael A. Messner is professor emeritus of sociology and gender research at USC Dornsife. His new e book is “The Excessive Faculty: Sports activities, Spirit, and Residents, 1903-2024.”
