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This article out of Long Beach California written by Bob Keisser raises a very interesting question that is common in women's sports. It discusses a recent high school game in which the two starting pitchers, in a men's baseball game, were women. The pitchers Ghazdeh Sailors and Marti Sementelli turned heads due to their level of skill, with Sementelli getting the win 6-1.

One question that parents of young female athletes often have is whether or not their talented young female athlete should join a girls or a boys team. A lot of sports, such as baseball, softball and soccer, often have mixed gendered sports teams and leagues during the introductory stages of the sport before segregating boys and girls when they reach older ages.


When the girls are separated from the boys there is often pressure for the talented girls to keep playing with the boys.

There is a lot of debate about what is "better" for women in sport. Should young girls that are exceptionally talented compete only with women's teams? This would increase the "quality" of women's sport and give the other girls on the team a chance to learn and improve by playing with an exceptional athlete.

One argument that women often use for competing with men's teams is that it provides them with more opportunity in their sport. Men's teams are often better funded, making it less expensive to participate in the sport. Men's teams can also have more competitions as finding teams to compete against is often less challenging. Finally, and probably most importantly, there are more opportunities for men to keep playing sport after their college career is over.

After college, high performance female athletes have a hard time continuing on in their sport. Outside of the national team and club team structure there just simply are not opportunities for women to keep playing their sport at a high level. Men, on the other hand, have a very wide variety of professional opportunities at their disposal. With various levels of professional men's hockey, baseball and soccer around the world, a number of male athletes spend at least some of their post-college life playing the sport they love for money.

Female athletes are starting to catch on that they may have a brighter future in sport by playing with the boys. Ghazdeh Sailors and Marti Sementelli are getting international level news coverage for being the starting pitchers on a boys high school team. Hayley Wickenheiser, arguably the best female hockey player ever, was the first woman to ever play professional hockey on a men's team. And more and more female athletes are playing on men's college and club teams.

What is best for women in sport? I think that allowing women to compete with men, although it takes competition away from the women's leagues, is best for women in sport. Having a woman compete against a man will not only give the woman more opportunities to compete, it will, most importantly, show men that woman can compete with the boys. How many times have high level female athletes heard that they are "pretty good for a girl."

Maybe their perspective would change if they were struck out by a girl, body checked by a girl or scored on by a girl. Ultimately, women playing on men's teams provide great positive media attention to women playing sports and great exposure to female athletes. Eventually this exposure could lead to a more wide-scale acceptance of women's sports in general.

What do you think?

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