By Staff
Athletic Management, 18.3, April/May 2006, http://www.momentummedia.com/articles/am/am1803/wuboytrouble.htm
Last season, one player on the New Brighton (Pa.) Area High School girls’ volleyball team stood out from the others, but not because of great serves, precision passing, or wicked spikes. Middle hitter Pietro Pezzella stood out from the rest of the team for a much more obvious reason—he was a he.
Pezzella was one of two boys who competed on girls’ volleyball teams last year in the Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic League (WPIAL). Neither school involved has a boys’ volleyball program, though officials from the WPIAL and the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association (PIAA) say that even if they did, there’s no rule prohibiting boys from playing on girls’ squads.
New Brighton Head Volleyball Coach Stacy Lovra says having a male on the team wasn’t a big issue. “None of the girls on my team or any of their parents ever came to me and complained, and we didn’t cut any players this year, so he wasn’t taking a roster spot from a girl,” she says. “I discussed it with our athletic director, and we decided that since there wasn’t a rule against it, it wouldn’t be fair to discriminate against him.”
In other parts of the country, however, boys on girls’ teams has become a big issue. Most state associations and many individual school districts prohibit boys from joining girls’ teams, and several boys have recently challenged those rules in court.
In January 2005, Keith Bukowski, a junior at Stevens Point (Wis.) Area Senior High, sought a temporary injunction allowing him to compete on the girls’ gymnastics team at his school. The request was denied by a county circuit court judge, who ruled that his legal challenge to the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association (WIAA) rule prohibiting boys from competing on girls’ teams was unlikely to succeed. Nevertheless, Bukowski has appealed the decision to a higher court and still hopes to overturn the WIAA rule that keeps him from participating.
“Our state association is trying to promote athletic opportunities for the historically underrepresented gender—females,” says Mike Devine, Principal and former Athletic Director at Stevens Point. “This rule was written to protect programs that increase female participation.”
While Bukowski can’t compete at meets, he is allowed to practice with the gymnastics team. “He’s acted almost as an assistant coach, helping the girls with spotting and things like that,” Devine says. “They consider him part of the team, and everyone has been okay with that.”
Another case is working its way through the courts in Michigan. Maxime Goovaerts, an eighth grader at Forsythe Middle School, filed a lawsuit in Sept. 2005 challenging the Ann Arbor School District’s decision to bar him from playing on the girls’ field hockey team. A native of Belgium, where field hockey is popular among both males and females, Goovaerts joined the team as a seventh grader, but this school year the district said he wasn’t allowed to play.
“We don’t want to get in a situation where we take up slots with boys for girls’ teams or the boys physically dominate the girls out there,” Ann Arbor Superintendent George Fornero told The Ann Arbor News. Until a decision is reached, though, the district has agreed to allow Goovaerts to practice and play with the team.
State athletic associations in both Pennsylvania and Massachusetts currently allow boys on girls’ teams due to court orders. In Pennsylvania, an injunction has been in place since 1975 barring the PIAA from enacting rules that would restrict boys and girls from participating on the same teams. As a result, individual school districts are left to make their own policies, and girls’ teams in the state have occasionally included a male player.
In Massachusetts, the state supreme court struck down a Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association (MIAA) ban on boys joining girls’ teams in 1979, citing the state constitution’s Equal Rights Amendment. Since then, cross-gender participation has been allowed, with certain exceptions. “Boys can join girls’ teams, and vice versa, as long as the same or an equivalent sport is not available at the school,” says Nathan Bonneau, spokesman for the MIAA.
Unless mandated by further court decisions, most athletic administrators are committed to keeping boys off of girls’ teams. “Because of factors like implements being lighter and nets being lower, we believe males would be at a decided advantage if they were to seek placement on girls’ teams, and they could put our female athletes at greater injury risk,” explains John Johnson, Communications Director for the Michigan High School Athletic Association. “Also, it’s easy to imagine how boys competing in a girls’ sport could completely change the game.”
So what happens if your state or local policies allow cross-gender participation, and a boy wants a spot on a girls’ team? New Brighton Athletic Director Joe Ursida says communication is the key to avoiding problems. “First of all, make sure the coach is comfortable with the decision and understands the participation rules,” he advises. “We also notified our opponents that we would have a male playing. Since they knew about it in advance, we didn’t have any difficulty at our games.”
And while one volleyball-playing boy didn’t create a stir for New Brighton’s team this year, Ursida sees problems down the road if local rules don’t change. “I was talking with another athletic director from our area about how boys can play girls’ sports here, and he said, ‘If I had known that, I’d have gotten our three biggest boys’ basketball players to play volleyball—they’re all around 6-foot-3,’” he says. “Just imagine the can of worms that could open up.”