As summer time turns to fall, roughly 1.2 million U.S. teenagers are suiting as much as play highschool soccer. However one thing is shifting on this annual autumn ceremony. Tens of 1000’s of these younger athletes at the moment are women, they usually 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 subsequent rising sport” for ladies, in response to 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 applications. Given how women at the moment are flocking to the game, it’s a certain wager that extra states shall be stampeding to supply flag soccer for ladies.
The explosion of enthusiasm for ladies’ flag soccer has led some to surprise why women don’t play deal with soccer, just like the boys? As a scholar who has studied gender and sports activities for the reason that Eighties, I’m involved in 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. But it surely’s not simply women’ soccer that will get particular therapy: There’s a lengthy historical past whereby the foundations of ladies’ 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 historical past of ladies’ and girls’s baseball). And because the sport of lacrosse has expanded in American excessive colleges in recent times, the boys’ full-contact sport requires gamers to don helmets and protecting tools on their arms, 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 collaborating 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 prices of taking part in soccer — how each 2.6 years of taking part in deal with soccer doubles one’s possibilities of creating the degenerative mind illness CTE, how taking part in deal with soccer appears to render an individual extra prone to develop Parkinson’s illness — why can we tolerate this sport, even rejoice it, for boys?
In a time of feminist progress for women and girls, we’ve got not but thought as deeply about the well being risks of slender types of masculinity for boys and males. Boys are nonetheless too typically taught to inflict ache on others, as they’re rewarded for ignoring and even celebrating their very own accidents. And the general public celebration of deal with soccer, 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 younger working-class males of colour.
American excessive colleges are deeply invested in soccer — emotionally and financially. I noticed this in my evaluation of 120 years of sports activities, cheering and pupil life at Salinas Excessive Faculty, in Central Coast California. At that faculty 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 group members rejoice a collective identification. Sustaining these traditions takes ongoing investments of time, labor, emotion and a great deal of cash to pay for stadium maintenance, turf upkeep, coaches, journey, uniforms and different tools 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 concerning the well being prices of taking part in the sport are routinely brushed apart. However this wasn’t at all times 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 sport 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 Conflict I — once more, following the lead of the Stanford and Cal collegiate groups — was coloured by the militarization of bodily training, pushed by postwar anxieties about Military draftees’ supposed lack of toughness. By the Nineteen Thirties the “soccer hero” had change into the paragon of masculinity on campus. Within the post-war years — fueled by the rise of tv and Chilly Conflict fears of the feminization of U.S. boys and males — soccer seized the excessive floor on highschool and faculty campuses and got here to characterize “the American lifestyle.”
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 general public consciousness. A 2023 Washington Submit article examined how rising public consciousness of “the toll of a sport linked to mind injury” has contributed to a decline within the variety of boys who play deal with soccer. In the meantime, in response 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.”
Typically, once we take into consideration gender fairness we ask the improper questions, primarily based on the belief that fairness means women and girls striving to do what boys and males have been doing for many years. On this case, as an alternative of asking why women don’t play deal with soccer, extra persons are beginning 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 faculty and highschool — into flag soccer.
Michael A. Messner is professor emeritus of sociology and gender research at USC Dornsife. His new ebook is “The Excessive Faculty: Sports activities, Spirit, and Residents, 1903-2024.”
