Boys playing field hockey

The other night I was talking with a high school field hockey coach after her team played a tournament game against a team that had two boys on it.
Her team won, but the presence of the boys who were among the better players on the other team, did not sit well with her. She said she and another coach were going to draft a proposal to the state association for a separate coed division in the sport.
Now I've always felt that if a girl can wrestle or play football on a boys team there's no reason a boy should not be allowed to play field hockey on a girls team.
I brought up that point with her and she pointed out that wrestling has weight classes and that one of the concerns in field hockey is the size and strength of the boys and the safety problems that could present. She pointed out that there have been girls who have been seriously injured while playing against boys, not only by collisions with them, but also by the more powerful shots that they're able to make.
While I understand the safety issue, why wouldn't these people be equally concerned with a girl who was seriously injured playing football?
Could the real problem be not that boys are allowed to play field hockey, but that in many cases, they're good at it and able to help a team win games it otherwise would not win?

 

I grew up playing field hockey, and the velocity that I, inconsistently, and some of my teammates, a lot more consistently, could hit the ball would lead me to say I think the coaches concerns are valid.

When I was in my school's under-13 and under-14 teams, we would play our under-18 girls teams in practice scrimmages, but that ended once we hit under-15s and started hitting the ball with serious force.

 

Should be mocked. Endlessly.

 

Eh, it was a prep school. We played Rugby in the Autumn, Field Hockey in the Spring, and Cricket in the Summer.

 

Glad you're a good sport about it.

I'm sorry, but field hockey is the most worthless shit sport ever invented.

 

Not at prep school. We'd play pick-up games, but nothing organized. The two king sports were rugby and cricket.

I miss playing cricket.

 

No. Soccer is fucking baseball compared to field hockey.

Who the hell decided it was a good idea to play lacrosse--another horrible non-sport--with baseball bats? And rules that assured absolutely no flow to a game? "If the ball goes more than one inch over the ankle, it's a penalty!"

Seriously. Watching field hockey makes me want to rip my eyes out and cram them down my throat so I can watch my insides churn.

 

You're kind of right, but Men's field hockey, especially the Olympic tournament, can be very entertaining.

It's also a lot better on astrofurf than on grass.

 

Rick Reilly had a column on this in 2001 that addressed these very questions:
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/inside_game/magazine/life_of_reilly/news/2001/11/21/life_of_reilly/

My take: If the school, district, league or state association can't prove there's enough interest to make boys field hockey a sanctioned sport, then the boys should be afforded every opportunity to play on the team that is sanctioned.

 

Dealt with one of these coaches before, her team was about to play against a team with a boy on it (now plays on the National Team) and she was adamant that boys shouldn't be playing field hockey. I asked her about the girls that wrestle and play football, and to this coach's credit, she didn't want it both ways saying they shouldn't be playing those sports either. She said she's had boys approach to join her team but she wouldn't take them. The interesting thing would have been if they sued for sexual discrimination, because as the MIAA rep in the Reilly column said, they've lost at every step.

I know in Massachusetts it's not Girls Field Hockey, it's Field Hockey. Same for Wrestling and Football.

 

Search Pittsburgh in the mid 1990s.

Three boys played high school field hockey and made all conference. Coaches feared for their girls' lives because of the velocity of the shots being sent by the boys.

I'll try to find something online.

 

http://www.post-gazette.com/sports/columnists/20000921smizik.asp