I was just informed that in Western MA, boys will play on Tuesday and Friday nights during the first 4-6 weeks of the season, and the girls will play on the "lesser" nights. Then for the remaining 4-6 week, girls' teams will play on Tuesday and Friday nights, and the boys will play on the "lesser" nights.

Is it just me, or is this just getting downright stupid? :confused: Would it be ok if we just made boys' basketball a Fall sport?

Chuck

There are better ways
 

Stupid - Yup, I agree. In my daugter's high school in Maryland, the girls teams and boys team almost always playing the same opposing school. One would play at home, and the other would travel. Seemed to work.

In Texas we used to play girls on Monday Thursday, and boys on Tuesday Friday. Then that do-gooder Ross Perot got involved and got the laws in the state changed to where a team can only play on one school night (M,Tu,W,Th) a week.

This was the start of the real crisis for having enough quality officials in the state, for any sport.

No one shows up.
 

There are some conferences in the Chicagoland area that have the girls and boys playing on the same night for varsity games. The girls play at 6:00(same time as the JV Boys was before) and the boys at 7:30.

Nobody shows up for the girl's game, everyone shows up for the boy's game. I guess that is what they call equality.

Peace

Re: No one shows up.
 

I can see why that way is not always a good idea, but that's not what CYO Butch was suggesting. He was suggesting that School A Boys go to School B, while the School B girls go to School A. Both games can be played at the "prime" 7:30 time slot and each will have a full school worth of fans to draw from. This is how it was done here last season, I think. But I guess it was still not good enough for the more militant groups.

Chuck

Re: Re: No one shows up.
 

This shows the contradiction in the law or the rulings. Girl's and Boy's games were always (and still are in most places) played on seperate nights. A lawsuit was filed to have the girls play on every Friday and the same Saturdays as the Boys. Obviously they are not going to play at the same time with the way these two conferences changed it, but they I guess playing on the same night makes them happy.

I agree with equal accomidations and equal access, I just do not understand what it is going to accomplish by playing on the same nights. Not all officials are going to want to do varsity games at 6:00 (especially on a week day), no matter what level.

Peace

[Edited by JRutledge on Oct 7th, 2002 at 02:08 PM]

We're still waiting for Michigan high schools to determine on what nights to play girls and boys basketball, assuming the MHSAA loses its appeal in court. It looks like we'll have one more year of girls bb in the fall. Too bad. The girls got a lot more attention, from college coaches, from officials, from classmates, and from the media, than they will when they have to compete with boys.

Personally, I hope we end up with varsity doubleheaders, because I'm willing to spend 2 evenings a week away from my family, but not 4.

Here we play most of our games (all the league games plus a couple of others) on the same nights as the boys' team. If we are home, they are away. This is almost necessary due to the amount of available gym space. On a typical day, the JH teams use the two gyms (HS and JH) after school, and the HS teams use them in the evening. On non-game days, one of us practices 5-7 and the other 7-9. On the occasions where our boys' team is home but we are practicing, we are shuffled off to the less-than-suitable JH gym for a 5-7 practice. This only happens about two or three times a year (plus one or two more for Wednesday night home wrestling matches) so it's bearable. But if we played Mon/Thur and they played Tue/Fri, home on average one of those two games, we'd each be stuck in the JH once per week.

Also, I agree that it's unfair to give the girls' teams no weekend nights. If you have the gym space to go different nights for each gender, what's wrong with swapping halfway through the season? We get much better crowds for our Friday night games than we do for Tuesdays. If we had no Fridays we'd have fewer fans than we already do.

I agree many of the moves made to promote equality are going too far (like when existing men's collegiate sports are eliminated to balance the scale at a lesser cost than adding women's sports), but swapping halfway through seems awfully reasonable to me.

Re: Re: No one shows up.
 

I dunno.

Where I grew up, we did this A girls at B girls and B boys at A boys.

Basically, all of the fans for both teams would be at the boys game at school A.

In northern Virginia, we usually have a 4:00 freshman, 5:30 JV, and 7:30 varsity game. All 3 school A girls are at school B and vice versa for the boys. In a couple of districts, we sometimes have varsity double-header and sometimes it is boys first and girls second and the next time it might be reversed. The rationale for having the boys play first was that not many people came for the early girls game. If the boys play first, the fans are more likely to stay for the girls game -- at least for a good portion of it. Seems to work for us.

Yo, Stan !
 

Stan,
Welcome!
Glad you found your way to this forum.
Attaboy!

In Michigan Track & Field, the boys and girls alternate for the full year with repect to who performs in an event first.
I see nothing wrong with a similar scenario in hoops.
mick

Here in my little corner of WA State, we do the Mon-Thurs and Tues-Fri schedule with the switch halfway through the season...we have done it for at least 5 years...each season alternates as to who (boys or girls) get the Friday nights the first half of the season...I feel sorry for the AD's who have to figure out the schedules, but it has certainly not hurt any programs...on the contrary, all the coaches I have talked with like it, and both boys and girls programs get equal exposure!!!

The Portland (OR) area has tried lots of different schemes over the years and none of them are completely satisfactory. You can't please all the people (including parents, coaches, and fans) all the time.

I can't believe that people actually get upset about this sort of thing. In my (humble) opinion this is political correctness gone crazy, the game should be about playing (and maybe winning) not about the size of the crowd.

Oz, were you in debate class in high school? I'm wondering if that's where you learned this technique of introducing another un-related topic to distract attention from the point being made. As a high school coach, let me tell you that I am fully capable of concerning myself with what's fair to my team and also preparing them to the best of my ability for playing (and maybe winning :-). I think there are a lot of ridiculous PC things going on in the world, but this isn't one of them. Forget the standpoint of crowd size. Why would it be fair to have 100% of the girls' games be on school nights (sometimes our buses get back after 11:00 PM), and only 50% of the boys' games, especially when it is so easy to fix like Western Massachusetts just did?