Football

By: Matt Goryance

As I was reading the article titled, “Football” by Fields it started off briefly describing the history of the game. Stuff like how it is very important in the United States because we believe to have invented it ourselves, and the fierce rivalries that used to take place between ivy league schools in the first contests of football. We discussed all these things in great detail in History and Philosophy of sport. The article then went on to describe Title IX and the Equal Rights Amendment but what I read that really got me thinking was when it said people who wanted to exclude girls from this sport, and most likely others too, took one of three stances on the issue; “the girls would be hurt, girls’ athletic programs would be hurt, and the game of football would be hurt” (Fields, 2005, p. 37).

I started to think of our discussion in class about how it could possibly hurt girls’ athletic programs because I had never thought of that before but it makes sense. If girls all wanted to play with the boys because they saw it as more of a challenge they wouldn’t want to play in the WNBA they would be striving to be the one or two girls that were able to compete in the NBA and it could potentially hurt their programs. But when it comes to a sport like football where they really don’t have their own program I’m not sure it could hurt, but then that got me thinking if there would ever be enough interest from girls, and even if there was enough interest, if people would ever make a girls football team in high schools and what not. Since things like the LFL are on TV now and they are thinking of changing the name to make it more serious, and other contact sports like women’s boxing was even in the Olympics this year, I was wondering if anyone thought that someday girls would have their own football teams in junior highs or high schools and if they should.