Play With the Boys or Don't Play - Is Separate Really not Equal?

Recently, I was elected to my local youth soccer club's board of directors and one of my primary goals has been to improve the club's offerings for girls.

A few seasons ago, the club added to it's offerings an off season scrimmage.  It has been a huge plus conceptually and I the club puts a lot of emphasis on the context of these scrimmages to be a 'show up and play' format with a low degree of adult interaction.  

As one of my first actions as a board member, I set out to attend a few of these scrimmages and brought my daughter and some of her team mates to get a girl's perspective.

I realize that the club can not please everyone no matter what program is offered but I have observed a large number of girls both on my team and amongst the other girl's teams whose experience has been one of exclusion for them.  Over and over again I hear the common theme: "we've tried those scrimmages but my daughter came out and was intimidated". 

In short, the biggest problem has to do with how the program accommodates female players which is affecting the experience for both girls and boys.  I think the club has a decision to make: Do they want to give the girls their own space or not?  The current program only accommodates the small percentage of girls that don't mind playing with boys, most of which are at the older age groups.  These girls are a huge exception from the rule in my experience.  In fact, to put it in perspective, mixing boys and girls in the younger age groups at the scrimmages is no different than it would be if we went to all coed teams at the class IV level.  Such a move would accommodate only a small percentage of girls - this analogy describes exactly how the current scrimmage is structured and who it accommodates and excludes. 

I've made it a point to do a great deal of reading about how to coach girls over the past few years and how they differ from boys developmentally.  While I am not claiming to be an expert, the evidence expressed by parents and players that I observed (except for the older players) seems to suggest their is some merit to my observations.  I've also heard that the girls don't come out to the programs that have been offered and yet I was able to communicate with my fellow coaches and get a large number of Under 9 girls this past weekend.  Certainly, enough for the girls to have their own game but sadly, nothing near that happened. 

Their experience the past 2 weekends are examples of why girls don't come out.  When they do come out, they don't get to play the game in the spirit of the event - with minimal adult interaction.  In fact the adult moderator took a hard line with the girls which I can sum up as 'either learn to play with the boys or don't play'.  I believe this IS adult intervention.  Myself, and other parents of girls pleaded for some flexibility but the moderator was not accommodating.   Although she has never played soccer, she felt bad for the girls being 'segregated'.  Clearly the girls would not have felt bad about it as they had been asking for exactly that: there own space to play.

The net affect of this forced integration was that girls who are typically engaged in playing soccer, stood together in conversation during the scrimmage, causing a huge imbalance in the teams that were chosen. 

I found that the club's paid moderators don't seem to be deploying the program in the true spirit in which it was intended. I think they intend to do what they understand the club wants but they take the concept of minimal intervention too far on one hand, by paying little or no attention to what is going on and not far enough on the other by insisting girls play with boys at all age groups.  In my view, they need to be more engaged with what is going on, spend more time evaluating how games are progressing and switch things up to keep the kids interested. For example, the 2 or 3 boys that were paired with a large group of girls this past weekend were bored in the that group and said so repeatedly.   The solution would have been to either mix it up or to break it up into two smaller sided games (I think it was an 8v8 - certainly 2 4v4 games would have been a lot more valuable).   I understand that the moderator has no experience with soccer at all and I suspect this might be working against the club's intentions.  Although coaching the kids is beyond the scope of what the club intends for this event, I think some degree of coaching skills, knowledge of reading the game and interpersonal skills would be valuable in terms of moderating the event successfully (knowing how to group the kids, when to switch it up, how to tactfully and politely deal with parents concerns, etc.).

90 minutes is also too long for the younger age groups to stay interested in being left alone to play a scrimmage.  I suggested to either consider allocating the field time to be split up differently and / or shortening the younger age groups to 1 hour.  Towards the end of the scrimmage, I heard one of the young boys ask his dad if they could just practice shooting.  What a great idea I thought, how often do kids get free time just to shoot on a goal.  Allocating some of this field time to something like that certainly would not compromise the spirit or intent of the event. 

As for promoting attendance: I was approached by one of the parents of an Under 11 boy who asked how I got so many girls out and if they were from my team.  I told him that the girls were from a mix of teams in the U9 age group and that we communicated in advance about who was going.  For girls, this is huge.  For my daughter, for example, she loves soccer but knowing that 2 or 3 of her team mates were going to be there was a far more influential factor in terms of getting her out to the pitch in the first place. I find this to be representative of nearly every girl I have coached. 

I do agree that playing with boys can give girls a different experience which can enhance their overall skill set as a player but if the girls won't play with boys at the younger age groups, I don't see an advantage to forcing them to do so.

Some people I have encountered feel that separating the boys from the girls is not equal opportunity but my the experience of my daughter and her teammates would seem to suggest the opposite.