Obviously this won’t work for all sports, but things like football, track, soccer, it would allow for de-gendered team, even allowing athletes with the skills but not the genetically-endowed physical attributes to have a place to play.
Note: I know very little about sports and being on a sports team, so please point out anything that doesn’t make sense.
Forget weight limits…I think baseball is the perfect place to start.
I’ve watched baseball for 30 years. I don’t like change. I understood the need for an automanic runner on 2nd during the covid years. It made sense for the context of it’s time. That time has ended, and so should that rule. I hate the pitch clock. For me, baseball is sometimes not even about the game. Some men have a hard time admitting to others, or even to themselves that they enjoy the company of other men. But the truth is, we wouldn’t hang out every weekend, get drunk, and watch sports together if we truely didn’t care for each other. So even though you know your buddy cares about you, and you care about him, there still needs to be a game on. Now you’re trying to make the game shorter? I am not a fan. I will happily watch a double header with the boys. We want MORE sports, not LESS.
I’m also not a fan of the sensitivity of how balks are called now. Balks used to be so rare, that I had to be explained at age 19 what just happened when I saw one. This after watching baseball for 9 year already. These days it seems like EVERY game has a balk. Sometimes it’s just a twitch of the leg, with no pitching gesture. In NO WAY can some of these balks be realistically interpreted as an intentional fake out pitch movement.
As you can see, I’m a grumpy old set in my ways grey haired curmudgeon. However, even I wouldn’t even mind at all if women played with men. If they can hit a 97 mph fastball, and beat out the throw to home, why WOULDN’T you want them on their team?
The first one to break that barrier would be just as iconic as Jackie Robinson. At least you would THINK so. The reality of the situation is, women HAVE played on official MLB teams. The fact that I don’t remember their names or their decades that they played is only testiment to how unfairly they were viewed. If MLB wants to promote diversity, and progressive views, we get Jackie Robinson and Larry Dolby. When the MLB wants to kill the idea, you never hear a word about it officially from them. Instead you only hear about it on youtube videos about obscure MLB facts.
The point is, on a regular basis, I would still support competitive women playing on every team. There are some truely crappy players in the MLB (looking at you, Bartolo Colon), and if they get replaced with better playing women, then the MLB as a whole is stronger for it.
…that being said, women and men should NOT play hockey together. It just wouldn’t be right.
American ninja warrior has had more and more women making it farther and farther in the competition every year. There are still handicaps in place to make sure at least some women make it to the finals but after that there are no handicaps. At this point, even if they removed all the handicaps there would still be women that reach the finals, just not as many. It’s been very interesting to watch.
The announcers still try to hype up the women’s achievements but at this point most of the big barriers have been broken. They’ve had to resort to stuff like, “if she gets a buzzer here she’ll be only the second mom to get a buzzer in qualifying!”. It’s kind of silly at this point.
As a casual baseball fan I like the pitch clock, keeps things moving along aha.
I actually think coed would be more interesting. You could have a female pitcher for the women and a male pitcher for the men.
It would add another depth of strategy about which positions are played by which players.