Sports days should be fun and fair but there is nothing wrong with competition... or girls beating boys
Ihave been involved in sport for most of my life and I believe life is competitive. So I have been following the debate about a school having a “gender fluid” sports day with interest.
Merkinch Primary School in Inverness took the decision not to split up girls and boys, but to have mixed races instead at its sports day.
It has caused loads of chat, including a heated debate between Piers Morgan and athlete Iwan Thomas on Good Morning Britain last week.
It’s no big deal. Sports day should be about fun. You want the children to
have a ball and see that being active is cool and that competition can be enjoyable, too.
What wasn’t reported was that the teachers at Merkinch Primary had set out to make their sports day as fun and fair – to all of the kids – as they possibly could.
They held practice races and ran heats during the term. That allowed them to group the kids by ability. This approach meant that many more kids experienced success on sports day. Total common sense.
This is what happens in other sporting situations. Take a 10k. You enter the race. You submit the time you expect to run it in. You are then grouped with other runners – male and female – who are of similar level. Happy days.
The argument about boys automatically being stronger and faster doesn’t really add up.
There’s actually a lot of research to show that there’s hardly any difference in the strength and speed of boys and girls until they are about 11 or 12.
Once they reach that age, it’s a different matter. Physical and emotional changes kick in and then girls can often feel self-conscious around boys.
I do a lot of work with girls from 11-16 and they are often put off physical activity when classes are mixed.
Boys are generally more boisterous, more robust, more competitive and more noisy. They don’t mean to be intimidating, it’s just the way they are.
So, in the high school years, I can see the benefits of splitting into boys’ teams and girls’ teams and having more same-sex classes. But only to a degree.
We can’t segregate everything.
Society isn’t made up of everything being neatly split and always fair.
The most interesting bit of the whole Merkinch issue is that a parent was complaining that their child was being bullied by other kids because a girl had beaten him in a race. That is sexism, pure and simple – and it proves how young it can start.
Those attitudes are ingrained at a young age.
The whole story shows we still need to work to combat sexist attitudes. We’ve made a lot of progress but we’ve still got a long way to go, too.