Women and Athletics

Watching the movie in class yesterday about sports and men and women's role in them, many things went through my mind. Throughout my entire sports-playing life, I have definitely been through being treated unequally because I am a girl. I played many different sports throughout my life, from soccer, to softball, and even volleyball and tennis, and in every single sport I always noticed some sort of unfairness in the way we were being treated. When I was younger, it wasn’t necessarily as noticeable, because growing up I played on coed soccer teams, and people are not going to be treated one better than the other when they are dealing with 5 year olds, but I noticed it especially in high school. I played both volleyball and tennis all four years, and both teams were very good. However, our football team was pretty good, but we always made it farther in sectionals than they ever did, but somehow they always got more attention than we did. We would have huge pep sessions and assemblies for them when they had a big win, or before sectionals would begin, but would the volleyball team or tennis team get any of this special attention? No. Is it because the football team consists of 80 guys, and no girls are involved, and the volleyball and tennis teams are all girls? Who knows. No one will actually ever know why people of all ages are being treated differently while playing sports, but I do know that it will be an issue for many years to come.