35. I Love Playing With Fire – The Runaways 1977

 

My heart is achin' to see you play
And I can't wait
Till another day

 

Ummm, I don’t know how I feel about this one.

A couple of weeks back Netball Queensland had their state titles, and never before has a winning team caused so much controversy.

They had parents abusing players and officials. Not because of some wrong doing. The team that won, won fair and square. The team was being abused because they were boys . . .

Sorry, but isn’t the general lack of respect being applied on a gender basis exactly what ‘Oh my God! Women!’ have been fighting against for generations?

The one decent article I could find on this issue - which has been regurgitated by many other online media outlets - did raise the very fair point that the boys team was a sate (representative) team, while all other (girls) teams were regional (community) teams. This situation is on the nose.

Now, I know I’ve never really played netball (see Post 14 for an account of my limited experience on this front), but my understanding is that it’s a pretty low contact, high skill game. Please correct me if this isn’t the case. So, does the extra bulk and strength that the average male has over the average female really mean that much? Or are we back to the original representative versus community based debate?

Maybe the uproar was because males were handed the opportunity to play in the almost exclusively female competition, while there have been many years of sweat and tears to gain female opportunities in male dominated sports.

The article also recognised the potentially negative impact this event will have on female participation in netball.

These are all very valid issues that probably should have been given more consideration prior to the event. Once consideration was paid, the event organisers should have invested in openly communicating their decision and the reasoning behind it in order to prevent the heckling and heartache that occurred.

Unfortunately, in a New Zealand adaptation of the previous article the High Performance Director of Netball Queensland was quoted as saying “Our Queensland Firebirds [Super Netball] and Sapphire [semi-professional state league] teams regularly train with the Queensland Suns (male team), which provides an opportunity to continue to extend and adapt our skills as netballers.”

I wonder how many of the other teams playing at the Queensland Netball state titles had the opportunity to train with semi-professional and professional teams?

If Netball Queensland was so keen on building male participation in their sport, they probably should have invested in a male competition ran in tandem with the female competition, or, if they couldn’t find enough males to support a stand alone competition, a competition of mixed teams.

All I’m saying is that they had options.

In closing, would there have been such an uproar if the boys hadn’t of done so well? AND, as discussed in Post 20 and Post 31, I’m an endurance horse rider and neither my horse’s nor my gender are a reason for separating us out into separate competitions/divisions/leagues/etc. We’re already on an even playing field.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYyhbFoBNj4