Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
The basketball courts at Teter Park in Riverton were once a popular spot for summer pickup games. I often called my players in Shoshoni to see when they could be in town for a game. We’d start with half-court games of three-on-three that quickly expanded to full-court, “King of the Court” style play as more players showed up.
If you haven’t had the pleasure of playing “King of the Court” games, it’s an easy concept. You and your four teammates stay on the court as long as you keep winning games. Set the score and the first to 11, 15, or 21 wins and you stay on the court, playing the next team waiting on the sidelines.
Rarely do teams stay on the court for more than two games. Fatigue in the full-court, non-officiated “call your own foul” style of play, with no breaks or timeouts is physically more demanding than a traditional game.
One afternoon five of us started to shoot around. I noticed a tall 20-something gal shooting by herself on the other end of the court. I also noticed she didn’t miss many shots.
We decided to start a half-court game but needed an extra player. The younger guys didn’t want a girl on their team, which proved to be a great decision for my squad.
I asked her if she’d like to play with us and she said yes.
In the first game, she scored seven of our 11 winning points. She had a wicked shot off the glass from 15 feet and a nice pull-up jumper.
The boys were surprised.
I asked her where she had played since she was evidently a college-level athlete. She was entering her senior year at Wichita State University and was in Riverton visiting her grandparents.
Yes, she had game.
But if I were to put her on the floor against the men’s team from Wichita State she would have been outsized, outgunned, and most likely injured.
For those who think men should be able to compete on women’s teams, I can categorically say you are wrong on every level.
It took a long time for Title IX to arrive and give girls and women an equal chance at sports and now the woke movement is attempting to destroy it.
It’s a joke between some of my friends who are high school varsity officials just before the boy’s game begins in a doubleheader. The joke is always along these lines after the girls play. “That was a fast-paced game, I’m sure the next one will slow down.”
When only boys were allowed to play competitive varsity basketball there was a freshman game, a junior varsity game, and then a varsity contest. The difference in speed, size, and the flow of the game was sometimes noticeable, and sometimes, in better programs, barely discernable at all.
Now the junior varsity boys play in another gym while the JV girls take the floor just before the varsity girls play. It’s easier to handle locker rooms that way, and those players who compete in both the JV and varsity games have a chance to be in the same gym.
The “next one” never slows down, it’s just the opposite.
The speed difference between a varsity girls’ and a varsity boys’ game is palpable. It is the best argument you can find against the idiocy of allowing boys and men to play in female leagues.
The play may not be better, the free throw shooting usually isn’t, but the speed, power, and height of play off the floor is astronomically different for the guys.
The concept that we’re even talking about men being allowed to compete in a women’s league just because they think they’re women is ridiculous.
How many times have you heard someone say, “She could play with the boys?”
It’s always a compliment to an outstanding female player. While she may be able to play with the boys, she won’t stand out, she’ll be at the lower level of competition. It’s not a slam against women’s sports or high school girls’ athletics, it’s just a biological reality.
The opposite is true in many Division I women’s programs where they offer partial scholarships and substantial stipends to men. That’s right, women’s programs offer financial incentives for men to practice against the varsity women’s team. A group of men who were average high school players provides more challenge for the starting five at schools in the Big 10, ACC, and SEC than going against the second five on the women’s roster.
Hayes Heimbaugh, a player at Lusk, was one of these paid practice players at Michigan State and enjoyed it thoroughly.
Men are taller, faster, stronger, and better able to compete in violent, collision-style athletics. If you don’t think basketball is a physical sport, then you’ve never played it.
How soon will some guy claiming to be female arrive on the Ladies Professional Golf Association tour? The women put, chip, and play the short game every bit as well as the men, they just don’t drive the ball into low earth orbit like the heavy hitters on the men’s tour.
A guy who can’t reach the green from the men’s tees without extra strokes can feel like King Kong from the women’s. Just because he’s inadequate in his own division and “feels” like he’s a woman doesn’t give him the right to take away a woman’s chance to compete.
Why this is even a question is a comment on the confused, entitled, ridiculous social conditions the extremists are trying to force on us.
Competitive soccer by its nature is a more liberal-minded sport than track and field, wrestling, football, or basketball.
It’s interesting that run-of-the-mill male soccer players are now trying to infiltrate women’s national teams. The best women’s player in Canada is now a man who claims to be female.
If the US Women’s Team wanted to dominate the world in perpetuity, all they’d have to do is round up a dozen or so 16-year-old all-state boys’ soccer players willing to claim they identify as women, and they’d be unbeaten forever.
In the process, women would go back to the days before Title IX was implemented and not be allowed to compete. That’s what awaits if this fetid trend continues to its inevitable fruition.
How about instead we let men and boys compete against their own, and women and girls do the same?
What a concept.