A Massachusetts high school field hockey captain is telling the MIAA that the state athletic association "needs to do better" and should create a league for just boys after her teammate was seriously injured by a boy's shot during a game last week.
A high school field hockey captain is telling the MIAA that the state athletic association “needs to do better” and should create a league for just boys after her teammate was seriously injured by a boy’s shot during a playoff game last week.
The Swampscott High School boy player’s shot struck a Dighton-Rehoboth High School player in the face, sending her to the hospital with significant facial and dental injuries, according to officials. The “traumatic” incident led to shrieks and tears all over the field hockey pitch.
The viral shot from the male player is now leading to calls for gender rule changes for high school sports, especially when it comes to girls’ field hockey.
In Massachusetts, a boy can play on a girls’ team if that sport is not offered in the school for the boy.
“I understand that the MIAA is adhering to the Massachusetts Equal Rights Amendment, but continuously using the law as a scapegoat for criticism and issues regarding this topic is unacceptable,” Kelsey Bain, a captain for the Dighton-Rehoboth field hockey team, wrote to the MIAA following the recent injury to her teammate.
“The MIAA needs to do better,” Bain added. “Understanding that you can not easily change the Equal Rights Amendment, the MIAA can use the tragic incident from the November 2nd game as an opportunity to at least change girls’ field hockey.”
With dozens of boys across the state playing on girls’ field hockey teams, she said it’s likely that school districts could have co-op teams for boys to play in their own division.
“You have a chance to change the negative publicity the MIAA has been receiving due to the incident that happened on Thursday night by moving forward with the proposal for a seven versus seven boys league,” Bain wrote.
“Please use this as an opportunity to take a negative incident and turn it into a positive change,” she later added.
The MIAA in a statement after the incident said the athletic association and member schools must follow all federal and state gender equity laws.
“We respect and understand the complexity and concerns that exist regarding student safety,” the MIAA said. “However, student safety has not been a successful defense to excluding students of one gender from participating on teams of the opposite gender. The arguments generally fail due to the lack of correlation between injuries and mixed-gender teams.”
But Bain in her letter to the MIAA responded, “We all witnessed the substantial damage that a male has the ability to cause against a female during a game. How much longer does the MIAA plan on using girls as statistical data points before they realize that boys do not belong in girls’ sports? Twenty injuries? One hundred? Death?”
