Co-ed teams have their place, but why?

Women and men have always been on separate teams. Why is that so?

An article called Why do we still divide sports by gender? says, “When addressing the plausibility of co-ed sports, it’s crucial to note that men generally have higher testosterone levels than women, which can account for different performance levels.”

All of our bodies work in different ways, although it has always been said that a woman’s body is more “delicate.”

In the past, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has attempted to identify an athlete’s gender by testing hormone levels to make the process less embarrassing or avoid having it be discriminatory. They want to distinguish between female and male athletes because it could be confusing to other people, focusing on an athlete’s gender rather than their talent.

But not everyone agrees with prioritizing gender in sports. “Equity means that any given athlete has the same opportunity to earn a scholarship in the sport in which they excel regardless of their gender,” said Evan Grerstmann, in an article called Why Gender Equity in College Sports is Impossible. While men and women fair equally in sports like equestrian events, statistically, men run and swim faster than women, and to have the two genders compete together would put the women at a disadvantage. If teams were made up equally, the same number of either gender on all teams, it might even out the odds for many team sports, but then there is a matter of identifying gender for all contestants to verify that they meet the restrictions.

Schools don’t want to mix genders within a sport for a variety of reasons, but there are some benefits to having co-ed sports teams. It is believed that, in some sports, coed teams would cause the players to act with a different level of responsibility when they play with or against the opposite gender. They might play less aggressively and it could bring out the best in all of the players. With a different level of respect, there could possibly be fewer complaints, less trash talk and fewer fights.