Why do Texas high school girls only race 2 miles in XC?

actually all of the cross country coaches in texas voted again THIS year. i voted for a 5K. 1, 2 & 3A schools keep voting against a 5K. reason being is many of these schools have to share athletes with other sports- like volleyball and there simply isn't enough training time. (that was one arguement at the Texas Cross Country Coaches Assn. clinic this year)

next year we're going to have separate voting with 4A and 5A so hopefully we can get it changed!

By the same token, women should play football. If started young and kept going for 25 or 30 years, womens football would do as well as the WNBA. Obviously the budget for this should come out of mens football...

you raise some excellents points - here's another...why do women tennis players play best of 3 set (at their major slams) while the guys play best of 5.

as for Texas, there could be any number of reasons, we just recently moved up from 2m to 5K here in a nearby state...it could be the heat in Texas, tradition, fear of losing numbers, etc. Ususally it is up to the coaches to vote so there is seldom one answer its just whatever the reason the coaches have chosen not to move the distance up.

Because in Texas the woman "shall not break a sweat before she enters the kitchen."

I find womens tennis a conumdrum in this type of discussion. True they don't play equal sets, and the top ranked ladies are barely on the court in early rounds of slams. I think Wimbeldon finally equalized the pay-out between the men and women. It doesn't seem hardly fair when you think of effort it takes to win between the men and women. But if you'd go by the popularity of the games, the womens game is probably more popular than the mens game. The mens game basically centers around the power servers and rallies don't last very long. Although the womens game may be a bit slower the play is more fun to watch, for myself at least (except for all the freaking grunting and shrieking). Tennis may be the one sport where women could argue for higher pay than men. They probably put more bums in the seats.

I can somewhat understand why there is the "NBA" and the "WNBA" because the NBA came first, so it would not make as much since to completely change the name.

I would just like to know a legitimate reason for the separate distances in cross country. It is sexist. Females are just as physically capable to race the same course that the males do. They do it with road races and track events, so why not cross country?

>> Females are just as physically capable to race the same course that the males do. They do it with road races and track events, so why not cross country?

!! Who the hell wants to wait that long?

Someone earlier hit the nail on the head. The majority of female HS athletes are simply not interested in running that far. They, and their parents, see it as punishment / torture. Many girls that run XC are "forced" (strongly suggested) to do so by their basketball coaches. It's a simple fact that females are just not as interested in sports (in general) as males are. If they're forced to run 2 miles, the HS Average Jane athlete might do it (hating every step). As the distance increases, the number of HS females willing to participate decreases. Smaller schools already have a smaller number of athletes (hence the term smaller schools, it doesn't actually describe the height of their buildings). Females that go on to run in college are the top runners that actually WANT to compete in the sport at a higher level, but that's a small percentage.

It's one extra mile. If they are trained properly, there should be no problem. It is not a fact that females are less interested in sports. That is only what society and parents tell them. The root of the problem is obviously the parents and coaches telling and showing them that running is punishment and torture.

Their Uteri will fall out if they are forced to run more than 2 miles.

Deny it all you want, but IN GENERAL, females are less interested in sports than males. It's not sexist, it's fact. There are always exceptions, but on the whole, girls would rather watch / participate in something other than sports. This Thurs nite, stop by a sports bar and count the number of males vs. the number of females. Heck, even include the wait staff of mostly female college coeds who could care less about the TVs, and I'm pretty sure there will be a lot more guys than girls. I find it hard to believe that there's a global conspiracy going on, but whether it's society or parents or whatever, it's still true.

Then why should the ones who are interested be held back?

hannsen wrote:

An even more pertinent question is why do NCAA women only race 6k in XC?

How is that at all "pertinent"??

rojo wrote:

The term WNBA is along the same lines. Why don't they rename the NBA the MNBA?

-Rojo

I see your point, but I think NBA vs WNBA might not be the right analogy. The names came about as they did because the NBA had been in existance for years when the WNBA emerged. There would have been no point in calling themselves the MNBA at a time when no womens league existed. It also seems to make sense that when the new league emerges that the newcomer should be the one to select a name to differentiate themselves rather than the existing league changing it's name.

The NBA is not only for men. It's for the best basketball players. Since women can't compete anywhere near men in basketball it's a de facto men's league. The WNBA, on the other hand, is only for women. Now that's actually sexist. Women can play in the NBA but men can't play in the WNBA.

In Texas in particular the reason is that most girls that run XC are doing so against their will. Most of the coaches are doing so also against their will. Most coaches are actually basketball coaches in Texas and will keep the distance at 2 miles until otherwise necessitated. They have been trying to change the distance for years but to no avail, there are too many people that don't care or care enough not to want the longer distance.

What is 'holding them back'?? The 1A, 2A, and 3A coaches have a point, if the state goes to 5k for girls in all divisions then you'll see a lot of those schools no longer being able to send teams to certain invitationals or any post-season competition because they won't have enough girls still coming out for xc to field a scoring team. Even if you changed the scoring rules to needing 4 you'd still see quite a few 1A and 2A schools unable to provide the opportunity of xc for their girls because not enough of their peers are interested in 5k as opposed to 3.2k. Is that a trade-off you think is acceptable, enabling a defacto complete loss of opportunity for one set of girls in the state so that another set of girls can race a little over a mile further yet most of the time still come up with the same results that would've come from a 3200m race?

This debate goes back to the 1920s! Rojo has an ally in the women who have, since that time, pushed for the same type of "event distance equality" he mentions. During the Women's Olympic Games (a short-lived venture of five female-administered Olympics which were held alongside the modern Olympics in the 1920s-30s), women ran LONGER distances than they were permitted by the modern Olympic committee, the longest race being 1000m. When male-administered athletic organizations (such as de Coubertin's Olympic Committee) took control of women's sports, female administrators of women's sports pushed for exactly what rojo calls for: event equality. DeCoubertin squashed them in the 1920s. In the 1970s, the NCAA's takeover of the AIAW was the final nail in the coffin, in terms of event equality at the college level. It's at that juncture that a sharp drop off occurred in the number of Division I, II, and III female athletic administrators -- and, subsequently, a dropoff in terms of the events/distances that women were allowed to participate in.

The best book on this topic is Mary Jo Festle's "Playing Nice"; while "The Silence of Great Distance is a good case study, Festle's work gives a more systemic (and wider-reaching) analysis of why it is that we have such things as the "Lady" Tigers, and the 2mile XC race in TX.

Harry Kooter wrote:

rojo wrote:

The term WNBA is along the same lines. Why don't they rename the NBA the MNBA?

-Rojo

I see your point, but I think NBA vs WNBA might not be the right analogy. The names came about as they did because the NBA had been in existance for years when the WNBA emerged. There would have been no point in calling themselves the MNBA at a time when no womens league existed. It also seems to make sense that when the new league emerges that the newcomer should be the one to select a name to differentiate themselves rather than the existing league changing it's name.

Since we now have manpurses, should all others be called womenpurses?