Non gendered races in middle school

Most kids regardless of gender don’t get a chance to ‘win.’ That’s the same for pretty much every road race in America. You can maybe hold a special little snowflake run around your yard where she can win every time!

Back in the day, middle/elementary schools would run boys and girls together all the time. So what.

I think it's okay as long as the races are still scored by gender. In middle school, I'm okay with an open category too.

I just hope it's not every race. It would be good to have variety. Girls deserve their own races independent of boys. I'm a girl. It can suck to play sports with boys. Yes, it's fun to beat them, but I'd also like an opportunity to see where I measure up against other girls without boys blocking your way, boxing you in, trying to get in front of you even though they can't keep up.

I'm a huge proponent of protecting women's sports. huge. At the high school level and beyond I dig my feet in. I do feel like in middle school with kids that young, there's room to play around a bit and be a bit more inclusive. I kind of like the idea of boys girls everyone getting on the line together for a couple of the races.

I ran middle school cross country back in the late ‘90s. We did it that way back then too. Didn’t seem to bother anyone from what I saw.
My sister won the girls division in a couple of races. I think racing against the boys just helped push her faster, tbh.

I don't know how common this is in cross country, but when I was in middle school back in the mid aughts girls and boys would compete in the same heats/races at school swim meets. I think part of the explanation for it was that both girls and boys can be at such wildly different levels of development at that level that mixing them together helps ensure a better variety of top-end competition for everyone. That probably wouldn't be as big of a concern at huge invitationals, but I can see it making sense for smaller meets.

I think it's good for the fastest girls to be pushed by boys; but it must be tough for the slowest boys as they might be teased for losing to girls.

Clutch those pearls!

What a fvcking attempt at a troll thread.

What does it matter, really?

When my kids were in grade school, their rec soccer teams were coed. Should I have cried like a snowflake?

I like this idea! Kids need to win sometimes and should not always have to learn dog eat dog harshness. It's the snowflake kids who are walking for sport along the trail watching some frustrated runner show their grit where they can barely breathe, and who walk away knowing they kept fit that day and aren't frustrated.

^ this

When my girls were in grade school they always did a few “fun” xc races. Everyone ran together. In grade school girls are often as fast or faster than a lot of boys. One of my daughters always won and I was happy to see her run against the guys. I didn’t cry about it like the poor little OP snowflake 🙄

I realize this is probably a troll. But here we go... I guess. I coach a MS team and the club team for MS/HS. Most of the club races combine genders. Plenty of MS races combine genders. We train boys/girls together, and it helps everyone.

Our coaches take it seriously. Our runners take is seriously. We train hard. We race to win, but we also realize they are 11-14 year old kids. It's middle school. How we interact with them and treat them as people is more important than their athletic development or achievements. If that means we have gender neutral, inclusive, or combined races, I'm cool with that.

Get over yourself. Nice job with the dog whistle comments though.

The classic case of a parent who never won anything in high school so they want to find any way for their kid to win and somehow convince themselves that they could have won races if they had a better coach in high school.

I think you mean they score by sex, not gender. Runners compete by sex regardless of their gender. Hiltz is rhe best example.

Well, they should be split by sex and not gender. There’s like 20 genders. It would be stupid to have 20 races.

Owwwch!

I L-O-V-E-D to win high school races (the girls division - I am a woman) though I didn't run in middle school, so I can't really compare. It build my confidence. It's good to lead and be way out there by yourself and get your picture in the local paper (or twitter acct). I wouldn't want to take the thrill of winning away from any young female athlete, after all the boys have the privilege to win. they get to have the thrill of winning, why not the girls? There's no way I wouldn't won the boys varsity, our team was too good! They won the state meet the year after I graduated! I didn't even train with the boys varsity, I only trained with the boy's JV group.

It would be humiliating for boys to be beaten by girls in middle school or high school. keep them separate.

The races should be separated by XX and XY. You could even have them do a 23andme spit test and get the results so it's just purely biological (except for people who have rare chromosome disorders).

To reiterate, it's just sad that the thrill of winning is taken away from young female athletes. I can't believe I'm saying: things were actually better for young female athletes back in the day.

Why even have a female category at all then?

If most people never get to win, why are we going to so much effort to glorify just one woman? Seems unfair, if so many will never get to experience it.

I know you are purposefully being dense, but even in the scenario described by the first poster the races were separated by sex. In meaningless early season races it probably doesn't matter if you combine them and only one person gets to cross the line. It could help cut back the time it takes to hold a meet instead of running a JV boys/girls, Varsity boys/girls, MS boys/girls race and having to take over 3 hours, you could hold a 5k and a 3k or whatever and have the meet last 1/3rd the time. That way you can get it in on a weeknight before it gets dark without kids missing as much class time.

Obviously in later races it's easier to see where your team stands in a conference/state type meet. Also, if a team decided to have some of the men pace the women it can create unfair advantages.

As a kid I would have no interest at all in competing vs girls in anything. Why would any guy need to beat a girl, that's pretty sad.