Girls Versus Boys: A Few Half-Baked Observations From Coaching Genders

Last week, one of the players I coach, a 6th-grade girl, asked me who I like coaching better: boys or girls? (People have been asking me this in various forms lately. No one ever asked when I used to just coach boys. I think that’s because we think that to coach is to coach boys, but to coach girls is to coach girls.)

First, I told her, “There is no comparison.” I love all my children equally; they’re just different. But maybe the question is useful if I don’t take it literally. Maybe, what we’re really interested in are questions like Why are boys’ sports valuable? And why are girls’ sports valuable? What do they (the people and the sports) uniquely offer? 

This kid is special. So I’m not surprised by the kind of rebuttal she immediately offered, Okay, then what do you like most about coaching girls?

That was easy. You guys (girls) are nice to each other. They teach me how to compete without an eye toward dominance over others. You all are more eager to learn [because they tend not to have had as much rigorous, tactical, and technical coaching before].¹ You guys are very welcoming toward each other. Because girls’ basketball has not been as invested into, I find that the disparity between girls’ experience levels is wider. The girls I coach seem more accepting of the differences between them; they don’t view each other as threats. Boys, I told them, tend to be more aggressive. They have more experience with sports, and seem to have higher expectations for their personal performance, and are also surrounded by more promise or prospect of trappings. 

When I first started coaching girls last fall, an old trope was regurgitated to me more than once: Girls connect to compete; boys compete to connect. I trust there may be something to that.² But there is also something to learn from the inverse of the trope. We should prioritize connection with and between boys, trusting that this is a core emotional need that is probably typically going unmet, just as we should prioritize sheer competition with girls.

Maybe it’s just the age and experience level I’ve been coaching, or the special group I’m fortunate to work with, but there’s something precious about girls’ basketball. A purity, wholeness, sincerity. 

I think this is something worth protecting, as the girls’ and women’s game matures, bringing along with it increased attention and economic stakes. I hope we won’t rely on mimicry of the boys and men game as a strategy. Copy-paste doesn’t work, as Emma Hayes, Head Coach of the United States’ women’s national soccer team, has been popularizing lately. Let them be different! 

For instance, while I appreciate the “Everyone Watches Women’s Sports” concept (and have supported it with my wallet) and respect from afar those behind it, the logic suggests that the value of women’s sports is somehow predicated on being watched in great big numbers. I think the value is more inherent and intrinsic. (To be sure, I think there is market demand for watching women’s sports, but that is besides the point I am trying to make.) Or take trash-talking. I for one, am sick of seeing the “too small” sort of celebrations, first popularized by men and boys, and then women and girls. (Please allow me to criticize the behavior, rather than individual people). 

Girls need not just copy the boys. In many ways, the men and boys are not alright. I’m convinced many professional men’s athletes are depressed: The trappings are not a worthy goal enough, and social glory and domination is not a sustainable identity. 

As a man coaching girls, who grew up playing as a boy, always coached by men, these kids have taught me so much. Some of the people I’ve been most inspired by on earth are middle school and high school girls basketball players. I tear up when I reflect on how hard they strive, how inclusive they are, their physical sacrifice and risk-taking. 

And the experience also begs many more questions, for which I am only scratching the surface: How do we coach boys and girls differently without essentializing gender? As men coaching boys, how can we serve the unique needs of boys, in a space that was made for them, but today may prioritize performance over well-being? How do we get more women coaching girls, when only 25% of youth coaches are women, as my new friends at the Women’s Coaching Alliance are working to address?

1. There’s also a lot of evidence that boys have generally fallen behind girls in educational settings. ↩︎
2. Whether or not such tropes are valid, they are prominent. There is an old book called “A Philosophy of Play” by Luther Halsey Gulick, published in 1920. Gulick is like the grandfather of basketball and volleyball. He’s known to have overseen James Naismith’s creation of basketball, and played a similar role for volleyball. He also developed the YMCA triangle symbol, created the Public School Athletic Leagues in New York, the Boy Scouts of America, and the Camp Fire Girls. Also cool, he studied at Oberlin College, my alma mater. In his “A Philosophy of Play,” chapter 7 is called “Masculine and Feminine Differences,” where Gulick details what are in my opinion his antiquated ideas about how and why boys and girls, respectively, play. Those ideas must have penetrated the foundational logics of our sports systems to this day. ↩︎