Yeah.
I had that same sense when I came across this article about a lawyer hockey dad who called a parent's meeting and drafted an agenda to discuss the Very Important Issue of how he had noticed that the only girl on his son's Pee-Wee hockey team just wasn't very good and sometimes almost saw the boys' pee-pees in the locker room.
From the article:
"The Thornhill lawyer drafted the agenda which included this item: 'Kayla Watkins — Player Ability Limitations and Suggested Options.' 'It is now 14 games into the season and I have noticed that Kayla’s play has not improved,' the agenda reads. 'It is at the point where many of the team members do not want to play on this team if this situation is not addressed....
If Kayla is NOT amenable to the above options, the coach should find Kayla a new team to play on — commensurate to her skill level — for the balance of the season,' the agenda reads.
Atis also raised concerns about Kayla changing in the same locker-room as the boys, stating, 'there have been many ‘near miss’ incidents where the boys have almost been exposed to Kayla.'”
The girl's coach, for the record, wanted her to remain on the team:
“There’s always complaints from parents about ice time but I’ve never seen an issue where it has gone this far before,” he said. “I don’t know what they were trying to accomplish. It’s not an individual player losing a game. She made mistakes but so did others on the team. We’ve been the same since she left.”
The girl, who is 12 (12!), quit the team over this controversy. After learning of the hockey dad's agenda against her, she was humiliated and felt as though the other parents would have been "watching every move" she made on the ice.
Two things.
One, apparently I missed the Lawyering For Douchebags seminar they teach in law school where legal professionals learn that it's of the utmost importance to make use of one's legal skillz for purposes of embarrassing pre-teen girls into quitting sonny boy's hockey team.
And two, I don't know what this girl's level of skill is and how it compares to those of her former teammates. Obviously I've never seen them play. However, the lengths the hockey dad went to to address this "issue," that he brought her gender into it via LoCkErRoOm PaNiC (OOOGA BOOGA wieners!), and that the situation was addressed more harshly than other similar complaints does suggest that the real issue here was that some boys on the team, or at least some over-involved dads, didn't want a boys team to have to endure being tainted by The Girl.
It's an early lesson that girls learn.
It's a shame this young athlete learned had to learn, just as I did, perhaps you did, and countless others did as well, that due to the suckiness of ourselves, we learn, it isn't fair to expect boys to do well if they have to do important things with us.
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