Kicking Up a New Debate : Lingering Prejudices Raise Concerns About the Future of Girls’ Sports

LEWISVILLE, Tex. —  At halftime of a recent soccer game here for girls under 12, two fathers of players on one team walked onto the field. Talking to the referee and the rival coach near the goal, one parent allegedly made a unique request.

“He wanted his wife to take three of our girls . . . into the bathroom and verify that they were girls,” said Joe Johnson, coach of the Lewisville Blaze. “I said ‘No way!’ and probably a few other vulgar things. I got very upset. . . . The request was absurd.”

The story made its way into the local newspaper, the Lewisville Leader, and to the papers in Dallas and Ft. Worth, about 25 miles to the south. Soon it spread to Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times.

Dudley Green, managing editor of the Leader, said the incident focused more attention on the rapidly growing community of 47,000 than any event since a Woodstock-style concert in the mid-1970s.

“Everyone in town has been talking about it,” said Mike Wood, president of the Lewisville Soccer Assn. “Last year we had about 1,900 kids playing soccer. You have roughly double that in parents, and you have grandparents and referees. It’s been all over town.”

But the “panty check” story did not end there. Although the two fathers angrily denied the allegations, the North Texas State Soccer Assn. suspended one father from all games until the end of the fall season and banished the other until next September.

And the incident raised perplexing questions about the future of girls’ sports. Were the Texas fathers accused of making the remarks part of a small minority, or do they speak for a large but less vocal community of men who still can’t accept girls as exceptional athletes? And would this highly publicized episode affect girls’ willingness to compete, undermining decades of growing female participation in sports?

Among a pediatrician and a dozen sociologists and psychologists contacted by The Times, a few said the incident could affect girls sports negatively.

“If that thinking (of the fathers) prevailed,” said Anne Marie Bird, chair of the physical education department at Cal State Fullerton, “little girls wouldn’t go into sports because their femininity would be questioned. I think it would be very threatening (to women’s sports.)”

But the overwhelming majority viewed the alleged remarks of the Texas fathers as an aberration.

“The kind of incredulity that these men demonstrated borders on irrationality,” said Don Sabo, a sports sociologist at D’Youville College in Buffalo, N.Y., and co-author of a recent book, “Sport, Men and the Gender Order.”

“The surveys done during the last decade indicate a tremendous shift in attitudes toward girls’ participation in athletics,” Sabo said. “Overall, parents are supportive.”

Marjorie Snyder, a sports psychologist who is programs director of the Women’s Sports Foundation in New York, said she didn’t think the remarks would hurt girls’ athletics.

“I think it’s the same kind of incident as when (Los Angeles Dodgers general manager) Al Campanis made his remarks about blacks,” she said. “We look at it and say it’s outrageous.

“We have to be vigilant and make sure the opportunities are there for girls, but I don’t think there is going to be a backlash.”

That was good news to Natasha Dennis, 10, the Lewisville Blaze goalie who was only 9 when she was apparently asked to prove she was a girl in the Sept. 29 game.

Next to Dennis’ house, a few blocks east of Interstate 35 in Lewisville, is a wooden garage with paint chipping from the white siding.

Dennis has appreciably aided the chipping on one wall by frequently lining up 15 soccer balls on the dirt and kicking them one at a time against the wall.

Sometimes she kicks for hours at night under the bright light extending upward from the garage roof.

On a recent evening two fire trucks lumbered up her block, sirens screaming and bright lights flashing, and stopped in front of her house. Neighbors poured out of homes on both sides of the street to see what was wrong. Natasha never stopped kicking her soccer ball. The trucks had been called for a small stove fire in a house across the street. But for Dennis, only the competitive fires burned.

Dennis, who stands 4 feet, 5 inches tall, has been playing soccer five years. In addition to performing on Lewisville Soccer Assn. teams twice a year, she is the only girl who plays in boys soccer games at her school during recess.

“I like it when other players come in on me getting ready to kick,” said Dennis, who wore black soccer shoes with shorts and a T-shirt as she talked to a reporter in her living room recently. “I like being able to stop that. I like the challenge.

“I think girls can play better than boys if we try our best and practice.”

Linda Carpenter, a professor of physical education at Brooklyn College, said that the dedication Dennis shows is a hallmark of exceptional athletes--male and female.

“Excellence takes commitment and it takes the same kind whether you’re male or female,” said Carpenter, who attended Dorsey High School in Los Angeles and earned her Ph.D. from USC.

“I think you’d have to look pretty far to find an exceptional athlete who grew up not putting an extraordinary effort into that part of their life.”

Specialists say men are beginning to understand the efforts women make to excel, and that their understanding may be reflected in attitudes supporting girls athletics.

Sabo and Snyder base their optimism about men’s attitudes in large part on a 1987 telephone study for the Women’s Sports Foundation. Researchers contacted 1,004 parents and 513 of their 7- to 18-year-old daughters.

The study found that “parents show very little concern that sports may be unladylike.” Ninety-seven percent of the fathers and mothers agreed that sports provide important benefits to girls. The idea that sports are equally important for boys and girls was generally accepted by 87%.

Doctors, sociologists and psychologists said there was every reason to believe that girls 9 and 10 years old could play as well as, if not better than, boys.

Dr. Barbara Lippe, a professor of pediatrics and chief of the division of endocrinology at the UCLA Medical Center, said that the hormones that change boys’ strength, such as testosterone, don’t appear until puberty, which usually starts at 11 1/2 or 12.

At the Women’s Sports Foundation, Snyder agreed. “In third- and fourth-grade class pictures, girls are the tallest and often the strongest, and its not unusual for girls to be better athletes,” she said.

“If you took a bunch of girls and trained them exactly the same as boys until they reached 11 or 12, there’s a good chance girls would beat boys.”

In addition to possessing abilities similar to boys, many young American girls have honed their skills in recent decades by competing in rapidly proliferating teams and leagues.

The Women’s Sports Foundation study reported that 87% of girls 7 to 10 and 84% of girls 11 to 14 are involved in sports.

Snyder added that 294,000 girls competed in high school sports in 1971, but the number increased to 1,839,000 girls along with 3,417,000 boys in 1988-89, the last year for which figures are available.

“If you take out 950,000 (boys) playing football, we’re getting a lot closer to parity,” she said.

Noting girls’ improvement in gymnastic scores and times for track events, Snyder said, “It shouldn’t be surprising to anybody . . . that when you begin making opportunity available, girls have been improving at all levels of competition at a much faster rate than men over the last 20 years.”

Carole Oglesby, a sports psychologist who chairs the department of physical education at Temple University in Philadelphia, says record-setting performers or other superb athletes won’t be affected by disparaging remarks about their femininity.

“If a young woman shows spectacular promise,” Oglesby said, “then her parents and coaches will pick up on that and see all that collegiate or Olympic competition might offer. She’s going to stay with it and get all the positive support that goes with those activities.”

Oglesby, a graduate of Baldwin Park High School and UCLA, said she’s concerned that the barbs may drive away average performers who will miss the joys and lessons of competition.

“There are a large group of people in the middle of the normal curve of girls who will say if people are going to hassle me about this (femininity), I’m not going to stay,” she said.

Yet the spectacular athlete is the one that men have most trouble accepting, Sabo said.

“When I think about these two fathers in Texas, I picture them as very traditional males who have difficulty accepting a girl’s athletic ability in non-stereotypical terms,” Sabo said.

“When this man sees a woman who can bench-press 220 pounds or run a five-minute mile, or who can kick his butt in volleyball or baseball, he has no category in his mind to put that kind of woman. So he has to turn her into a male to deal with her.”

Dorothy Harris, a sports psychologist and a professor of exercise and sports science at Penn State University, said many men think women are inferior athletes because those men have confused notions of skill and size or strength.

“Look at Steffi Graf, Monica Seles and Jennifer Capriati . . . who are superb tennis players and will be ranked as the best in the world, and yet a male ranked 50th could probably beat a woman ranked No. 1,” she said.

“The men can have unorthodox strokes and be less skilled, but can compensate through strength and quickness. In many cases, women’s matches are more interesting because there is more strategy.”

While Natasha Dennis can boot a soccer ball 40 or 50 yards, the slender goalie would hardly be considered powerful.

She plays soccer because she likes it--better than skateboarding, better than jumping on her trampoline and better than playing football with her neighborhood friends.

She also likes it better than wearing dresses or skirts, which she has refused to do for two years. On a recent evening, Linda Dennis said her daughter was old enough to choose her clothing style, but that she would love Natasha to put on a blue jean skirt with a ruffle on the bottom and a pink blouse.

Suddenly a gagging sound was heard from the other side of the room where Natasha was sitting on the rug. She had a finger in her mouth, reacting in mock horror to her mother’s wishes.

“I don’t like dresses. They’re dorky,” said Natasha, whose hair is short and curly with a wisp of a ponytail in the style of Joe McIntyre of New Kids on the Block.

Linda Dennis continued describing the loafers and the long hair with French braids she’d like for Natasha. This time a quiet voice said, “Now you’re going a little too far.”

Natasha had left the living room but had partially returned, sticking her head in the doorway to protest.

On the field, Natasha’s practice is paying off. She is one of the best players on her team and had allowed only seven goals in her first seven games while her team had scored 39.

Nevertheless, Linda Dennis was surprised and angered when she heard that fathers on a rival team had requested that Natasha prove she was a girl.

“If they had sent me into the bathroom with a mother to look down Natasha’s pants,” she said, “that mother wouldn’t have come out. She would have been torn up and flushed down the toilet.”

After the Lewisville team refused the request for a gender check and won the game, 3-1, Linda Dennis walked her daughter across the field to meet her purported accuser.

“I approached one of the men and said, ‘I’d like you to meet my daughter, Natasha,’ “Dennis said. “He stopped and took a step back--like he’d seen a ghost--and said, ‘Nice game, boy!’ ”

“I said, ‘No, it’s good game, girl, or good game, kid.’ ”

“He said, ‘Good game, son,’ and reached over and patted her shoulder.”