A day before a filly won the Preakness Stakes, Cardozo boys’ tennis head coach Howie Arons found himself on the wrong end of another girls-beating-the-boys incident.
Hannah Berner, at third singles for the Beacon School, beat Roland John handily en route to a three-match-to-two victory for the team from Manhattan. Arons, whose response was honest and probably not the product of bitterness, was not pleased.
“This is the boys’ championship — boys’,” he said. “Hannah is great, but she’s a girl on a boys’ team.”
Arons’ objection was that Berner is better than many of her male competitors, and that her inclusion in a boys’ competition was unfair. While a detour in which he called male athletes “faster and stronger” obscured the real point, Arons wasn’t saying Berner wasn’t good enough. He was saying that she belonged competing with her natural gender class.
Of course, Beacon appears to have few options besides including talented girls’ players on its boys’ team. The school says it can’t afford to add a girls’ tennis program, and surely players like Berner are better off playing for the boys than not playing at all. (“They need a girls’ team,” to be clear, is Arons’ position.)
As long as financial concerns persist, the best answer, no doubt, is to include a few girls on the Beacon School boys’ tennis team. But that leaves a bigger question: If Beacon did have a boys’ team, and if Berner were deemed too good for it, would that justify playing against the boys?
Letting her play in their division, a la Michelle Wie, sounds like an undoubtedly egalitarian and cosmopolitan decision. But is it? Wouldn’t it imply that the boys are in a higher league to which a female player would be promoted? Wouldn’t it imply that the boys really are “faster and stronger,” that it isn’t good enough to be at the top of the girls’ tennis universe? (Imagine, for example, the reasons for which a boy might play in a girls’ league.)
If the boys’ division were seen as “higher” as opposed to merely “different,” would that even be problematic?
For now, the Beacon School doesn’t have a choice in the matter. But if it did … which side of the debate would be the sexist one?
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