It was only about six weeks ago when one of the more controversial scenes of the 2024 Olympics occurred.
This is when Italian 66kg boxer Angela Carini met Algerian boxer Imane Khelif. Just 45 seconds into the fight, Carini quit after getting hit by a Khelif punch and quit rather than go on fighting. It turns out that Khelif had been targeted by a Russian oligarch in charge of sanctioning amateur boxing for disqualification, and had used false biometric tests to label the Algerian boxer as a biological male. It wasn’t true, and Khelif would win gold in the weight class.
So, what does this story have to do with a field hockey team located right on the Rhode Island-Massachusetts border?
Well, a story came out this week that the team at Dighton-Rehoboth (Mass.) would be forfeiting a game against Somerset-Berkley (Mass.) because there was a boy on the roster. Not that the male player was dominating the scoring or had caused injury to an opponent. Just the mere existence of the player raised enough objections enough to make the team quit.
And we’re calling it that here. Dighton-Rehoboth is making its students quit rather than face a male player. It is borne from a situation when a D-R player deflected a penalty corner shot into her own head. And the shooter happened to be a male player from Swampscott (Mass.).
That incident led the school district to pass a rule last July which says, in part, “No student-athlete on a single-sex team shall be penalized by the District in any manner for refusing to play…against an opposing team because that team includes a member of the opposite sex.”
It is a rule which only affects this one school district, and is not a rule which is subscribed to by the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association.
And it shouldn’t; the Massachusetts Equal Rights Amendment is still in force. It guarantees equal access to athletic participation in situations where there isn’t a single-gender equivalent. This means that the way forward should be if Dighton-Rehoboth and other school districts offer boys’ field hockey on boys teams.
As far as we know, that needle hasn’t moved at all. And it’s too bad that school districts have figured out clever ways of getting people to not play a sport through forfeiture or outright bans on offending players, rather than working on participation.
Some people in this situation need to go.