Girl sports pack economic punch (as backed up by one anecdote)

Just when “anecdotal stories” good enough to be treated as a solid evidence behind some presumed social trends to grace the pages of prestigious New York Times?

When it supports some noble cause, of course.

And the noble cause in this case is a promotion of girls’ sports, a favourite topic of many NTY staff writers. Understandably it’s much more pleasant and uplifting than dealing with more hard core topics like drugs or inner-city violence that mostly affects boys. Maybe this female staff writer has a younger sister. Or nieces. Or the girls sport team she belonged to when she was in high school needed some boost.

She doesn’t even bother to look for another “anecdotal evidence”, in other cities or other sports to support her claim, but is content with citing just one story from Chatanooga, TN. Girls soft ball in one obscure town in the South. And even local officials don’t have numbers to back up but has to rely on their memories or hunch.

Lest’ see it from another way. We can also draw conclusions from this (anecdotal) story that girls are generally less independent, as they need mothers, fathers, and sisters around to travel to other towns to play sports. Boys could manage all these by themselves.

In addition, girls are less serious and stoic about sports they are playing, which explains why girls sports are boring and don’t succeed as players in more senior category - remember for boys “It was eat, sleep and drink baseball.”, but for girls, its’ shopping, sightseeing and leisure activities when not in the fields. While the boys who didn’t drop some dollars on visiting town may some day be million-dollar professional baseball player, thanks to his eat-sleep-drink-baseball attitude, girls will only hope to be some mild-mannered office workers lamenting discrimination in sports – as men earn more money in sports, of course!

By the way, obviously I wasn’t the only one who noted this story…

Girls more likely to suffer concussion than boys

I don’t know why the New York Times, usually a reliable promoter of women and girls as strong, independent, stereo-type defying, trail-brazing amazons, reverted to this kind of article that would surly prompt some people to say, “I TOLD YOU SOOOOO…. Girls are too feeble and just not good for competitive sports.”

In the article, even faced with the super-obvious, the doctors chose to play dumb;

“Doctors are also uncertain as to why documented rates of concussion among high school girls are consistently higher than among boys in the same sports.”

Perhaps the doctors are the only people who cannot understand the reason, or maybe along with die-hard feminists, why women and girls suffer more concussion than men and boys while playing the same sports. I think even 10 year-old kid can understand it instinctively.

Their dumbness gets worse as they try to come up with politically-correct explanation which allow them avoid admitting the obvious physical weakness of females compared to males, and even give some credits to females for their honesty in reporting one’s own physical conditions;

The primary theory is that girls might be more honest in reporting injuries — though experts are confident that many girls, just like boys, hide injuries either because they are not aware of the risks or because they simply do not want to miss playing time.

But in the end they seemed to have realized that not mentioning even as mere “possibility” of the obvious reason that everyone else know is too damaging to their credibility;

Other rationales include the fact that girls’ neck muscles are less developed than boys’, providing less shock absorption during impact.

It is just one of the “other rationales”, of course….

Perhaps the writer at the NYT could not take the fact that attention is mostly on boys when it comes to concussions in school sports any longer, so he decided to highlight the plight of female athletes, just to “level the playing field”.. After all, we live in the Title IX world, where everything (except negative) needs to be shared equally by men and women…