In 1939 Little League was founded in Williamsport, Pennsylvania with only three teams. By the time I was playing Little League baseball in the late 1950s it was all over the country and now Little League is being sponsored all over the world. It’s a great way to foster a healthy, competitive spirit between children ages five through eighteen and in several arenas, based on age.
But back in 1959 through 1962 my Little League experience was a wonderful, exciting and rewarding competitive camaraderie between a bunch of boys. And a time for them to learn how to play baseball together and learn pitching, fielding and hitting skills from grown men who enjoyed showing boys how to play baseball and how to compete with a sense of sportsmanship.
The very notion of boys enjoying team sports under the direction of men who lent their time and effort to help boys become better youths became a topic of heated debate and contention by the time I was all grown up. It seemed that the new America, which had sprung from the bosom of the American Feminist Movement, somehow believed that boys having fun playing an organized sport were somehow depriving girls of the same age of the opportunity to play baseball.
But back in 1959 through 1962 my Little League experience was a wonderful, exciting and rewarding competitive camaraderie between a bunch of boys. And a time for them to learn how to play baseball together and learn pitching, fielding and hitting skills from grown men who enjoyed showing boys how to play baseball and how to compete with a sense of sportsmanship.
The very notion of boys enjoying team sports under the direction of men who lent their time and effort to help boys become better youths became a topic of heated debate and contention by the time I was all grown up. It seemed that the new America, which had sprung from the bosom of the American Feminist Movement, somehow believed that boys having fun playing an organized sport were somehow depriving girls of the same age of the opportunity to play baseball.
No one ever thought to form a separate Little League for girls. Instead, the new America decided to instill in the boys entrusted to its care an undeserved guilt about playing sports with just boys, making them and the men who managed their Little League teams feel that what they were doing was somehow wrong, shameful and sexist. How in the hell a ten-year-old boy back in 1960 could be guilty of sexism just by swinging a baseball bat at a ball pitched by another boy is still totally beyond my comprehension.
What was really shameful and sexist was the false sense of righteousness in an America that allowed such an ill-conceived national movement to become Little League policy. Any arbitrary decision by adults which forces boys to play with girls (and vice-versa) and to forsake children's natural tendency to enjoy the company of other children of their own gender only masquerades as an equal opportunity of any kind for anybody.
What was really shameful and sexist was the false sense of righteousness in an America that allowed such an ill-conceived national movement to become Little League policy. Any arbitrary decision by adults which forces boys to play with girls (and vice-versa) and to forsake children's natural tendency to enjoy the company of other children of their own gender only masquerades as an equal opportunity of any kind for anybody.
