At a meeting hall near turf fields in Burnaby last week, I watched a woman — teased blond hair, smart jacket — roll her eyes skyward and exhale. More than once, the shake of her head told the room she’d had just about enough.
For the fourth time in three years, players, managers and coaches from the country’s largest recreational field hockey league gathered to talk about shorts. The Vancouver Women’s Field Hockey Association (VWFHA) was asking if they’re part of a woman’s uniform or not.
Can you blame one woman for her quiet frustration? Yes, I can.
She was listening, as we all were, to a coach read a letter from a 20-something Vancouver athlete. At one point in her distinguished career she was a provincial and national team field hockey goaltender and was unable to be at the mid-week meeting because she’s studying at and playing for a top-flight university in Toronto.
In her letter, the player recounted how this clothing control predated her ever picking up a hockey stick, but when she did, she remembered both boys and girls wearing shorts. Eventually, that changed.
“After only a couple seasons, I was faced with having to wear a skirt if I wanted to continue playing the next year, so I quit,” she wrote. “I hated wearing skirts.”
Recently, wrote the athlete, “I started an eight-week treatment program for an eating disorder that I have had for the past six years. An eating disorder isn’t going to develop just because someone is uncomfortable in a skirt, but in my own experience and from hearing my fellow program members, something like that can be a serious trigger.”
Then, across the room, another slow, sky-high eye roll. Sorry if you’ve heard this one before.
This is more than empty rhetoric over the difference between a uniform with or without an inseam. Unhealthy body image is one reason girls and women stop playing sport. Sadly, for women who leave and don’t return, the exercise they didn’t get might have been one of the best ways to lift their self-esteem.
In Canada, only 19 per cent of women play organized sport — that’s less than one in every five of us — while one in every three men is active. Women and girls from low-income families are even less active than their more affluent peers, especially compared to male participation rates, according to the public health office.
When I was in primary school in the ’90s, a P.E. teacher separated us nine-year-old girls from the nine-year-old boys. When we asked why since no other classes did this, he smiled and said it protected the “delicate” girls from the, one could only imagine, throw-down violent knife fights the still-prepubescent boys pursued in their gym classes. So we staged a sit-in. I led all the girls in the protest and the next day we wore our frilliest best and sat on the sidelines. If we were mistaken as too precious to play, we were determined to show this teacher just what that looked like. We’d made our point: We called him on his patriarchal garbage. Obviously not with those words since we were in Grade 3.
This anecdote isn’t to say I am pro-skirt or pro-short. (As if that isn’t the most ridiculous sentence.) But I am for participation, 110 per cent as they say.
Any barrier to playing — that includes gendered typecasting, discrimination, sexualization and a uniform that makes an athlete unrecognizable to herself — is problematic and even damaging. Talking about looks means we’re not talking about the game, the score, the athletes.
Kaity Cooper was threatened with penalties and expulsion if she didn’t conform to the VWFHA rules and compete in a skirt. She plays on the Vancouver Jokers and is, along with other athletes, simply not comfortable playing in a skirt. There is a chance she will walk away from field hockey if she has to wear one.
The International Hockey Federation does not stipulate women wear skirts although many players identify them with the women’s game. At the highest level of the game, the rule is this: “Field players of the same team must wear uniform clothing.” Except at some specific tournaments, no language specifies women wear one thing, men another. Even in recreational field hockey, not all skirts are alike. Some are slimmer and shorter, others have pleats, some are baggy and loose — kind of like shorts. Don’t confuse the debate by asking about the hypothetical basketball players who might want to wear skirts to shoot hoops. If it’s athletic wear at the recreational level and she feels good about it, who cares when it means the player is still in the game? (Although, unlike the FIH, international basketball rules do clearly specify players competing on national teams wear specific clothing: shorts.)
For the women who choose to wear a skirt, all the power to them. Those who want to wear shorts deserve the same power. Could it be simpler?
Not for the majority of VWFHA members who are committed to the conformist status quo, the heteronormative ideal. If they say — and they do — that skirts are professional and traditional, what does that mean for a woman who doesn’t wear one? It’s worth asking if a woman in shorts is really that threatening to you and your game.
Last week, the league denied individual women the right to wear shorts by a substantial margin: 190 opposed, 51 in favour.
Even the international rules for beach volleyball are better on this issue. In that sport, women are no longer required to show butt cheeks and cleavage at the Olympic Games but can opt to cover their torsos and thighs nearly to the knee. Maybe no one chooses to do this, but it’s still her choice.
The VWFHA struck a compromise and decided no individual can wear shorts, but an entire team will be able to dress all players in shorts. It’s the uniform uniform. The league settled for incremental change by allowing teams to choose one or the other: everyone in shorts or everyone in skirts. Frankly, matching colours are still uniform, but it wasn’t up for debate. On this question, the vote count switched: 141 in favour, 80 opposed.
I applaud the women and few men who filled all the seats at a Burnaby meeting room Feb. 19 to debate their values in sport and competition. League president Victoria Bryan, who didn’t have a vote, was efficient and personable as she ran a matter-of-fact meeting that was more collaborative than it followed Robert’s Rules of Order. But in the end, the league got it wrong. The compromise might signal incremental change to some, but to others, it’s a message to conform or get out of the game.
It’s hard to imagine, but the shorts-shunners decided they are more committed to a piece of clothing with occasional pleats than they are to growing the number of girls who pick up their sport and the ranks of women who play into adulthood.
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