As it is written, “Engage thyself not in coeducational sporting endeavors, lest thou get thine ass kicked by a gi-irl.”
Instead of playing in a championship baseball game, Paige Sultzbach and her team won’t even make it to the dugout.
A Phoenix school that was scheduled to play the 15-year-old Mesa girl and her male teammates forfeited the game rather than face a female player.
Second baseperson Sultzbach voluntarily had sat out her team’s last two games against Our Lady of Sorrows, which has a policy prohibiting co-ed sports. “It was on their field and I felt the need to respect their rules,” she said. But she wasn’t about to miss out on the state championship.
So OLoS did instead. In a statement to the press, they said:
This policy is consistent with the traditional approach of education. As a Catholic school we promote the ideal of forming and educating boys and girls separately during the adolescent years, especially in physical education.
Our school aims to instill in our boys a profound respect for women and girls. Teaching our boys to treat ladies with deference, we choose not to place them in an athletic competition where proper boundaries can be respected with difficulty.
Translation: We have not prepared our boys for the likelihood that they will someday get their asses handed to them by to a girl.
Mesa Prep remains undefeated this season and stands as state champions thanks to Our Lady of Sorrows’s forfeit. This has to stick in the craws of any of the OLoS players who would have loved to have a stab at the state championship, gi-irl on second base or not. It also has to stick in the craws of the other teams in the ACAA Western Division, who certainly would have been happy to take on Mesa Prep in OLoS’s place. But I’m guessing the craw in which it sticks the most is that of Sultzbach, who watched her team beat OLoS twice on their turf and is now deprived of the opportunity a) to spank them on neutral ground, and b) to actually compete in the state championships and enjoy victory on her terms.
“The very idea that such stereotypes are so strong, they’d actually forfeit a game simply because a girl was on the field,” [American Association of University Women Director of Public Policy Lisa] Maatz said. “Does she have cooties?”