David and I were checking out baseball scores last night online, and my Mariners are only two games away from winning as many games as they’ve lost! Hooray! Hey, stop that laughing—when your team has been a model of mediocrity and just plain badness for the past few years, you have to celebrate the small victories.

If you’ve been reading the blog for a long time, you know that we Rices take baseball/softball very seriously. My sister did not play fastpitch softball this year, but my mom and she went to a few high school games. Mom and my grandparents also made an appearance at my dad’s annual memorial tournament, which draws men’s fastpitch teams from around the Pacific Northwest. The organizers wanted David and me to come back from Switzerland early to throw out the first pitch, but I told them that we’d save that for another year.

I was actually thinking of my dad this morning, and how generally un-sexist he was during his life. In reflecting back on the eighteen years I knew him (and I think this is something EVERY man should aspire to in relation to his daughters), I cannot recall a single instance where he made me feel that my sex was a limitation. As a little girl, we fished together. When I was older, he worked overtime so that I could attend Whitworth and travel to England with friends.

Why was this, I wonder? Well, besides the fact that Dad was just an amazing person, I benefited from two circumstances—my dad only had daughters, and we were of the Title IX era. In terms of the first, my dad didn’t have the luxury of assigning certain interests to gender roles. If he wanted to pass on his love of sports, or music, or cooking, or anything else, he had to work with what God had given him. And I say, “Praise God for that!”

And then there’s Title IX, the law passed in 1972 that prohibits schools receiving federal funding from sex discrimination. Athletics has generated the most controversy, as compliance has meant that schools have to provide a proportionally equal number of sports for males and females relative to their overall percentage of the student body.

I did look up some of those controversies online, including clarifications by the Department of Education issued in 2005 that may provide loopholes for schools not in compliance to allow continued gender disparity. You’ve got Google, and if you’re interested you can look that up.

But what I was reflecting on this morning is how equal opportunities in athletics impacted my own life. I started playing softball when I was in second grade, and played all the way up to my senior year of high school. I played basketball, too, for several years. Aside from all the benefits touted for girls participating in sports—higher self-esteem, lower engagement in risky behaviors, better grades, better health—I think in my own context that participation in sports has revolutionized relationships between fathers and daughters. As I’ve played softball myself, and watched my sister play softball year after year, I’ve seen tons of dads out there with their daughters. And they aren’t telling girls to get back in the kitchen, either. They are spending hours catching pitches, fielding ground balls, working on hitting.

My sister and I got to know our dad in those hours he devoted to us on the softball field. And in those moments, he didn’t focus on our gender—he instead imparted to us a love of the game that his father had given to him. It is significant that my sister stubbornly wouldn’t let any high school coach change the pitching style she had learned as a child in the backyard with my dad. It is significant that one of the last memories I have with Dad before his death was playing catch in the backyard.

So many people these days are critical of those fighting for women’s rights, calling our efforts “political correctness.” Yeah, it may be PC to have equal opportunities in sports for boys and girls. But you know what? That political correctness, in this case, made a huge difference in my life. After all, would my dad have bothered to teach my sister and me how to pitch if we’d had no hope of ever playing softball in school? What experiences would my sister, me, and my dad have missed out on if the opportunity hadn’t been there?

Hopefully, my daughters will also look back fondly on the day Dad taught them how to shoot a basketball. And hopefully, my sons will remember the hours they spent in the backyard with their sisters, as Mom pitched batting practice to them all.

“But take care and watch yourselves closely, so as neither to forget the things that your eyes have seen nor to let them slip from your mind all the days of your life; make them known to your children and your children’s children.” --Deuteronomy 4:9

Kelsey

Kelsey, this post sounds a lot like a post I would make about my father. Mine was a little more weighted toward basketball, but there were hours that we did softball as well.