Going Isn’t Easy When Girls Join Boys on Field : High school athletics: Mixing of genders in sports can be tough on both sexes.

After a boys’ varsity water polo game last fall, an admirer from the rival school asked Magnolia starter Dawn Sanchez out on a date. That someone turned out to be the goalie Sanchez had scored twice against half an hour earlier.

Magnolia went on to win the Orange League title, and Sanchez was later named second-team all-league. The date never took place.

Who-likes-who is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to issues revolving around athletic gender-blending.

The presence of girls on boys’ team has prompted an outpouring of emotion from coaches, parents and athletes. Everyone but the school mascot seems to have an opinion on the subject.

Legally, the Southern Section doesn’t have much to say because the guidelines are clear. Article 2, Rule 200 of the section’s Blue Book under General Provisions of Eligibility Requirements covers girls playing on boys’ teams:

“Whenever the school provides only a team or teams for boys in a particular sport, girls are permitted to qualify for the student team(s).”

“The rules are simple,” said Tom Byrnes, CIF state commissioner. “Girls have the right in certain sports, and that’s that.”

Topics of concern range from minor to major and hit everything in between. Where the girls change clothes is certainly a petty question compared to concerns--in contact sports--about keeping girls out of harm’s way, especially in instances where an opponent wants to use her for target practice.

When Sam White told her aunt, Margaret Panting, that she wanted to try out for the Brethren Christian junior varsity football team, Panting was skeptical.

“At first her uncle and I said, ‘Uh, OK.’ Then we finally agreed. It didn’t take much convincing because we thought if she really wanted to do it, we should let her do it. She had to make it through Hell Week like everyone else.”

When Panting and her husband attended White’s games, naturally, they worried.

“But I would have been worried if it was my nephew out there,” she said. “I would be cringing if it was a boy or a girl underneath the pile. It really didn’t matter.”

Magnolia water polo Coach Grafton Weiss said when a girl turns out for the team, he makes sure her parents know what their daughter is getting into.

“Usually a girl wants to come out and the parents say it’s too rough,” he said. “If she does decide to go out and makes the team, the parent doesn’t come looking for me because they understand (the risks) coming in. If they don’t want her to play, she’ll usually end up taking stats.”

But the physical danger can be greater for the girls in contact sports when they are physically mismatched. Players have noticed that some teams make it a point to go after the girls.

In a nonleague game against El Cajon Christian, Brethren Christian junior varsity football Coach Dave Posthuma exchanged words with El Cajon’s coach. Posthuma said he believed El Cajon was purposely hounding Denise Hansen, who was on the kickoff-return team.

“They kept kicking it to her,” team captain Paul Stites recalled. “After they hit her, some of the guys knew she was a girl and I’d hear them say, ‘Kick it to No. 89.’ I was afraid of them hurting (White or Hansen).”

Posthuma tried to play White (5-0) and Hansen (4-10) at positions where their size wouldn’t be a detriment.

“My biggest concern was not to overmatch them,” he said. “I didn’t want big massive bodies tackling them.”

Four games into the season, Hansen blew out her knee during a practice drill, when a teammate fell on her knee. She missed basketball season and is waiting to be cleared by her doctor to see if she can finish the softball season.

Girls have been criticized, supported, ridiculed and praised for playing with the boys.

So why do it?

Whittier Christian pitcher Ila Borders loves baseball and has no desire to play softball.

Woodbridge wrestler Janet Gomez originally tried to play football, but decided with her wrestling background--her uncle was a two-time State champion--it would make more sense to hit the mats.

“I was the first girl in Orange County to wrestle on a boys’ team,” Gomez said. “I’ve definitely opened a lot of doors for a lot of girls. Girls are always coming up to me saying since I did it, they’ll try it.”

Posthuma made it a point to meet specially with White and Hansen and find out why they wanted to play football.

“I’m still not sure why they wanted to play, other than they just wanted to,” he said.

Hansen and White, both sophomores, made a pact in eighth grade to give football a try and wanted to go through with it.

Neither will be suiting up for spring drills; they won’t be returning to the football team this fall. Though they enjoyed their experience, they’d been there, done that, and decided they’d rather work to earn money.

Gomez might have been able to pursue her wrestling; Cal State Fullerton sent her a letter of inquiry about competing for the Titans. But her dream is to be a lawyer, and she wants to concentrate on her studies.

Borders, on the other hand, sees a future in the major leagues. She realizes it’s a far-off dream, but believes it’s attainable.

“I hope I can keep progressing and make my major goal, which is to make it to the professional leagues,” said Borders, who will pitch for Southern California College’s baseball team next year. “If I work hard, with all my heart, I believe I can do it.

“If I learn more and keep improving, I can keep going up the ladder. I have to live and breath it. Sure guys are bigger and stronger, but you also have to know how to pitch. And I know how to pitch.”

Borders is 5-3 this season, with 47 strikeouts in 41 innings.

But not everyone who has been pitched the proposition of girls playing on boys’ teams has caught on. Parents, the girls will tell you, say the darndest things.

“I’ve had some mothers say some weird things to me,” said Gomez, who wrestled at the 103-pound and 112-pound classes at Woodbridge.

In sports like baseball, football, water polo and wrestling, where it is non-traditional for girls to play cheek-to-cheek with the boys, the issue of physical contact can get sticky.

Said Gomez: “I had the parent of one guy I wrestled come up to me before the match and said she didn’t want me to wrestle her son because she was afraid he’d become sexually aroused.”

Normally, the concerns center around awkward holds in wrestling and water polo. Sanchez said there is one offensive move in water polo, where it is common to put your hand above the chest of an opponent in a blocking motion. Guys hesitate to use the move on her.

“They don’t want to touch me,” she said. “They’re afraid their arm is going to slip. But I’m not even thinking about it, I’m concentrating on the game. They’re apologizing and I’m ready to take it to them.”

Sometimes when action heats up, an opponent’s defensive instincts take over.

“That does happen, but in CIF, you don’t let that worry you,” said Magnolia’s Mustafa Hassan, one of Sanchez’s teammates. “It does get uncomfortable sometimes, but she knows if someone touches her, it’s an accident.”

Sanchez vividly remembered one confrontation during a game, where her swimsuit was ripped off from her shoulders to her waist.

“Me and this guy were at each other the whole game,” she said. “He was behind me, I kicked him really hard, he swam over me and ripped off my straps.”

Sanchez called a timeout, swam to the side of the pool and had a teammate help her fix her suit.

Weiss, who had four girls on his varsity team at Magnolia in 1991, said the girls protect each other from boys who try to take advantage of them. Troublemakers are identified and after one incident, it doesn’t happen again.

“The girls take care of themselves,” Weiss said. “If a girl was having a problem, they’d (the other girls on the team) pull her aside and tell her how to deal with it. With Dawn, you didn’t do anything to her twice. There are always the guys who grab and pinch, but she took care of it.”

Boys sometimes feel pressure occupying the same playing field as the girls. Stites said a Brethren Christian football player quit when one of the girls tackled him.

“Men generally have difficulty competing with women,” said Dr. Richard Lister, a clinical sports psychologist based in Costa Mesa. “The average man doesn’t know how to deal with it.”

Said Sanchez: “They try harder because they don’t want to look dumb.”

Pacific Shores outfielder Charity Chavez--who competes for a school that doesn’t field a softball team--said once a girl gets a hit, the teammates of the opposing team’s pitcher won’t let him live it down.

“The guy gets razzed,” she said. “Sometimes when you’re up at the plate, pitchers look over at me and laugh. They’ll pitch me right in the strike zone, thinking I can’t hit, and I’ll crack a double.”

Pride goes both ways.

In the movie “A League of Their Own,” Tom Hanks’ character, Jimmy Dugan, manager of the Rockford Peaches girls’ professional baseball team, scolded one of his players: “There’s no crying in baseball.”

Today’s girls won’t hear of it, and no coach or player has reported any unusual teary episodes.

Hassan said there there are only minor character differences between girl and boy athletes. “One thing I do notice,” he said, “is the girls sometimes tend to whine.”

But not in defeat, at least no more than the guys.

“They don’t handle it any differently,” Pacific Shores Coach Rich Zanelli said. “The girls are trying so hard not to be different, to blend in. No one’s done cartwheels yet.”

Weiss has noticed that his girl water polo players tend to let outside distractions affect their play more than the boys, but a loss, is a loss, is a loss. Boys aren’t immune to feelings of failure when the scoreboard turns on them.

“I’ve seen girls cry after a loss, but I’ve seen guys cry after a loss, too,” Weiss said.

Most of the girls interviewed have competed on girls’ and boys’ teams and prefer the boys’ training and competition. They generally agreed that the boys are more disciplined and take a more serious approach to the game.

Some even suggested the experience of playing on a boys’ team has more long-term advantages.

“The guys take it more seriously,” Chavez said. “Guys are completely different on the field. They’re more competitive. They’re always working their hardest. Girls can take it seriously, but not as much.”

Sanchez has played varsity girls’ basketball for three seasons at Pacific Shores and sees a striking difference.

“If a guy screws up and the whole team has to do 50 or 100 pushups, no one complains or it (the number of pushups) goes up,” she said. “In basketball, if a coach says do five pushups, the girls whine and cry and their mothers would call the coach and say (the coach) was working them too hard.”

The girls generally found the boys to be more committed to athletics, and found they matured faster because of their experiences on boys’ teams.

“I don’t know if it was just the summer between being 15 and turning 16, but she did grow up,” Panting said of her niece, Hansen. “The (football) training was harder than anything she’s ever done. The discipline was incredible.”

The experience, so incredible for the girls, can also be meaningful for coaches and boys who expected nothing but headaches.

“I was probably a little skeptical in the beginning, but I found out that girls can do it,” said Brethren Christian’s Posthuma. “They can do anything we ask of the guys. We weren’t too sure in the beginning, but Denise and Samantha did it, no questions asked. (White and Hansen) were fierce competitors, and that took them all the way.”

Not that the opportunity is ever handed to them. Traditional views of girls and boys as well as built-in factors contribute to making it harder for girls to succeed on a boys’ team.

In sports where size is a consideration, coaches tend to favor a bigger player when the talent levels are the same.

“That’s a tough call,” said Magnolia’s Weiss. “I think if I’m deciding between two skill levels and someone is 5-2 and the other one is 6-2, I’m going to automatically think the bigger person is better. So yes, (girls) probably have to be better.”

And no matter how often coaches and the boys insist they are one big happy family and the girls are given no special consideration, girls can’t always be treated as one of the guys.

“Just because (girls) are on the team, that doesn’t make them a guy,” Pacific Shores’ Zanelli said. “The boys are mature enough to hold their tongues and respect them. They won’t talk about certain things just because (the girls) are baseball players.”

Girls have played baseball at Pacific Shores for three years, but it took some time for the boys to see them as equals.

“The first year, it was the old third-grade cooties thing,” Zanelli said. ‘The old, ‘I’m not playing on a team with girls.’ ”

Several boys, however, never suffered from cooties or have recovered.

Gomez has had a boyfriend all four years she has wrestled for Woodbridge’s varsity, but that didn’t stop teammates from developing innocent crushes, she said.

Pacific Shores utility player Katie Webb dates junior John Dodge and sees no problem with the shortstop as her sweetheart. “It’s not like we get in fights or anything,” she said.

Teen-age romances are bound to bloom when girls and boys mix in athletics. Dr. Lister believes male athletes might even be more attracted to female counterparts.

“I think, generally, the guys would find the girl on the team more attractive because she can do something. . . .,” he said. “There’s more chance of a relationship developing between teammates because of the proximity factor. They’re standing next to each other, listening to instructions from a coach, and they’re doing it together.”

* BARRIER BROKEN: A Fountain Valley High girl convinced the CIF to allow her to compete in the pole vault. C6.