Boy’s Shot at Playing Field Hockey Is Blocked by Gender Rule

Quan Vu is co-captain of the Santiago High School girls’ field hockey team, a title that goes to players who are loyal and inspirational and exhibit a team-first attitude.

Captains are also, quite often, stars of the games. Not Vu. You have to play to be considered a star, and Vu has been banned from competition because the California Interscholastic Federation Southern Section has ruled that you have to be a girl to play field hockey.

Vu, a boy, doesn’t qualify.

“Girls can play guys’ sports, like wrestling and football, but I can’t play field hockey,” the soft-spoken 17-year-old said after watching his team defeat Westminster on a recent afternoon. “It doesn’t make sense. An athlete is an athlete.”

The all-female cast championing Vu’s cause agrees. His teammates, their coach, and even girls from some opposing teams are rallying behind an appeal on Vu’s behalf.

Similar challenges by boys have been swiftly opposed by women’s rights activists as undermining efforts to foster girls’ self-esteem and equality through sports. But if Orange County’s field hockey players are any indication, such thinking may be out of date.

“It’s girl power,” said Santiago’s Rosy Pineda, who says safety isn’t an issue as long as Vu and other boys stick to the sports’ non-contact rules. “We want to show them we are as good as them and it makes us want to do better.”

Vu, slightly framed at 5 feet 5, 125 pounds, seems an unlikely trailblazer. He says he is not out for attention and doesn’t need to crash an all-girls team to find a girlfriend.

“I really like the sport,” Vu said. “It’s demanding and physical. I just want to play.”

Recently chosen Santiago’s student of the month, Vu is a member of the National Honor Society and is the Garden Grove school’s senior class treasurer. He also shows up at school each weekday morning at 5:15 to work in the cafeteria.

A Garden Grove League champion wrestler in the winter and a member of the junior varsity tennis team in the spring, Vu wanted to play a fall sport, too. He ran cross-country last year, but found it boring, and he considered himself too small for football.

“Not everyone is a football player,” said Vu, who was sporting a large cut above his left eye where a hockey ball had hit him during a recent practice.

Vu tried out after a friend told him of Coach Sarah Anderson’s campus-wide invitation to participate in field hockey, a sport that U.S. high schools traditionally offer only to girls. He immediately took to the game’s speed and challenge, never missing a practice.

Asked if being a boy gives him an advantage, Vu, in his usual soft tone, said: “An athlete has an advantage out here. Male or female.”

Are the girls intimidated by him?

“Not the varsity girls,” Vu said. “They all want a piece of me. Some of the girls are really rough.”

A petition to allow Vu to play in games was rejected recently by Commissioner James Staunton of the Southern Section, which governs sports for more than 500 high schools in Southern California.

Staunton’s decision cited a rule barring boys from playing a girls’ sport “unless opportunities in the total sports programs for boys in the school have been limited in comparison to the total sports programs for girls.”

In Orange County, most athletic programs include team sports played separately by boys and girls, such as soccer, basketball, volleyball and water polo. Boys’ football and wrestling and girls’ field hockey are the exceptions. At Santiago, there are 10 boys’ sports offered and nine girls’ sports.

Crossing of sports’ gender lines has mostly involved girls trying to play a boys’ sport. There have been several Orange County cases, for example, in which girls have successfully tried out for football or wrestling teams, with the Southern Section’s blessing.

“We’ve had girls wrestling in our league and a girl playing quarterback,” said Santiago High Principal Ginny Lombardi, who is preparing Vu’s appeal. “We’ve seen girls making a lot of progress in this area.”

Vu believes he should be given the same allowance.

“A sport is a sport,” he said. “I tried out like everyone else and made the team. At the time I thought I could play. I didn’t know it was restricted to just girls.”

Lombardi feels the sport should be open to both genders, though she understands that the Southern Section’s decision in Vu’s case was based on a rule. “But maybe,” she said, “things need to change.”

Change won’t come easily, said Katherine Darmer, an assistant law professor at Chapman University in Orange. She said the real motivation behind such guidelines is to overcome historical discrimination against girls. As a result, boys have a harder--if not impossible--burden to prove.

“Courts have really struggled with these issues,” Darmer said.

Michael Messner, a sociologist and associate professor at USC, said the debate raises questions about “where we are at right now with gender and equal opportunity and what some of our fears might be,” issues that cannot always be decided by well-meaning rules of courts. He said he believes coed play is most advantageous because it helps boys see girls as equals. But that doesn’t necessarily serve girls well.

“Doesn’t it make sense perhaps to say we allow women and girls to develop their own spaces, their own areas to develop bodily confidence? Maybe it is a threat if we start opening this up to boys and men,” he said. “It’s a sociological gray zone; it’s full of contradictions.”

Not everyone supports Vu’s efforts to play. When the issue came up during a preseason coaches meeting, some voiced concerns about whether boys’ involvement would be the death knell for a sport that struggles each year to find enough players.

“I’m happy his petition didn’t go through,” Huntington Beach Coach Pacita Vasquez said. “There are more sports out there for boys already. . . . If we allow boys to play, then soon there will be one less sport for girls.”

But Kelli Kedis, one of Vasquez’s players, said: “I’ve played against guys. It’s no big deal. I think it’s fine if they want to play with us.”

Field hockey is a cross between ice hockey and soccer, in which players use sticks to hit a ball into the opposing goal. If the Southern Section can be swayed to allow Vu to play, coaches say, there are more than a dozen boys who are ready to try out for the Southern Section’s 11 teams, which include Harvard-Westlake, Glendora and Bonita.

Advocates say safety isn’t a concern, as long as referees call fouls on players who ignore no-contact rules. And limits on how many boys can be on the field at any one time would keep the game from being taken away from the girls, they say.

“I’m all for it; my guys want to play,” Westminster Coach Dianne Pendergrass said. “There’s no body contact allowed here. It’s technique. It’s stick work. They’re not going body-to-body and pushing people over.”

The issue over boys joining girls’ field hockey teams has been simmering for the past 15 years.

* In 1986, senior Bobby Cole played five games for Huntington Beach Marina High School’s team before someone complained, and the Southern Section forced him from the team.

* In 1993, the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia unanimously overturned a decision by the lower courts, ruling that field hockey can exclude boys because it is a contact sport.

* In 1999 a Maine judge refused to lift a ban on boys participating in field hockey, concluding that the ban was needed to preserve equal athletic opportunities for girls.

As the debate stirs, even longtime advocates of all-girls play such as Newport Harbor Coach Sharon Wolfe are soul searching.

“Times are changing and we need to adjust,” Wolfe said. “I’m torn in the middle. . . . Maybe it’s time to allow boys to play.”

Oscar Rodriguez, a 6-foot, 160-pound junior, currently trains with the Santiago High School junior varsity team. He and several boys at Westminster are awaiting the outcome of Vu’s appeal.

Westminster senior Julio Mota, who trains with the field hockey team when he is not preparing to try out for boys’ basketball, said he’d like to play and he doesn’t mind the ribbing he takes from friends.

“They make comments . . . but it doesn’t bother me,” Mota said. “Field hockey isn’t for sissies. It’s hard work, and I have the bruises to prove it.”

Anderson, the Santiago coach, said anyone who witnesses Vu’s loyalty to the team would understand why the school is fighting for him. She said he is the most motivated player she has ever met, and recalled how the former cross-country runner is always the first to finish his laps, but never fails to turn back to accompany the slower runners.

“He’s not out there because he wants to be the guy that plays field hockey,” she said. “He’s not out there to prove anything. That is the hardest thing to take, to see the desire he has and to not let him play.”

Vu’s challenge comes as boys’ interest in the sport--and coed play--is rising.

In the United States, the only organized teams for men are at the club and national level, while the high school and college competitions are reserved for females. However, there are nine states where high school boys play on the girls’ teams, according to the U.S. Field Hockey Assn.

Boys’ and men’s field hockey is particularly active in California.

“California is the hotbed for male field hockey right now,” said Howard Thomas, spokesman for U.S. Field Hockey. “More than half of the men’s U.S. National team is from California.”

The sport dates back well before the ancient Olympic Games. Although the origins are unknown, 4,000-year-old drawings found in Egypt’s Nile Valley depict men playing the sport. It has been played by men in the Olympics since 1908; women’s Olympic competition didn’t begin until 1980.

Now, the boys are back.

“If we keep pushing, maybe it will happen,” Anderson said.

Vu agrees.

“I still hope I might be able to play,” Vu said.