There was an article this week in Newton South’s paper, The Lion’s Roar, titled “Female athletes face adversity, even at South” describing differential attitudes toward girls’ and boys’ teams at the school.
On February 12, the Newton South Athletics Instagram page congratulated the boys hockey team on their senior night, while failing to recognize the girls hockey team’s senior night, which took place on the same day.
“One of the girls on my team commented pointing out that we had a game as well. Somebody responded saying that nobody cared, which obviously we were hurt by,” Conroy said.
After Conroy’s teammate commented on the post, now-removed responses by members of the boys team highlighted the underlying misogyny present at South…
Aside from Athletic Director Patricia Gonzalez turning off the post’s comments and apologizing to the girls, the incident remained largely unaddressed.
It is sad and disturbing to see the lack of respect for female athletes in a Newton school. I hope that the athletics department and school administration will address the differences in attention to and respect for girls’ and boys’ sports teams and use this as an educational opportunity.
Kudos to the staff of The Lion’s Roar, especially reporter Grace Grabowski and editor Clare Tourtelotte. I hope a follow-up article will be able to report that constructive action has been taken to address these problematic attitudes.
Sports will stop being sexist when fans stop being sexist.
@Boatie – we’re not talking pro sports here. We’re talking high school kids. It is up to the school, especially the athletics department, to model respect and appreciation for girls’ sports.
I support Meredith’s call for action. The Boys Hockey team should take a break from competition to address these toxic attitudes and comments. I want to hear from the coach & athletic department how they are addressing the bigotry. As the parent of NSHS kids this is totally unacceptable to have in our kids’ school.
Nathan – they have taken a break. It’s the spring sports season…..hockey was over months ago.
The AD at South is not very effective. The Instagram account in general is pretty poorly done with blurry photos and mis spellings. She rarest identifies who the kids are in the photos which would be especially nice for the senior athletes on senior days, I’m sure she didn’t purposely overlook the girls which just makes you wonder why someone else doesn’t run the account or organize it better. I read part of the thread as there was a bit of talk among the kids. The boys definitely should have been more respectful. I don’t think athletics overall are valued much at South.
This reminds me of the headlines that said that the U.S. Soccer team didn’t qualify for the Olympics when, in fact, the U.S. Women’s team — winner of the last two world cup championships — has qualified for every major tournament ever.
So sorry to hear that this happened. Girls’ sports need to be treated with the same respect and funding as boys’ sports. I thought this was the case in all Newton Schools, especially at the high school level.
Some of the deleted comments were really disturbing. There should have been a more “official” public comment on this from the school. Otherwise, the girls just feel like they schools knows about it, deleted the comments (silenced) and done nothing. Do we want to be part of that? We should break the cycle.
Kudos to these reporters and the girls team for reporting it. The Lion’s Roar is an excellent read (our only local newspaper?) and recently won the Suffolk University annual communication awards for “Best news writing and general excellence in print”! Quite a big deal and honor!!
Kudos to the student reporters (who in the past broke the story about Fleishman and the plagiarism). As a parent of two teenagers (one male and one female), I am HORRIFIED that sexism still exists in Newton sports today at the high school level. While we don’t have female and male chores (everyone helps with everything), I can’t believe the male high school hockey players feel like they are more elite than the female high school hockey players. And I can’t believe that the AD closed comments.
The date of this story is April 11 and there has been NOTHING said on a higher level to South students. Does the AD and principal feel that sweeping the story under the carpet helps the situation?
@NewtonMom That’s apparently what happened. I get that it is hard to manage comments on a public platform like instagram when you are trying to balance engagement/awareness/community and comments can quickly get out of hand, as happened in this case. It started off as a simple post about a boys hockey scheduled game that omitted the girls game happening at the same time, this oversight in a post (in February) was rectified but not before many comments came out that it didn’t matter that the girls game was omitted, the “girls game is less important, etc” (I am paraphrasing the comments that got negative and ugly). The reporting highlighted here came out in the next publication of the Lions Roar paper and prior to this no public acknowledgement. To me the issue is that the administration and the AD did not and still have not addressed the sexism displayed in the situation. It was obvious that many South male students piled on disparaging the girls team. The post and comments were subsequently turned off. Instead of using this situation an opportunity to denounce this disrespect/use it as a learning opportunity, the post was simply deleted. As parents we get notices of zoom-bombings/incidents of hate, rightfully so, but in this case, nothing! In the era of #metoo, I would have thought otherwise. Has sexism been so normalized that it doesn’t warrant anything? I have 2 South high school daughters, both female athletes in other sports, and they were all talking about it at the time, and disappointed that nothing was said publicly about it. The instagram @nshsathletics, I believe, is run by the school. In general, it does a good job of showcasing of all our student athletes but in this case, it missed the mark and the opportunity to address this important issue of respect for all athletes, regardless of gender.
What Liz said. Social media is a really powerful mechanism to communicate our “brand” and values. In under resourced circumstances It is often an add on to someone’s already full time job. When not given the thoughtful time and attention it deserves, can do more harm than good.
@Brenda Noel – re “In under resourced circumstances …”: Today’s NewtonTab argues perfectly against your qualified view of cause. Page 2 powerfully portrays our Grapplers (Ggrrrrrrrrr!). Page 3 convincingly shows our Gridsmen (woof, wooof, woof). But for advertisements, nothing else is on those prime real estate pages.
No where is there mention of female athletics. Even the people cited in the Page 6 article on the MIAA are males.
From which we should conclude: Government doesn’t need more resources to be applied to improving its role in husbanding [sic] the continuing problem. Government and all of us need to walk the talk we all speak so very very well.
The NN Tigers YouTube channel has 6 of the boys ice hockey games as compared to 2 for girls ice hockey: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKG01EQH5Pu3rc0Au1Yr5szNjt3Joe-r5
Newton girls ice hockey is a combined Newton North-Newton South team, so a game or two may have been streamed by South. But for all sports, schools only stream the home games. The season was much shorter this year – looks like there were 6 home games scheduled, and 3 were cancelled. So while there are many examples that show how girls sports do not get the same support and respect that boys sports do, this (the NNHS YouTube channel) is not one of them.
Just an FYI some of the kids that commented on the Instagram post are not public school students including one boy who made some of the particularly bad comments. What occurred though still should have been addressed in some way to the South/North community not just by removing the comments. Kids need to think about what they are posting and realize how it reflects on them as well as how it makes others feel.