What is coed in sports?

Description Mixed-sex sports are individual and team sports whose participants are not of a single sex. In organised sports settings, rules usually dictate an equal number of people of each sex in a team. Usually, the main purpose of these rules are to account for physiological sex differences. Wikipedia

Mixed-sex sports (also known as mixed-gender or coed sports) are individual and team sports whose participants are not of a single sex. In organised sports settings, rules usually dictate an equal number of people of each sex in a team (for example teams of one man and one woman). Usually, the main purpose of these rules are to account for physiological sex differences. Mixed-sex sports in informal settings are typically groups of neighbours, friends or family playing without regard to the sex of the participants. Mixed-sex play is also common in children's sports as before puberty and adolescence, sport-relevant sex differences affect performance far less.

There are multiple dynamics to mixed-sex sports. Where sex differences in human physiology do not play a significant role in a person's proficiency in a sport, then men and women may compete in a single open class, as in equestrian sports. When sex is a major factor in a competitor's performance, sports will typically split men and women into separate divisions, but there may be mixed-sex team variants, such as mixed doubles. In artistic judged sports, these physical differences play a key role in performances, as demonstrated in pair figure skating and acrobatic gymnastics.

Mixed-sex sport events may be organised to achieve certain social aims, such as boosting female participation in sport, as a form of exercise, or to improve social harmony between the sexes.[1]

It is uncommon in most organised sports to find individuals of different genders competing head-to-head at elite levels, principally due to physiological differences between the (adult) sexes. In sports where these differences are less linked to performance, it is standard practice for men and women to compete in mixed-sex fields. These open-class sports prove accommodating to intersex athletes, who challenge sex-defined rules of both single-sex events and mixed-sex teams with distinct male and female composition.

In equestrian sports, male and female riders compete against each other in eventing, dressage and show jumping disciplines. Female jockeys compete alongside male ones in horse racing, though they constitute a minority of jockeys overall. Beyond the human athletes, male and female horses are found in racing, with a roughly 60/40 split at the top level between colts and fillies.[2]

In snooker, the professional tour is open to men and women, although only one woman has to date competed on the tour for a full year (other women have played in individual tournaments). In addition, the separate women-only tour encourages female participation in the sport.

In croquet, three women have won the British Association Croquet Open Championship: Lily Gower in 1905, Dorothy Steel in 1925, 1933, 1935 and 1936, and Hope Rotherham in 1960. In 2018, two international Golf Croquet championships open to both sexes were won by women: Rachel Gee of England beat Pierre Beaudry to win the European Golf Croquet championship, and Hanan Rashad of Egypt beat Yasser Fathy (also from Egypt) to win the World over-50s championship.

The mixed division is a staple of Ultimate (without being the standard)—it is the only division showcased at both the 2013 and 2017 World Games. Seven-player mixed teams (4 men plus 3 women, or 4 women plus 3 men) directly compete. While most often players mark opponents of the same gender, match-ups between people of different gender are not uncommon to see. Open divisions are common in Ultimate, where sex/gender is not explicitly relevant in team composition—although at highest competitive levels male players predominate these divisions. Accordingly, although women's divisions are also common, men's are not (only appearing in settings without open divisions).

In sport shooting, the physical demands are lower relative to other sports, though fatigue and grip may be different between sexes. Research is conflicting about the influence of sex in the performance of shooters.[3] In 1966 the International Shooting Sport Federation published its open events as mixed. From 1968 to 1980, men and women competed together in Olympic shooting.[4]

In the NCAA, the main governing body of college/university sports in the US, the only sport in which men and women compete against one another directly is rifle shooting. While male and female riders compete against one another in international equestrian sports, NCAA-recognized competition is open only to women, currently as part of the NCAA Emerging Sports for Women program. The NCAA awards a combined men's and women's team championship in two sports—fencing and skiing—but all individual bouts or races involve members of the same sex, and teams field separate men's and women's squads.

In dog sled racing, male and female mushers are in direct competition. About 1/3rd of mushers in the Iditarod are female, and finishers in the top ten are proportionately split by gender.[5]

In most forms of motorsport, men and women are allowed to compete in direct competition. There are some series which are female only in an effort to promote women in motorsport, most notably W Series and Formula Women. However, these series have caught criticism for segregating female drivers as opposed to supporting them in their own campaigns.

A common form of mixed-sex event is for pairs of one male and one female.

Sports based on dancing usually have male/female pairings, such as ice dancing, pair figure skating, ballroom dancing and synchronised swimming duets. In these sports/events, the male and female participants physically work together (often to music) to jointly produce an artistic athletic performance. Similarly, taekwondo poomsae, which is performance-based, also has a mixed pair event.

Mixed doubles are events where two mixed-sex pairs directly compete (that is, all four competitors are in open play as two teams). This is particularly found in racket sports (which rarely have larger teams), including tennis, table tennis, badminton, squash and racquetball.

Pairs may also compete in turn-based games: one format (out of many) alternates the woman and man of each pair just as the competing sides alternate, so each round has four turns of individual action. Well-suited to strategy-based sports (such as mixed doubles curling, mixed golf, mixed bowling, mixed team darts) where players can beneficially undertake mental planning or assessment while waiting for their turn.[6] Separate male and female performances may also be scored then added to produce mixed team results in such sports as diving. Synchronised diving is also found in mixed-sex format. In professional wrestling, mixed tag team matches do not explicitly alternate in a turn-based manner but each wrestler only faces their opponent of the same sex (switching occurs at players' discretion).[7][8] Intergender wrestling between a man and a woman also occurs but is scripted like other professional wrestling.

In non-vehicular racing sports the physiological differences between the sexes often preclude head-to-head competition between people of different sexes at the elite level. Mixed-sex events are often held though with a relay race format.

In running, a 4 × 400 m mixed relay race was introduced at the 2017 IAAF World Relays, and added to the 2019 World Athletics Championships (details) and 2020 Summer Olympics (details). In addition, a 2 × 2 × 400 m and shuttle hurdles mixed relay races were introduced at the 2019 IAAF World Relays. The Match Europe v USA in 2019 had a mixed 200+200+400+800 m sprint medley relay.

In cross country running, a 4 × 2 km mixed relay race was added at the 2017 IAAF World Cross Country Championships.

In swimming, mixed relay races were introduced at the 2014 FINA World Swimming Championships (25 m) (4 × 50 m freestyle and medley), the 2015 World Aquatics Championships (4 × 100 m freestyle and medley), and the 2020 Summer Olympics (4 × 100 m medley). In open water swimming, mixed-gendered relays were introduced at the 2011 World Aquatics Championships (4 × 1250 m).

In triathlon, the ITU Triathlon Mixed Relay World Championships mixed relay race has been held since 2009. Also, the triathlon at the Youth Olympic Games has a mixed relay race since 2010, and the event was introduced at the 2020 Summer Olympics (details). As in standard triathlons, each triathlon competitor must do a segment of swimming, cycling and running.

In biathlon, a mixed relay race was first held at the Biathlon World Championships 2005 in Khanty-Mansiysk (4 × 6 km), and it was added to the 2014 Winter Olympics (4 × 6 km / 7.5 km).

In road cycling, the 2019 UCI Road World Championships introduced a team time trial mixed relay where first three men and then three women ride together as a national team.[9] Distances vary in road cycling. The 2019 race was 2 × 14 km.

In mountain biking, the UCI Mountain Bike World Championships has a mixed team relay race since 1999.

Mixed-sex forms of ball sports involve set numbers of each sex per team, sometimes defining the roles in the team by sex/gender (examples include korfball, Baseball5, coed softball, quidditch, dodgeball, touch/tag rugby, wheelchair handball, and wheelchair rugby, wheelchair rugby league, and Netball).

In adventure racing teams of 4 must include at least 1 member of the opposite sex. Archery also incorporates mixed-team competition (which can also be seen at the Olympic level).

In a number of countries, club underwater hockey is mixed-sex with any ratio of sex allowed. However, national teams usually compete in single sex teams.

Sports were almost never mixed in any way in ancient Greece.[10] Women were forbidden from competing in or viewing the ancient Olympic games.[note 1] They competed at the separate Heraean games, from which men were excluded.[13] Although taking place in the same stadium as the Olympic games and also every four years, it was an unrelated festival (of Hera) with fewer sport events, none of which exactly matched Olympic counterparts. Olympic winners were honoured in the Sanctuary of Zeus; Heraean winners at the Temple of Hera (where since 1936 the modern movement has lit and kept the Olympic Flame).[14]

Mixed-sex sport has a long history at the modern Olympic Games, dating back to the 1900 Summer Olympics (the first in which women participated). Two women competed against men in equestrian events,[15] the croquet competition was mixed-sex,[16] and Hélène de Pourtalès was the sole female sailor, achieving the Olympics′ first mixed-sex team champion as part of the gold medal-winning Swiss team.[17] The sole time Olympic motorboating was held (1908), Sophia Gorham took part in a mixed British team.[18]

Mixed doubles tennis was first contested in 1900 but fell off the programme after 1924 before being reintroduced in 2012.[19] Mixed doubles badminton was introduced in 1996.[20]

Pair figure skating was present at the summer games in 1908 and 1920 before continuing as a founding event at the first Winter Olympic Games.[21] Ice dancing expanded the mixed figure skating programme in 1976.[22]

Sailing at the Summer Olympics was mostly mixed-sex up to 1988 but grew increasingly divided, with no mixed sailing events being held in 2012.[23] Similarly, shooting at the Summer Olympics continued on a mixed basis in several events from 1968 to 1992, before competitors were restricted by sex.[24]

There was an increased focus on mixed-sex competition at the start of the 21st century, with new introductions including mixed biathlon relay, team figure skating, and luge mixed team relay in 2014, then Nacra 17 in 2016, and mixed doubles curling and mixed team alpine skiing in 2018. Mixed team shooting events and table tennis mixed doubles are set for inauguration at the 2020 Summer Olympics.[25][26] Mixed-sex relay events are also slated for the 2020 athletics and swimming programmes. These changes resulted from an International Olympic Committee initiative to increase women's participation towards parity with men's – the recasting of men's events as mixed-sex ones was a part of this initiative.[27]

Baseball5 will be played at the 2026 Summer Youth Olympics, and will be the first Olympic team sport involving mixed-sex teams.[28]

Because Mandelzis was a girl trying to join a boys’ sport, she had to abide by a set of “mixed gender” sport regulations that the New York State Education Department passed back in 1985. These rules, which were developed in part to protect girls from harm during competitions, required that Mandelzis submit a record of her past performance in physical-education classes, a doctor’s physical documenting her medical history, and assessments of her body type (height and weight, joint structure) and sexual maturity level (breast and pubic-hair development measured according to a medical guideline known as the Tanner Scale). Once she passed a fitness test, including a one-mile run, sprints, push-ups, and curl-ups, she sent her scores to a closed-door panel including physical-education staff, other administrators of the school’s choosing, and a consulting physician. The panel then set out to determine whether Mandelzis was, essentially, strong, developed, and athletic enough to play a contact sport with boys—even though those boys needed to prove no such thing.

Although Mandelzis’s exact experience may seem rare, it exemplifies the way many people still view sports as a perfectly reasonable venue in which to enforce exclusion on the basis of sex. School sports are typically sex-segregated, and in America some of them have even come to be seen as either traditionally for boys or traditionally for girls: Think football, wrestling, field hockey, volleyball. However, it’s becoming more common for these lines to blur, especially as Gen Zers are more likely than members of previous generations to reject a strict gender binary altogether. Maintaining this binary in youth sports reinforces the idea that boys are inherently bigger, faster, and stronger than girls in a competitive setting—a notion that’s been challenged by scientists for years.

Decades of research have shown that sex is far more complex than we may think. And though sex differences in sports show advantages for men, researchers today still don’t know how much of this to attribute to biological difference versus the lack of support provided to women athletes to reach their highest potential. “Science is increasingly showing how sex is dynamic; it has multiple aspects and also shifts; for example, social experiences can actually change levels of sex-related hormones like testosterone in our bodies in a second-to-second and month-to-month way!” Sari van Anders, the research chair in social neuroendocrinology at Queen’s University, in Ontario, told me by email. She said that this complexity means it doesn’t make sense to separate sports by sex in order to protect women athletes from getting hurt. “If safety was a concern, and there was evidence to select certain bodily characteristics to base safety cut-offs on, then you would see, say, shorter men excluded from competing with taller men, or lighter women from competing with heavier women, across sports.” We do see weight-class separation in boxing, rowing, and wrestling, yet it’s far from the norm across all sports, and isn’t typically seen as a method of integrating athletes of different sexes—though it could be. Old notions of sex as a marker of physical capability are changing, and more research is making clear that sex differences aren’t really clear at all.

Regulations like the ones Mandelzis encountered in the Bronx don’t affect girls alone. Colin Ives, who graduated from Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York, this year, “basically had a [field hockey] stick in my hand for my whole life,” he told me on Zoom. His mom, Jenny Leffler, is an English teacher and field-hockey coach at the school, so Ives grew up attending practices and games, and took to the sport. Around the world, field hockey is played mostly by men, but here in the U.S. it’s typically seen as a girls’ sport. So Ives had to go through the same New York State mixed-gender-competition rules to get on the team. He was approved by his school’s panel to play during his freshman and sophomore years (the pandemic canceled his junior season). But last year, Ives went through the process, and just days before his first league game his head of school informed Leffler that Ives was not allowed to play. Hackley had approved his petition to play, but the other private high schools that make up the Ivy Preparatory School League, which Hackley is a part of, voted to not allow Ives to play.

As with many kids who play sports in school, Ives’s teammates were his close friends, and they wanted to play together. Ives told me that the girls on his team (as well as on opposing teams) expressed support for him to play because the idea that he was “too good” to play with them felt discriminatory toward them. “It’s belittling to them to know that their own heads of school or their own athletic directors or whoever they would credit for making these decisions didn’t think that they were strong enough or had the physical capabilities to play against me,” Ives said. Just as Mandelzis told me that she could take a hit as well as the boys on her football team, Ives said the assumption that he’d be a danger to girls is an oversimplification. “There are players on teams that we play that are faster than me, that are stronger than me, that can hit the ball harder than me. So I knew that [the league’s] arguments didn’t really have any basis in that regard.” (A representative of the Ivy Preparatory School League did not respond to requests for comment.)

In recent years, the question of who can play on what team has developed into a full-blown front in the culture war, based in large part on the fear that transgender girls will unfairly take over girls’ sports because of sweeping generalizations about biological athletic advantages. As of this writing, 18 states have passed laws to ban trans girls and women from playing on certain school teams (some laws ban trans boys and men from certain teams as well). But perhaps what’s missing most from that debate is the question over why there are rigidly segregated girls’ teams and boys’ teams at all.

The insistence on separating sports teams strictly by sex is backwards, argues Michela Musto, an assistant sociology professor at the University of British Columbia who has studied the effect of the gender binary on students and young athletes. “Part of the reason why we have this belief that boys are inherently stronger than girls, and even the fact that we believe that gender is a binary, is because of sport itself, not the other way around,” she told me by phone. The strict sex segregation we’ve instilled in sports at all levels gives the impression that men and women have completely different capabilities, but in reality, she said, the relationship between sex and athletic capability is never so cut-and-dried. “There are some boys who also could get really hurt if they were competing against other boys in contact sports.” Researchers have noted for years that there may even be more diversity in athletic performance within a sex than between the sexes. One recent small study in Norway found no innate sex difference when it came to youth-soccer players’ technical skills. The researchers hypothesized that the gap they did find between girls and boys was likely due to socialization, not biology.

While the need to separate athletes by sex is still held firmly by many as a way to protect girls and women from harm, many people advocate for moving to a more integrated and inclusive approach. The Women’s Sports Foundation, founded by the tennis legend Billie Jean King, offered guidance on how girls and boys can equitably compete with and against each other: “If the skill, size and strength of any participant, female or male, compared to others playing on the team creates the potential of a hazardous environment, participation may be limited on the basis of these factors, rather than the sex of the participant.” In other words, if a girl on the football team needs to be assessed for her size and strength for safety reasons, so should all of the boys.

The panel at Riverdale ultimately approved Mandelzis’s request to play on the football team, but she felt unfairly treated and violated by the physical exams. She won’t return to the gridiron this fall, or to Riverdale. “Going through the regulations was so infuriating for me, because there were these freshman [boys] who are 100 pounds and half my size and all they had to do was sign up,” she told me by phone. “And the fact that my ability to get on the field had to be tested simply because of my gender, when I had more experience than these other people, was just very upsetting for me.” When reached for comment, a representative for Riverdale told me that the school agrees with Mandelzis about the state regulations. “We encouraged Shira to try and change New York State regulations for all young women playing sports, as we agree with her that the whole panel review system is seriously flawed, outdated, and sexist; therefore, we attempted to help connect her with elected officials and state lobbyists.” Mandelzis is, in fact, trying to overturn the regulations; she’s retained a lawyer who has made a formal request to the New York State Education Department to revoke the guidelines, citing a violation of Title IX and the equal-protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. (Department officials acknowledged receipt of the letter and said they plan to review and respond to the request.)

Mandelzis’s lawyer, Iliana Konidaris, told me that the existence of these mixed-gender-competition guidelines in New York has effects beyond the playing field. “The sports field is not … a niche issue,” she said. “It’s where a lot of students get their sense of fairness, sportsmanship, equality, culture, and confidence.” This became starkly clear to Musto, the University of British Columbia researcher, when she recently spent months observing sixth, seventh, and eighth graders at a school in California to assess how gender informs education. The gender binary’s influence on schoolkids crystallized for her when she interviewed nearly 200 students and the one subject they commonly identified as a “boys’ subject” was P.E.

But some young people seem intent on challenging the binary sports system. In 2018, according to data from the National Federation of State High School Associations, 2,404 girls played high-school tackle football, up from fewer than 1,000 in 2008. Around the country, the number of girls on wrestling teams increased to 28,447 in the 2019–20 season from just 4,975 in 2005. In 2019, Trista Blasz, a then-12-year-old wrestling phenom, was denied her request to join Lancaster High School’s junior-varsity boys’ team through the New York guidelines. According to the Washington Post, the Lancaster district medical director wrote on Blasz’s medical evaluation, “Girls don’t play boys sports in Lancaster schools.” Shortly after news of his response broke, the doctor’s contract was terminated, and Blasz was allowed to wrestle. Earlier this year, a pinfall win in a match helped earn her school a divisional title.

• Co-ed Sports Diversify a Team. A team with both genders will have a much more varied skill set.
• Co-ed Sports Encourage Mutual Respect Between the Genders. Interaction between genders in a group sport encourages friendship and mutual respect.
• Strength in Numbers.

Mixed-sex sports (also known as mixed-gender or coed sports) are individual and team sports whose participants are not of a single sex. In organised sports settings, rules usually dictate an equal number of people of each sex in a team (for example teams of one man and one woman).