It’s All For The Kids-

Gender,Families and
Youth Sports
MİCHAEL A. MESSNER

Berk Sezer Yılmaz

120405003
SOC382
 1. Gender, Families and Youth Sports
Messner starts by saying that he was very happy about his son’s first football coach is a
woman(Karen). Karen is a talented, athletic and knowledgeable instructor, he claims. But his
children's sports career has not been able to meet another female trainer. This has prompted
Messner to investigate why women are excluded from the American Football League and
other sports. Women could only take part in this organization as "sports mothers". As a result
of the study of the data in these leagues, it was found that women were coaching very little
amount of teams, this number was low at a tragicomic level, and glass ceiling was applied to
women clearly.
As he began more deeply to examine the annual data(mostly yearbook for high schools), he
noticed some patterns. Not only are woman coaches low in number, they tend to be placed
differently than men. Shortly, boys teams are mostly coaching women and higher-ranked
teams are isolated from women. Women are coaching mostly 10-12 years old’s teams.
According to Messner, the field called sport is a field in which gender is complex, biased and
often contradictory. As one of the most contentious areas of sports, the sports of young people
have both very important opportunities and a source of danger in terms of changing gender
relations. He tried to explain clearly how women's sport and coach systematically tried to be
left out of the field in conscious and unconscious forms. Messner has tried to show clearly
how the imbalance of the work part of the youths sport is reshaped by the actions of the
societies. The Messner’s story is aimed specifically at areas of intense concentration in areas
of change and acceptance.
Messner stated that we are not the ones who are taught us in the gender field, but that we are
the ones who make up the gender.
Separating the third and fourth parts into a "gender-sorting process", Messner examines in
detail how the spore gender divides the workforce in these parts.
In Chapter 5, he focused his scope to how the women’s and men’s beliefs and actions help to
shape a context that engenders the kids they are coaching.
In chapter 6 , He broaden his aim to consider how sex-segregation among youth sports
volunteer coaches and ‘’team moms’’ connects with families and community.

2. Looking For A Team Mom

In the second episode, the writer is collecting information and interviewing with the female
coaches that he detected in minors football league. When the author asks them how they
become coaches, mostly, they answered assistant coaching is a “pipeline” for becoming
coach. It is a very interesting phase to look for gender.
 Recruiting Dads and Moms To Help

The author making an interview with Wendy Lylte This interview shows that women in this
league are much more likely to be "team mothers". Women in the league are often pushed to
the team mate by an invisible hand. And also we can clearly understand that, the assistant
coach and team parent positions are sometimes informally set up before first team meeting.
What the author wants to say here is that "team-parenting" should be defined instead of
"team-mothering".

Gendered Language
In that chapter, the author tells a riddle like this ;
“A man is driving along in his car when he accidentally hits a boy on a bike. He gets out of
the car, looks down and sees the injured boy, and says, “Oh,God! I’ve hit my own son!” He
rushes the boy to the hospital, and in the emergency room, the doctor walks in,looks at the
boy,and exclaims: “Oh God! I can’t do surgery on this boy! He is my son!” How this is
possible?”

And the author answers also: The doctor is boy’s mother and the point of the riddle is to
illustrate the automatic assumption in the mind of the listener that doctor always implies a
man. This example is a beautiful example of the masculine in our minds. For the league we
have built on the research, even a definition of "team-parenting" plays a woman in our minds.
Even the simple and innocent-looking institution called "team parenting" explains to us how it
is "sex-segregated". Although these institutions seem innocent, according to the author, they
seal masculine molds in children's minds. The common result of the author's interviews with
many people is that they have a gender role balance defined in the minds of people and even
most of the interviewed men are able to say things like "I'm embarrassed to say that" during
the interview, and still make the definitions of the sexist workforce.

Finding a Team Mom

He says the interviews with people are very descriptive about how people's beliefs and values
influence their decisions. He says that a "gendered" language can be seen as very important in
terms of our understanding of how we play roles with females and males. The author
exemplifies a day in which team management roles are shared during a pre-season meeting
for a particular team. According to the author's point of view, the role of "team-mom" in the
head of the person is already given to a woman before the team is even gathered. The author's
main motivation is his son's sports career. This is also a part of the writer's topic in this
section since it has his research field at the same time.
Shortly the sport field is a public space that usually male coaches exerts their authority and
command.
The main assumption that book told us ; the fathers will volunteer to be assistant coaches and
mothers to be team moms. This situation creates a context that divide women and men
powerfully into “channels”. The "gendered division of labor" – all we know what it is-
causing this. When the trainer is looking for an assistant to help him, the question is directed
directly to the side where the men are intense. In a story taken by the author's book, one time
this call is left unanswered by men and the trainer has to find a woman to help him. The
woman who tells the story is involved in it and says she can help him and she has 10 year
coaching experience.

The Devaluation of women’s Invisible Labor

The author says there is a need for a very serious work force to meet the needs of a young
soccer team (nearly 300 hour per season for one player). This workforce is set voluntarily on
many of the teams the author works on. When we look at the social status of these women and
the professions of their husbands, it is an interesting picture. Most women are upper-middle
class lawyers, managers, physicists. Another important observation of the author is; most of
the women working voluntarily in the sports team also work in another voluntary service. In
short, the author explains how the "sex-category working process" works in this section.
While doing all the "team-parenting" work near voluntary women, volunteer men are often in
the "coaching" part. In short, people’s gendered sense of identity, their informal gendered
interactions and language, the gendered divisions of labor in their organizations, and their
commonly held beliefs about gender and families together fuel a tremendous inertia that tends
mostly to make this profoundly social sex-category sorting process appear to be natural.

3. We Don’t Like Chick Coaches

In this section, the author mentions that the sport is seen as a "tool for the eradication" beyond
the distribution of women and men in the field of sports. It determines that the right
competition has been advocated as more manly. In this section, the author mentions that the
sport is seen as a "tool for the eradication" beyond the distribution of women and men in the
field of sports. It determines that the right competition has been advocated as more manly. It
is determined that the body is quickly perceived as femininity, lack of gentleness or hardness,
femininity. While the male coaches never make any effort to stay in their positions, women
have to struggle to survive where they are. In contrast to woman coaches’ individualized
strategies for survival as tokens, these collective strategies by women coaches can lead to
structural changes in youth sport organizations.
 4. You Don’t Have To Be a Drill Sergant

The author says there ; Although the vast majority of coaches are men, they don’t share
equally in the power and public status of coaching. In fact, among the men who coach youth
sports there is a hierarchy that is expressed in two dimensions. First, certain types of men are
selected out of coaching by what the author calls “gender-sorting system”

Second, this gender sorting process reflects and re-shapes and inner circle of men who set the
tone, run the main show, and make other man feel they’re outsiders.

Another thing the author found is that as the age group of the instructor progresses, the degree
of masculinity is expected to progress to the same extent. That is the most striking fact about
that chapter.

5. They’re Different - Engendering the kids

In that chapter the author talks about the sport and young sport common masculined actions.
He gives lots of examples about that situation. Shortly he supports his first five chapter’s main
ideas.
In this section, in addition, the author tells a long story that a girl can do every sport a child
can do in the same qualities.

6. It’s a Safe and Fun Place for The Kids

In his final chapter, he will broaden the scope of his analysis to examin how these gendered
processes and beliefs within youth sports connect with people’s lives in workplaces, families,
and in the community. He will argue that soft essentialism- especially the idea that women
can choose how they want to straddle careers- is part of a historical moment of class-based
family formation, just as hard essentialism was during the middle decades of twentieth
century.