Double-dutch teams have been created at 10 high schools in predominantly black New York City neighborhoods, according to Salon. Last year, the New York Times reported that the city was introducing varsity double-dutch to address the fact that in city schools only 10 percent of high school students played on sports teams, compared to more than a third in many suburban districts.

Legitimizing the sport, which many girls already participate in when they're young, may be the key to getting them to continue their involvement in sports through high school. A study last year from the Women's Sports Foundation found that inner-city girls of color have some of the lowest rates of sports participation of U.S. teens, according to Women's eNews. Sociologist Don Sabo, the organization's research director says that urban girls tend to start organized sports later and are thus more likely to drop out. He says:

"They haven't learned the fundamentals of how to balance, jump, run, how to be a team member, how to suck it up and play through being tired. They feel foolish," said Sabo ... "When was the last time you tried something you weren't good at and stayed with it for a year?"

Urban girls of color are "hit with a double whammy," says Neena Chaudhry of the National Women's Law Center. Often their communities have less access to open spaces and they face competition for scarce resources at school. Theoretically, Title IX should solve this problem, but unlike in colleges and universities, high schools are not required to report gender breakdowns by sport, resources, and funding. A study by the National Women's Law Center suggested that few urban female athletes were using Title IX to demand equal treatment.

There's a push now to require high schools to report statistics like colleges and universities do to make sure that the schools are complying to Title IX. Last month Senator Olympia Snowe reintroduced a 2004 bill to the Senate called the High School Sports Information Collection Act, which would require high schools to report the gender of student athletes and the financing of sports teams.

Advocates say that enacting Title IX compliance laws would increase sports opportunities for girls and boys across the country. While city officials hope to increase girls' participation in sports especially, the new double-dutch teams in New York are coed. The video below from the annual double dutch tournament held at the Apollo Theater in New York shows the incredible amount of athleticism that competitive double-dutch requires. Since countless studies have shown that student athletes perform better in school and have higher self-esteem, clearly girls across the country would benefit from similar programs.

Double Dutch Bust [Salon]
Double Dutch Gets Status in the Schools [The New York Times]
Girls' Sports Opportunities MIA In City Schools [Women's eNews]

Fifth-grader ZeAndre Orr, the double dutch champion, has had a rough time: he was mocked and beaten up in his Brooklyn neighborhood, and even his mother tried to dissuade him from a hobby that brought him so much negative attention. Of course, the rest is history: he persevered and triumphed. And when you consider the actual physical challenges of double dutch (and check out this video!) it's a particularly arbitrary gender division.

The story reads like a real-life Billy Elliott, the story of a young boy from a coal-mining community who defies his father and his friends to pursue his passion for ballet. Billy Elliott is now a musical on Broadway, scored by Elton John, and is winning acclaim not just for its story of unlikely triumph, but for the rotating cast of young boys who dance the lead, with a backing cast of little-girl dancers. Onstage, of course, everything is resolved neatly within a few hours: Billy wins the respect of his unemotional father and dances off into the sunset. And, oh yeah, he's not gay.

Says Cara at Feministe, "as feminists, it’s understandable that we generally focus on girls and women who break down gender barriers, rather than boys and men who do the same." But let's not be disingenuous: these boys are not beaten up just for jumping double-dutch or dancing with girls; it's naive to think that a fairy tale like Billy Elliott can make the everyday life of a young boy in a bad neighborhood much easier. In fact, one question this makes me ask is, are people pleased at the idea of barriers coming down and gender roles becoming less defined, or only to the extent that the plucky outsider triumphs over adversity? Is the specialness of the story what appeals— the cuteness factor of a fish-out-of-water — or the larger implication? Are people as tied to the idea of the "other" as the nominal idea of "equality?" Maybe it doesn't matter, and one can't exist without the other, but it's worth considering.

Where Ballet Is A Boy Thing [NY Times]
Boys Who Do Double Dutch [NY Times via Feministe]