In the battle of the sexes regarding high school sports, the Maine Principals’ Association is correct in trying to keep girls’ field hockey in no-man’s land. Correct, but too late.

Two weeks ago, the Maine Human Rights Commission ruled in favor of Portland high-schooler Jeremy Ellis, saying the MPA’s ban on boys playing field hockey violates state law. This week, the MPA, which oversees interscholastic sports, filed suit, asking the court to uphold its regulation.

Boys are bigger, stronger, faster, says the MPA. Boys soon will dominate the sport, driving girls off the field and onto the bench. There will be a domino effect, with the fall of other girls-only sports inevitable.

Sadly, that’s probably so. Sadder still is that the MPA’s own inconsistency is a contributing factor.

Just last year, the situation was the same, only the sex and the sport were different. A small group of girls wanted on boys-only wrestling teams. The Human Rights Commission said it should be so. The MPA did not object, it immediately informed its member schools that the wrestling roster, like football and ice hockey, must be gender-blind, determined solely by athletic ability. Those few girls were hailed as brave pioneers, exerting their rights and venturing into territory where no young Maine woman had gone before.

How unfair it is, then, that Jeremy Ellis is portrayed as an interloper. He, too, is exerting his rights. He, too, is a brave pioneer.

Boys and girls are not the same. Boys and girls deserve equal opportunity to participate in athletics–equal funding, an equal number of sports offered. The problem here is that the drive for equal opportunity is being replaced by the drive for sameness, and it’s doomed to fail.

At the time of the commission hearing, Ellis was the only boy in Maine with a declared interest in field hockey. Today, there are five. As soon as boys, now unfamiliar with the game but familiar with their rights, figure out that it’s fun to run around with abandon while hitting a ball with a stick, they will begin to dominate. Proponents of the Ellis decision say in time enough boys willl take up the sport to form their own teams. That is of little comfort to today’s high school girl who does not have the time to wait for that glorious day.

Next on the hit list surely will be girls-only softball. Boys already know baseball, and they know their rights, so the learning curve will be short. Girls who should be out making a hard slide into third will be riding the pine.

This slippiery slope of exerting rights could be steep and fast. Does not the gifted girl, insufficiently challenged by girls’ basketball, have the right to play hoops with the boys? Doesn’t the boy, not quite good enough to make the boys’ team, have the right to play with the girls?

In short, the day very well may come when there are no girls’ teams or boys’ teams. Just teams, just for a school’s biggest, strongest, fastest athletes. In short, girls may have won the theoretical opportunity to play any sport they choose but lost the real opportunity to play any at all.

With years to correct inequalities, it’s unfortunate that schools have not done more to boost girls’ athletics. It’s unfortunate that civics classes apparently do not teach that the full-tilt exercise of one person’s rights often leads to the abridgement of another’s. It’s unfortunate that litigation is not a varsity sport. Everybody could letter.