Practice started at 8pm on a Tuesday in April, under lights, for a group of eleven-year-olds who had school the next morning. The boys’ team, same club, same fields, practiced at 5:30. We noticed the pattern in year one and told ourselves it was a scheduling fluke. By year three, when the same 8pm slot showed up on the calendar again, it stopped looking like a fluke and started looking like a default nobody had ever questioned out loud.
This isn’t a story about anyone being unfair on purpose. The club president who built the schedule had coached boys’ lacrosse for a decade before the girls’ program existed, and when the girls’ team got added, it got added around the boys’ existing slots rather than into an equal rotation. Nobody sat down and decided girls should practice later. It just happened that way, season after season, because the schedule got copied forward without anyone checking whether it still made sense once there were two teams sharing one set of fields.
The pattern was easy to see once we actually looked at it in writing. We pulled three seasons of practice schedules off the club’s shared calendar and laid them side by side. Boys had the 5:30 to 7pm slot every single season. Girls had 7 to 8:30, later in spring when the daylight ran out. On tournament weekends, boys’ games got the earlier, cooler morning slots more often than not. None of this was written down as policy anywhere. It was just how the spreadsheet had always been filled in.
We brought data, not accusations, to the conversation. A general complaint, “it feels like girls always get the worse time,” is easy to wave off because it sounds like a feeling rather than a fact. A schedule showing three years of identical late slots is harder to dismiss. We printed the three seasons side by side and asked, at a regular board meeting, whether the club had a rotation policy for splitting good and bad slots between the two programs. The honest answer was no, there wasn’t one. That admission opened the door for a real conversation instead of a defensive one.
The ask was specific: alternate the good slot by season, not by team. We proposed that whichever program had the earlier slot one season would get the later one the next, tracked in writing so it wasn’t left to memory or habit. The board adopted something close to that by the next scheduling cycle. It wasn’t a dramatic overhaul. It was one paragraph added to the club’s operating document that hadn’t existed before.
Raising it constructively meant separating the ask from any judgment about who caused it. We didn’t say the club was sexist or that anyone had done this deliberately, because we didn’t believe that and saying it would have made the conversation about defending intentions instead of about fixing a schedule. We said the pattern existed, here’s three years of proof, and asked what a fair rotation would look like going forward. That framing let the board fix the actual problem without anyone having to admit to a motive they didn’t have.
Other parents on the girls’ team had noticed too, but nobody had said anything before us. After we raised it, three other families told us they’d noticed the same pattern for years and had assumed nothing could be done about it, or hadn’t wanted to be the family that made a fuss. That’s common with scheduling inequities in shared-facility clubs. The pattern is visible to everyone living it and invisible to whoever built the calendar, and it tends to persist until one family takes the time to document it and ask the specific question at the specific meeting where the schedule actually gets set.
The following spring, the girls’ team got the 5:30 slot for the first half of the season and the boys’ team took the later one. Nobody made a big announcement about it. The rotation just showed up in the new schedule, one line different from every year before it, because somebody finally asked the club to write down what fair would actually look like instead of assuming the old pattern was neutral just because nobody had planned it on purpose.
If you are new to the sport and still sorting out how the levels and clubs fit together, the girls lacrosse pathway is a good place to start.