Playing sports without a team
The difficulty in staying apolitical in a super politicized world.
On the cold Christmas day of 1914, German and British soldiers agreed to hang up their rifles and replace their army boots with soccer shoes. Through sport, despite being surrounded by piles of dead bodies that lay frozen in the mud of No Man’s Land, soldiers on both sides experienced normalcy once again, if only for a moment. As one German soldier wrote of his experience, “[it] managed to bring mortal enemies together as friends for a time.”
Sports have been, and always should be, the great unifier. Look no further than the World Cup, where billions of people tune in to support their nation. Regardless of who you are or what you believe, for four weeks of soccer, everyone within a country unites under the same flag.
And yet, the unifying power of sports is under attack. The weaponization of sports as a political tool threatens to create a partisan framework for basic athletic competition.
On February 5, 2025, in a room full of smiling girls, U.S. President Donald Trump signed his executive order banning transgender athletes from women’s sports. His actions marked the beginning of a social reorientation he had long promised throughout his campaign.
Officially registered as Executive Order 14201, the order threatens to revoke all federal funding from any elementary, secondary, and post-secondary institution that allows transgender athletes to play on girls’ teams. It cites Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 as the basis for its legitimacy, claiming it must create new regulations to uphold the Act’s mandate to provide “equal athletic opportunity for members of both sexes.”
The implications of President Trump’s new executive order remain to be seen. Charlie Baker, President of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), said that his association would comply, and even praised the new policy as a “clear, national standard.”
Contrarily, the California Interscholastic Federation, the governing body for high-school athletics within the state, stated that it would continue allowing transgender athletes to compete within its borders.
This is not to say that sports have never been politicized. The 1972 Summit Series between Canada and the Soviet Union was more of a battle between democracy and communism than it was a hockey game. Muhammad Ali’s refusal to serve overseas in the Vietnam War created its own political tidal wave during the Civil Rights Movement. Even in their World Championship game, American Bobby Fischer and Russian Boris Spassky were just two pawns in the much larger chess game that was the Cold War.
The greatest shame, however, is when policymakers divide a nation amongst itself and utilize sports to do so. Earlier this year, House Republicans passed the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which again used Title IX to support its claim, and mandated the determination of an athlete’s sex solely based on reproductive biology and genetics at birth. The bill was blocked in the Senate, with a party-line vote failing to give it the support needed to move forward. And while party line votes aren’t uncommon, incidents of total disconnect between the left and right—the widening chasm between ideologies—tare growing more frequent.
Donald Trump, though the most recent culprit, is certainly not the first. Lawmakers on either side of the aisle have repeatedly used sports and science as grounds for pushing their own political agenda. Under the Biden administration, a 2021 executive order meant that the protections given to female student athletes through Title IX would also apply to transgender student athletes at the high-school, collegiate, and professional levels.
In doing this, governments forced everyday athletes to pick a side. Being open, or closed for that matter, on one specific policy meant they were aligning themselves with a political party. Regardless of one’s economic rationale or views on other social issues, the opinion on this specific policy was, in society’s eyes, enough to place a party label on an athlete.
The human desire for athletic competition, which should ideally serve as a unifying force that transcends political, cultural, and social divides, has somehow squeezed its way into contemporary political discourse. And so, while it’s fair to say global cooperation has improved significantly since WWI, the impulse of an entire battalion to drop their political allegiance for a game of soccer leaves something to strive towards.
Sports & Health Editor (Volume 51) — Joseph is a recent graduate from UTM, having double-majored in Professional Writing & Communication and Political Science. During his time at UTM, he played on the men’s hockey and soccer teams and was actively involved in the campus’ sports community. Joseph is a strong advocate for a healthy lifestyle, and hopes that as Sports & Health Editor he can encourage students to get involved in campus sports and activities.