Intramural Sports introduces controversial rules for coed basketball league

Stanford Intramural (IM) Sports launched its coed basketball league this January, with 95 players competing Wednesday evenings at the Arrillaga Outdoor Education and Recreation Center. However, with the league came three new rules limiting defensive plays against women, sparking dissent from members of the league. 

While the pre-existing leagues — Open Competitive A, Open Competitive B, and Open Recreational Leagues — are definitionally coed, they are dominated by male players, with less than 5% of all current members identifying as female, Josiah Riley, the assistant director of IM sports, recreation, and competitive sports, said. This statistic, as well as complaints from female players in the open leagues, led to the creation of the coed league.

“Intramural sports are not just for those who are very much in tune with sports. Intramural sports are for everybody,” Riley said. “I’m doing my best to broaden the horizons of intramural sports.”

However, the creation of this league also sparked unpopular new rules. Riley explained the three changes: a man cannot steal from or block a woman, there must always be two women on the court at all times and if a man blocks or steals from a woman, the play immediately stops and the woman’s team takes the ball out of bounds.

“I incorporated these rules to ensure that it wouldn’t get to a too crazy level,” Riley said.

When female player Plengrhambhai Kruesopon ’26 heard the rules for the first time during the captain’s huddle, she immediately asked if the teams could vote on them. The referee shut the idea down.

Later, one of the female players on the other team posed further questions to the referee: “Why is it like this? Why are we going back to the 1930s?” Still, the game went on.

“I think it’s a bit unfair. We come to play in these leagues for a challenge,” said Erica McCall ’17, former WNBA player, assistant coach for the Stanford Women’s Basketball Team and current Open Competitive A participant. “We know that we are competing against men, and the men know they are playing against women. We want to play the same level of basketball. I want the same challenge as I would want if I were to play against women.”

Despite trying to make the game more approachable for beginners, this rule change led to an uproar among players in the league who feel the rule does not allow for fair, equitable play.

“It takes the basketball out of it,” said Joshua Bowden ’26, the captain of a coed team. “It assumes that girls are worse than guys, which is obviously not true. If we had known about the rule changes beforehand, we would have just played in the normal league.”

The other three leagues that exist are technically coed but do not have these rules in place. If a woman were to play in the Open Competitive A league, she could have her shot blocked and the ball stolen without anyone else experiencing a penalty, which follows the standard rules of basketball.

“It definitely disincentivizes girls from feeling as though they are at par or at level with these guys,” said Kruesopon. “It’s just hurting everything. It’s not helping anything. It’s ruining the game of basketball.”

In the future, Riley plans to update the rules as he sees fit, using the league’s first quarter as a “tester,” he said. The current rules in place are subject to change in the Spring league based on the feedback that IM sports has received.

“It’s not always perfect. No program is perfect, no league is perfect, no sport is perfect,” Riley said. “I try to hear as much as I can from those that have complaints. I do what I can with what I am given. That’s all I’ve ever done.”

The post Intramural Sports introduces controversial rules for coed basketball league appeared first on The Stanford Daily.