I don't disagree with their plight but it does raise the question of where transgender athletes should compete.
Male-to-female athletes likely have an advantage over female athletes but a disadvantage over similarly aged males that aren't undergoing hormone treatments.
Female-to-male athletes are probably different again, probably less severe than the former case though but still creating an advantage over natural females and still at a disadvantage to male athletes.
No one likes to advocate for a special category but I think it might be the best option from a fairness perspective even if it's at odds with modern thinking on gender identity.
Your inability to name any of them has been noted.
The fact that some cunts felt your comment was worthy of [vouching] despite your vile comment history tells us all we need to know about this cess pit.
I've been told to think of trans people as always being their true gender, from birth. Which makes perfect sense to me, but then that contradicts this discussion of athletics. Clearly there will be some points in time when the trans woman athlete had a biological advantage over other women, but that doesn't mean they weren't a woman at that time too.
Tildes is more conducive to rational discussion about trans people. People are more willing to read the science and less likely to knee-jerk their ignorant hateful opinions.
Toxic is calling other people toxic for not following your emotional opinions.
It's incontestable that male-to-female trans have an unfair physical advantage over females, take the case of Fallon Fox, the MMA female trans fighter who has fractured the skull of female rivals. Having trans females fight biological females is unethical.
Except nothing you said is true. Fallon Fox has not caused more head injuries than is statistically likely for MMA. There is no actual evidence of trans women having an oversized advantage in sports and when it has been tried to be studied has had mixed results at best. Additionally despite trans people being allowed to compete in the olympics for over a decade it has been basically non existent.
Things that seem “common sense” often are far more complicated then they seem on the surface.
Should trans people partake in youth sports? Maybe sorta, with restrictions it depends. Should adult trans women be allowed to partake in sports, probably yes after sufficient time on hormones as the limited data we have says it isn’t a significant advantage, or may be a disadvantage. That said we should study and learn.
This conversation is toxic because people who don’t understand the subject matter come in and say things they don’t understand and continually insult and degrade a vulnerable minority.
I seriously don't understand why are you defending that trans-women don't have a physical advantage against women?
The article is about post-puberty trans women dominating the first places. High-performance athletes train hard, but also have an innate biological advantage that gives them that slight edge to reach the podium. Post-puberty trans women had their innate biological advantage growing male, and hormone replacement can lessen, but not fully revert that.
Some of the male to female trans gender converts have even stated it themselves that they couldn't cut it in men's sports but they can make a living in women's sports.
"We have shown that under testosterone suppression regimes typically used in clinical settings, and which comfortably exceed the requirements of sports federations for inclusion of transgender women in female sports categories by reducing testosterone levels to well below the upper tolerated limit, evidence for loss of the male performance advantage, established by testosterone at puberty and translating in elite athletes to a 10–50% performance advantage, is lacking."
How hard would it be to base the categories on basic biology, like a chromosome test? It seems the current rules are crafted specially to be bend.
It also raises the question of sport’s universality. Telling appart men and wen isn’t even controversial in most of the world. Will there be a split at the international level between countries that use sex and those that use gender for making the two categories?
1) chromosome tests are useless. They set the original blueprint of what your body is, but if that original blueprint is ignored then they mean nothing.
2) As the original comment mentioned this completely fails for trans men. They are often physically stronger due to the higher presences of testosterone in the body.
3) For trans women this often fails because once sufficient time is spent on oestrogen testosterone levels drop to often below cis female levels. This causes a drop in muscle mass and can lead to the "bigger body, smaller engine" problem. Additionally with trans youth who have earlier access to puberty blockers and then earlier access to hormones they may never have gone through a traditional "male" puberty.
> Telling appart men and wen isn’t even controversial in most of the world.
This is a very bad statement in many ways. At best this is a confirmation bias. You notice the trans people who you notice, therefore you don't have a good barometer of who is trans and who isn't unless they tell you. I know plenty of trans people who you would never be able to recognize.
Even for non-trans people this can be very deceptive and is very cultural dependent.
All things lie on a spectrum: there's no binary "was exposed to testosterone in the womb", nor is there a binary "their physiology is changed or not". See, for example, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190318151730.h..., a paper which purports to show that females who shared a womb with males tend to have some of their life outcomes pushed towards the testosterone end of the scale.
I have to correct my original comment, it's actually the presence of the Y chromosome, and consequently the reaction of androgen receptors to testosterone in the womb that causes the physiological change on the male fetus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgen_receptor#Effect_on_de...
This event early on in the embryo's development is tantamount to dividing males from females.
physical sex is not as binary as people like to believe, even excluding trans people. for instance, having a y chromosome does not necessarily mean developing a male body.
The epidemiology of that says that they're so few of those cases that it wouldn't even relate to a sports case because there wouldn't be enough of them to compete in sports unless they all got together like midgets and lived in the same place
The difference there is that female athletes do not choose to be female. A transgender person, according to your personal politics, may not choose to be transgender, but taking hormones for a sex transition therapy is a choice. Female athletes should not be punished with unfair competition for that choice of hormone therapy upon a biological male.
The biggest problem with that is probably that there aren't enough trans people at the high school athletics level to form a local league. For something like running it is maybe realistic, but for any team sports it's definitely not. Basketball feels like an example where a single dominant player could change the outcome of a league, but you would still need like 10 kids per school minimum to field a team.
I think most trans men want to compete with the men anyway though, in fact the controversy with the FtM wrestler crushing a bunch of women a few years ago was because his conservative state wouldn't let him compete with the men.
IMO the men's league should be open to anyone that can make it, so the issue is really just who should qualify for the women's league - which presumably only those that identify as women would even try to. I would think the vast majority of people agree that a trans woman that just started hormones yesterday should not be allowed to compete with women, so there would have to be some restriction beyond just identity. Figuring out the specifics is tough though.
We shouldn't separate by gender (which is irrelevant for sport performance using the "identify as" definition), but should simply use testosterone level: low, medium, high, based on highest level tested.
Any rational discussion about this topic had unfortunately lead to accusations of *phobia nearly instantly, without considering the content of the argument.
Or there are legitimate issues of transphobia surrounding this topic. This is used as a stick to beat trans people often ignoring the realities of the situation. How few trans individuals compete, how the ones that do don't generally operate at a higher level than statistically is likely. How the scientific evidence we have on the matter is limited and conflicted at best for people who are are on HRT. It additionally ignores how people on HRT often operate at lower levels than cis women do.
The issue is largely with youth not adults, yet every time the issue is brought out to attack adult trans people. Additionally this is somehow used to demonise trans people and that is then further used to limit access to puberty inhibitors which give trans youth more time to make decisions, and completely eliminate the actual problem with trans youth competing.
So the fact that this is the new favorite beating stick that transphobes use to attack trans people is probably why most people arguing this are called transphobes.
Flippant statements like yours then add to the issue because they try and dismiss the legitimate issues and nuances around this discussion and further lead to the voices of trans people being silenced, and the further attempts to restrict trans people's rights and access to health care.
I'm sure there are transphobic people that jump on these discussions, but I don't see any connection between this issue and trying to limit access to puberty blockers? If anything using puberty blockers should help diminish any hypothetical advantage trans women have in women's athletics.
So, she won, but somehow trans athletes have a huge advantage and will dominate the sport, even though there are no trans athletes dominating their sport?
This article is just recycled homophobia following the UK pattern of vicious, anti-science, transphobia. There's no substance here -- the science shows that trans athletes do not have an advantage; the stats show that trans athletes don't have an advantage. The argument isn't driven by fact, it's driven by hate.
"I won that race, and I'm grateful. But time after time, I have lost. I’ve lost four women’s state championship titles, two all-New England awards, and numerous other spots on the podium to male runners. I was bumped to third place in the 55-meter dash in 2019, behind two male runners."
I'm honestly not familiar with the literature on this issue at all, but the way you misrepresented the current article does not inspire confidence in your other claims.
> When you look at the results, it might be easy to understand why some people, like Soule, are upset. On the face of the results, it looks like two trans athletes have suddenly come along and raced into state titles and decades-old records
> Yet when you look a little deeper, there’s more to the story.
> First, Miller and Yearwood aren’t “beating everyone.”
> Yearwood finished seventh in the 200-meter. Five girls, other than Miller, beat her in that race.
> Miller, in addition to her two big wins, also ran the 400-meter and finished fourth.
> Both of these trans girls were beaten by cisgender girls at the state meet.
> The idea that they are unbeatable, or that any advantage they may experience as trans athletes is “unfair,” are undermined when you look beyond the headlines of state titles and records.
The idea people are struggling with is that some advantages are fair, while others are cheating. This is incoherent. Should we ban rich children who get private coaching from sporting competitions? Why not?
>>The idea people are struggling with is that some advantages are fair, while others are cheating
This idea is the very basis of all human competition. The fact that we can't identify exactly which things are fair and which things are not doesn't make it incoherent.
Just because someone doesn't win literally every event every time doesn't mean they don't have an unfair advantage. The trans women did slash up the recordbooks in the 55m dash, per even that source.
Different race types favor different physical attributes, the fact that they didn't win longer races doesn't say much about whether there was an advantage in the shorter dash.
How many trans women even compete in Connecticut high school track? The odds of the top two finishers on the entire state level being trans women are extremely low if they had no advantage.
I can certainly believe that trans women do not have any advantage if they began transitioning before puberty, but there are no restrictions on these details when looking at high school level athletics in most states.
It's very odd that the author chose to lead with an event which she won. If there were other events that she lost, why not tell about one of those?
Unlike bathroom panics, women's sports feels like a thing where there could actually be a "there" there. There has always been controversy of who exactly qualifies as a "woman". (The Wikipedia article is pretty horrifying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_verification_in_sports.)
With bathroom panics, it was a trivial refutation to say "Show me the incidents where men are using the new understanding to harm women". Here, there are enough instances of trans women being over-represented at the higher ranks to raise the questions of what it is we wish to accomplish with women's sports as a separate institution. If we reach a state where increasing trans representation diminishes the ability of cis women to play, that would be a genuine problem.
Instead, we get somebody saying, "Well, I should have won... and then I did." I can't figure out if this is a genuine (but poorly-expressed) gripe, or an athlete understandably grumpy about losing something some time, or anti-trans prejudice trying to masquerade as one of the other two.
I feel like there could be a real issue some day, but this isn't it. And while it's understandable that somebody might try to solve a problem before it actually becomes one, it's going to be really hard to do that sincerely if it takes the same form as prejudice.
> The argument isn't driven by fact, it's driven by hate.
Whether your claims are true or not (and I haven't looked into that myself), this assertion is worlds away from assuming good faith. I see no evidence for it in the article.
Don't forget Hanlon's Razor - "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity", though I prefer to say "ignorance" instead of "stupidity."
Everybody, including us really smart people, have a domain of ignorance - things we really don't much about. The danger arises when we do think we know a lot about the subject when we don't. This is a trait afflicting many smart people. Expertise in one domain != expertise in another.
Back to your statement. Let's not assume the argument is being driven by hate but instead is being driven by ignorance; and our ignorance is born out of a scarcity of data and our experience with boys and girls sports. Most people, myself included, assume that a boy undergoing therapy to be a girl will perform better in sports than girls - after all that's why we separated boys and girls in sports in the first place. The hypothesis is trans girls will perform better in sports.
Time and data will tell if that hypothesis is correct. Anecdotally we can point to this girl won, but we can also anecdotally point to other cases where the trans girl won. Is that statistically significant? Do we have enough data to tell? I don't know, but I don't see how we're going to find out if we don't let trans girls compete as girls.
> I don't know, but I don't see how we're going to find out if we don't let trans girls compete as girls.
My first thought is that they could be allowed to participate in programs right up to (but not yet including) actual major competitions where things like eligibility for college scholarships are determined. You shouldn't be allowed to "win State" - and receive all the potentially career altering benefits of that - when more than half the observers suspect the possibility of an unfair advantage and there's no clear scientific way to counter their suspicion.
We can collect plenty of data without messing with the entire life trajectories of kids before the results are in. I feel bad for any trans people who miss opportunities over this, but when you're pushing new frontiers you sometimes have to wait for an area to mapped before you can fully explore it.
To your point then the real discussion here is money and how we fund higher education here in the United States. Now we see the domino effect of bad social policy.
Very, very true. The more intense feelings of 'betrayal by the system' in the original article ultimately do come down to money, and could have been avoided if our system was more fair in the first place. I can't help but agree this is probably the bigger issue.
My daughter was the fast kid from her school this year at 800m running at 2:27. The fast male from her school ran it at 1:57. That is an enormous difference. Female athletes cannot fairly compete against biological males in sprints.
You do realise it's not just the hormones at the point of competition that affect your performance? Males have a totally different skeletal structure to females. Especially around the hips. The difference in bone configuration gives male runners a massive advantage.
It's probably worth mentioning that this extends to the arms as well, whereby female arms are more "twisted" meaning they do not straighten as much as males'. This affects throwing, swinging, punching, etc. You know, the types of things you do in sports :)
I believe this is an evolutionary trait to aid in carrying babies...but please someone correct me on this if this is wrong (much like the hips have evolved for child-birth)
@dang HN at the best of times is horrifically biased and awful when it comes to discussions of minority and womens rights. Often due to people who insist on playing devils advocates and disregard any voices or experiences that are counter to their own.
This article is just fuel for the fire and will only be used to attack trans people.
Can you please kill it, and make sure it stays dead? Longer term I don't know what can be done to make HN a better more inclusive place, but as it stands HN is not a welcoming place and more and more people I know who are women or minorities avoid it and actively advise avoiding it. Which makes me really sad because it was such a strong and core part of my early career 10 years ago.
Just compete with the guys. "But then I can't win a gold medal at the Olympics!" Yes, join the club. 99% of guys are also genetically excluded from the elite-elite of the any sport.
This points out the absurdity of exactly two separate sports competitions for males and females. That's old fashioned binary thinking. Get rid of separate sports for males and females.
Instead, set up a lot more levels of each sports, and let each person compete at a level that makes sense for them, varsity, JV A, JV B, JV Z, club, intramural, etc.
I'm a male, and when I entered high school, I weighed 100 pounds. There was no way I could actually play on the football team. I could try, and sit on the bench, but that's all. I picked something else I could be good at. If they had a level with kids about my size, I still wouldn't have been that good, but I could have participated, got some exercise, improved, and had fun. And that's what sports should be about. All this focus on college scholarships twists the focus of sports around the wrong way.
Get rid of all college scholarships for sports for all men and women. Throw the whole college sports complex with million dollar TV deals and ticket sales out. Bulldoze the huge college stadiums and arenas. Turn them back into simple fields.
If you're really, really good at basketball, join the Overtime league, and make your way to the pros that way. But for the 99% of high school athletes who will never make it to the pros, add more levels, so anyone can participate, and bring back fun.
I don't know about bulldozing stadiums, but I agree about moving on from old-fashioned binary thinking. People are just people and the labels and categories that we assign to them are changing. Sports should reflect this too.
67 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadMale-to-female athletes likely have an advantage over female athletes but a disadvantage over similarly aged males that aren't undergoing hormone treatments.
Female-to-male athletes are probably different again, probably less severe than the former case though but still creating an advantage over natural females and still at a disadvantage to male athletes.
No one likes to advocate for a special category but I think it might be the best option from a fairness perspective even if it's at odds with modern thinking on gender identity.
There's no evidence of this.
EDIT: If you think trans athletes have an advantage try finding some trans athlete who demonstrates this.
The fact that some cunts felt your comment was worthy of [vouching] despite your vile comment history tells us all we need to know about this cess pit.
It's incontestable that male-to-female trans have an unfair physical advantage over females, take the case of Fallon Fox, the MMA female trans fighter who has fractured the skull of female rivals. Having trans females fight biological females is unethical.
Things that seem “common sense” often are far more complicated then they seem on the surface.
Should trans people partake in youth sports? Maybe sorta, with restrictions it depends. Should adult trans women be allowed to partake in sports, probably yes after sufficient time on hormones as the limited data we have says it isn’t a significant advantage, or may be a disadvantage. That said we should study and learn.
This conversation is toxic because people who don’t understand the subject matter come in and say things they don’t understand and continually insult and degrade a vulnerable minority.
The article is about post-puberty trans women dominating the first places. High-performance athletes train hard, but also have an innate biological advantage that gives them that slight edge to reach the podium. Post-puberty trans women had their innate biological advantage growing male, and hormone replacement can lessen, but not fully revert that.
Conclusion:
"We have shown that under testosterone suppression regimes typically used in clinical settings, and which comfortably exceed the requirements of sports federations for inclusion of transgender women in female sports categories by reducing testosterone levels to well below the upper tolerated limit, evidence for loss of the male performance advantage, established by testosterone at puberty and translating in elite athletes to a 10–50% performance advantage, is lacking."
It also raises the question of sport’s universality. Telling appart men and wen isn’t even controversial in most of the world. Will there be a split at the international level between countries that use sex and those that use gender for making the two categories?
2) As the original comment mentioned this completely fails for trans men. They are often physically stronger due to the higher presences of testosterone in the body.
3) For trans women this often fails because once sufficient time is spent on oestrogen testosterone levels drop to often below cis female levels. This causes a drop in muscle mass and can lead to the "bigger body, smaller engine" problem. Additionally with trans youth who have earlier access to puberty blockers and then earlier access to hormones they may never have gone through a traditional "male" puberty.
> Telling appart men and wen isn’t even controversial in most of the world.
This is a very bad statement in many ways. At best this is a confirmation bias. You notice the trans people who you notice, therefore you don't have a good barometer of who is trans and who isn't unless they tell you. I know plenty of trans people who you would never be able to recognize.
Even for non-trans people this can be very deceptive and is very cultural dependent.
This event early on in the embryo's development is tantamount to dividing males from females.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitivit...
I think most trans men want to compete with the men anyway though, in fact the controversy with the FtM wrestler crushing a bunch of women a few years ago was because his conservative state wouldn't let him compete with the men.
IMO the men's league should be open to anyone that can make it, so the issue is really just who should qualify for the women's league - which presumably only those that identify as women would even try to. I would think the vast majority of people agree that a trans woman that just started hormones yesterday should not be allowed to compete with women, so there would have to be some restriction beyond just identity. Figuring out the specifics is tough though.
It's unfair for both parties.
But one party made a choice and should therefore bear the unfair cost of their choice.
The idea that we have to shape the world to work with everyone's choices so no one has to deal with disappointment is ridiculous.
The issue is largely with youth not adults, yet every time the issue is brought out to attack adult trans people. Additionally this is somehow used to demonise trans people and that is then further used to limit access to puberty inhibitors which give trans youth more time to make decisions, and completely eliminate the actual problem with trans youth competing.
So the fact that this is the new favorite beating stick that transphobes use to attack trans people is probably why most people arguing this are called transphobes.
Flippant statements like yours then add to the issue because they try and dismiss the legitimate issues and nuances around this discussion and further lead to the voices of trans people being silenced, and the further attempts to restrict trans people's rights and access to health care.
This article is just recycled homophobia following the UK pattern of vicious, anti-science, transphobia. There's no substance here -- the science shows that trans athletes do not have an advantage; the stats show that trans athletes don't have an advantage. The argument isn't driven by fact, it's driven by hate.
I'm honestly not familiar with the literature on this issue at all, but the way you misrepresented the current article does not inspire confidence in your other claims.
But you've accepted at face values the claims this woman is making?
https://www.outsports.com/2018/6/14/17458696/trans-athlete-c...
> When you look at the results, it might be easy to understand why some people, like Soule, are upset. On the face of the results, it looks like two trans athletes have suddenly come along and raced into state titles and decades-old records
> Yet when you look a little deeper, there’s more to the story.
> First, Miller and Yearwood aren’t “beating everyone.”
> Yearwood finished seventh in the 200-meter. Five girls, other than Miller, beat her in that race.
> Miller, in addition to her two big wins, also ran the 400-meter and finished fourth.
> Both of these trans girls were beaten by cisgender girls at the state meet.
> The idea that they are unbeatable, or that any advantage they may experience as trans athletes is “unfair,” are undermined when you look beyond the headlines of state titles and records.
The idea people are struggling with is that some advantages are fair, while others are cheating. This is incoherent. Should we ban rich children who get private coaching from sporting competitions? Why not?
This idea is the very basis of all human competition. The fact that we can't identify exactly which things are fair and which things are not doesn't make it incoherent.
Different race types favor different physical attributes, the fact that they didn't win longer races doesn't say much about whether there was an advantage in the shorter dash.
How many trans women even compete in Connecticut high school track? The odds of the top two finishers on the entire state level being trans women are extremely low if they had no advantage.
I can certainly believe that trans women do not have any advantage if they began transitioning before puberty, but there are no restrictions on these details when looking at high school level athletics in most states.
Unlike bathroom panics, women's sports feels like a thing where there could actually be a "there" there. There has always been controversy of who exactly qualifies as a "woman". (The Wikipedia article is pretty horrifying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_verification_in_sports.)
With bathroom panics, it was a trivial refutation to say "Show me the incidents where men are using the new understanding to harm women". Here, there are enough instances of trans women being over-represented at the higher ranks to raise the questions of what it is we wish to accomplish with women's sports as a separate institution. If we reach a state where increasing trans representation diminishes the ability of cis women to play, that would be a genuine problem.
Instead, we get somebody saying, "Well, I should have won... and then I did." I can't figure out if this is a genuine (but poorly-expressed) gripe, or an athlete understandably grumpy about losing something some time, or anti-trans prejudice trying to masquerade as one of the other two.
I feel like there could be a real issue some day, but this isn't it. And while it's understandable that somebody might try to solve a problem before it actually becomes one, it's going to be really hard to do that sincerely if it takes the same form as prejudice.
Whether your claims are true or not (and I haven't looked into that myself), this assertion is worlds away from assuming good faith. I see no evidence for it in the article.
Everybody, including us really smart people, have a domain of ignorance - things we really don't much about. The danger arises when we do think we know a lot about the subject when we don't. This is a trait afflicting many smart people. Expertise in one domain != expertise in another.
Back to your statement. Let's not assume the argument is being driven by hate but instead is being driven by ignorance; and our ignorance is born out of a scarcity of data and our experience with boys and girls sports. Most people, myself included, assume that a boy undergoing therapy to be a girl will perform better in sports than girls - after all that's why we separated boys and girls in sports in the first place. The hypothesis is trans girls will perform better in sports.
Time and data will tell if that hypothesis is correct. Anecdotally we can point to this girl won, but we can also anecdotally point to other cases where the trans girl won. Is that statistically significant? Do we have enough data to tell? I don't know, but I don't see how we're going to find out if we don't let trans girls compete as girls.
My first thought is that they could be allowed to participate in programs right up to (but not yet including) actual major competitions where things like eligibility for college scholarships are determined. You shouldn't be allowed to "win State" - and receive all the potentially career altering benefits of that - when more than half the observers suspect the possibility of an unfair advantage and there's no clear scientific way to counter their suspicion.
We can collect plenty of data without messing with the entire life trajectories of kids before the results are in. I feel bad for any trans people who miss opportunities over this, but when you're pushing new frontiers you sometimes have to wait for an area to mapped before you can fully explore it.
I believe this is an evolutionary trait to aid in carrying babies...but please someone correct me on this if this is wrong (much like the hips have evolved for child-birth)
This article is just fuel for the fire and will only be used to attack trans people.
Can you please kill it, and make sure it stays dead? Longer term I don't know what can be done to make HN a better more inclusive place, but as it stands HN is not a welcoming place and more and more people I know who are women or minorities avoid it and actively advise avoiding it. Which makes me really sad because it was such a strong and core part of my early career 10 years ago.
Women (1:53,28 min):
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarmila_Kratochv%C3%ADlov%C3%A...
Men (1:40,91):
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Rudisha
At the time of her world record, Kratochvílová basically looked like a man (draw your own conclusions about doping).
So I find it very hard to believe that a male record holder would drop below her record just by taking hormones.
Instead, set up a lot more levels of each sports, and let each person compete at a level that makes sense for them, varsity, JV A, JV B, JV Z, club, intramural, etc.
I'm a male, and when I entered high school, I weighed 100 pounds. There was no way I could actually play on the football team. I could try, and sit on the bench, but that's all. I picked something else I could be good at. If they had a level with kids about my size, I still wouldn't have been that good, but I could have participated, got some exercise, improved, and had fun. And that's what sports should be about. All this focus on college scholarships twists the focus of sports around the wrong way.
Get rid of all college scholarships for sports for all men and women. Throw the whole college sports complex with million dollar TV deals and ticket sales out. Bulldoze the huge college stadiums and arenas. Turn them back into simple fields.
If you're really, really good at basketball, join the Overtime league, and make your way to the pros that way. But for the 99% of high school athletes who will never make it to the pros, add more levels, so anyone can participate, and bring back fun.