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If you are thinking Brent Watkins must be some kind of a chauvinist crank looking to safeguard hockey for the males of the species, he is not, and if you are thinking he is just plum crazy, he is not that either.

What he is, is a poor old coach caught in a classic 21st century dilemma, a trap of good-intentions, theoretically gone too far, that was sprung when the SMHA divided its league into two divisions: one for girls and one co-ed.

Boys are restricted to playing in the co-ed division. Girls are free to play in either division and, for an extra $100 a season, to play in both. A girl who plays in both will practise, on average, six times a week — plus games. A boy, at best, will practise three times a week.

None of this would present a problem if the all-star team didn’t exist as the ultimate aspiration, pitting girls against the boys in a cutthroat competition for spots.

“I have great difficulty in that [the SMHA] would provide twice the amount of skill-development opportunity to a player based on gender and then make them try out for the same team,” Mr. Watkins, who was en route to Lewisporte, wrote to me in an email.

“As a coach, if I had two players that were of equal ability and then was given twice as much ice time to spend with one, I could develop that one much more significantly than the other at this age, regardless of their gender.”

‘The first time I mentioned this, people took it the wrong way and I was labelled sexist and discriminatory’

We are schooled in perceiving hockey’s gender wars as a battleground where men are typically the bad guys, an old boys club of snickering jerks who laughed when little girls decided to ditch their figure skates for hockey blades.