I'm going over all of the popular evolutionary psychology theories of female sexuality and none of them seem to explain the preference for team sports participation over individual sports participation. Wrestling and MMA fighting are more masculine than team sports so the masculinity thing doesn't work. Any women out there who are turned on by guys who play team sports want to help me out here?

Why do we care if women prefer football players over golfers? I'm going to participate in whatever activity or sport I find stimulating, regardless of what faceless, nameless women say in some obscure study or survey.

What an pointless survey.

Truth is that men who play team sports usually end up being the guys ones who get fat and sit on the couch watching team sports when they get older. Just look at the guys who are the fattest: baseball players and football player.

If you want a really fit man, and one with brains take up with a runner, a tennis player, a crew member, all stay fit longer. Basketball also offers some slim fit men.

Lady's take a look a sports footage from 30-40 years ago and see how slim and fit men were then.

"I'm going to participate in any activity...I find stimulating"

This is just about the dumbest thing I've ever heard. First off, you use a rower as the one example from your personal experience? You say the guy is a jerk but has a great body? Maybe some women (and this seems to be more proven by experience) are just attracted to assholes with great bodies, and the team-sport (of which rowing hardly counts) has little to do with it. Second, you write "who wouldn't prefer an active mate, compared to a lazy one," thus implying that men who don't play organized sports are lazy. What about mountain biking, rock climbing, bowhunting, bakcpacking as examples of things that men and women could do together that may be "sporting" but are not necessarily organized sports? Or how about a man who is an active gardener and keeps in shape by doing vigorous yardwork? On the whole, I would say that women who are attracted to men who participate in team sports are the same women who waved pompoms in highschool and got too drunk at faternity parties in college. There are all kinds of men for all kinds of women, and I think the more obvious sociological conclusion is that men who play team sports tend to be the jockish, boasting, bullying types that shallow women claim to hate but usually end up sleeping with. Maybe this study should have followed up with a study on how many women were satified in their relationships with team-sports-playing men.

Either that or women just really dig mullets, which team-sports players worldwide seemed to have clung to much longer than the rest of the male population (Canadians excepted).

As long as the guy doesn't expect me to come watch him play it, I don't care what he plays.

This result is intriguing. What is the mechanism responsible for this difference? The intellectually incurious always scoff at findings that don't jibe with what they think is just, rather than bothering to think about them.

And who cares? I can't imagine any men are going to change what they enjoy doing just to, allegedly, attract more women. No guy who is really athletic or competetive in any sport will care enough.

This is particularly interesting to me because I was reading "Transforming a Rape Culture" (ed. Buchwald et al.-- published 1993, so possibly outdated) yesterday, and it contains an essay ("Fraternities and the Rape Culture," O'Sullivan) that claimed that men who played specifically team sports were among the more likely to do such things (for various reasons that are of course, gone into in more detail in the essay).

If this study and that essay are both true, there could be some interesting further study about how both results interact.

I have always been utterly turned off by men on sports teams. Since elementary school I connected them (in many ways wrongly) with behavior like your friend "Ice's".

But well into my 30s now I find men on sports teams unattractive generally. My husband is a distance road cyclist and I wouldn't have him any other way. If I were unmarried and looking for a date, I would want a cyclist or a runner or a skier, definitely. If it came to a choice between a team athlete and a couch potato, I would pick whoever reads the most.

I don't have a personal understanding of the attraction to men in team sports because I have always loved the men who write or paint or act or play music. (I should note that some of those men in my life also played football or baseball -- but it was their artistic side that attracted me.)

But I buy the cultural prominence of team sports as the explanation for many women's preference. In some environments, the football players are practically considered gods by the whole community. Isn't the captain of the football team the archetype of the ultimate high school catch?

In contrast, I have a young cousin who is a ski champ in an environment that worships skiing. He and his fellow male skiiers are wildly popular with the girls in their school, because of the cultural prominence of skiing in his community.

I used to date a soccer player when I was in school and it was fun to be part of that social circle. I don’t know if hanging out with the golf team would have been as much fun.

Sports are metaphors for combat. Take away the uniforms and replace the rackets, shoes, and balls with clubs and stones. Who wins, the teams or the individuals?

At a deep evolutionary level, it makes sense that a female is naturally more attracted to a male in a group than a loner. And it makes sense today. Who's going to be better in a corporate setting? Who's more likely to have more friends?