Every year the school I teach at has an intramural soccer tournament and the teachers always field a team. This was part of the reason I ended up in Bulgaria instead of at a school in Costa Rica. I love soccer. Unfortunately, we lost our first game to some 9th graders 2-1. It was a close game, and we led most of it, but, frankly, even if you’re in shape at 25, that is not the same thing as in shape at 15. But I digress.
I showed up to the game and noticed that the 9th grade team was all boys and so was the teacher team, Uchitelli Utd (although two more females showed up later in the game). I’m certainly not intimidated by playing against boys. In fact, I never played on an all girls team until I was 24, but I knew I had to play harder than the men on the team to prove I should be there as more than an occasional sub.
I started playing soccer, or football as the rest of the world knows it, sometime in elementary school. Then I played through middle school and joined the team in high school. The boys team, since girls in my hometown ran track and only about 4 would go out for soccer every year. 4 girls and over 50 boys. These boys were divided into 3 categories. The first, and smallest, were my actual friends on the team. My neighbor, a smattering of people I’d known since elementary school, and a few others that were nicer and more secure than the average teenage boy made up this group. The largest group was the ignorers. They ignored my existence at all costs. Never spoke to me, rarely passed to me- super mature as you can see. Then there were the jerks that insulted me, mooned me, etc. The coaches were very strict on behavior, but no coach can see what’s going on all the time, especially when we ran 1.5 miles of trail before every practice.
The coaches were very nice men, and excellent coaches (they really knew soccer). However, I spent the large portion of my high school soccer career riding the bench because I was a girl. I wasn’t expecting to start varsity, but for JV, I was just as good as the boys. There was one assistant coach that would start me in games, but once he left, I was back on the sidelines, in spite of the fact that several of the boys on the team, including some in the “jerk” category, acknowledged that I was pretty good.
So, you can understand why my jaw nearly hit the floor when two men from the teacher team complimented my playing- really complimented it. What a change from the high school crowd. Of course, the teachers I play with are obviously more mature than high school boys and they are genuinely nice, but I had still fully prepared myself to mostly ride the bench until someone needed a sub solely because the amount of estrogen in my body is greater than the amount of testosterone, but that may not be the way this one goes.
So, maybe the “real world” isn’t always the same as high school (even though, ironically, I spend most of my time at a high school) and perhaps I will start to fill in this soccer ball shaped chip on my shoulder.
