Girl fight!

I am supervising the ladies football/soccer tournament every Thursday night for the next few weeks. The QF Rec Center needed a female with a good amount of football/soccer experience to supervise and somehow found out about me. And since I believe there is a dire need for more opportunities, especially sport ones, for females in this country, I said I would do it. However, I thought it would be all rainbows and unicorns since most of them have only played football/soccer in a closed gym their entire life (could you imagine never playing on a real field?). But I guess not! These girls can be fucking (sorry...) brutal and tough (I saw the worst 'hit in the face with a ball' action I have ever seen and the girl was practically unfazed)! With only 30 seconds left in the first game, a couple girls from a local Sudanese team went after some of the players from Carnegie Mellon and their supporters. It was pure bananas! I normally avoid fights, especially since most people are bigger than me, but I had to get right in the middle to stop it. Few punches and kicks were thrown, but there was a whole lot of yelling (in Arabic and thus I had no damn clue what was being said) and holding people back to avoid direct blows and it went on and on and on... I have never seen such madness at a ladies football/soccer game in my life and I have played since I was five! I had one of the CMU player I know get Security. However, the security dudes had to wait outside the gym since the girls were not covered and only female security guards were allowed in the gym and they did not do shit. So it was a mess, but eventually we got everyone to sort of calm down (I saw one of the girls over an hour later in the parking lot and she had the look of an angry bull on her face) and leave. So we will see what happens next week.

But I still had a lot of fun. It was great to be involved again in probably my favorite game to play and watch girls actually have the opportunity to move freely and have fun (and yell...they love to yell). I particularly enjoyed the maid of one of the girls (there are several students here who have personal assistants usually refered to as maids and originally from the Phillipines following them around) totally getting a kick out of the game. She was laughing, cheering and clapping. And I laughed a bit at the expense of one of the goalies from the second game who was super afraid of the ball. She would flinch every single time the ball came her direction, but she was having a lot of fun (lots of smiles). Luckily, her team was good at defense and they only ended up losing 2-0. I also got to kick the ball around during the various breaks with the refs. It felt so good to play again and the skills came right back. The refs are female players with a Qatari development program (to form a national team) and they invited me to join them at their sessions at Aspire (a fancy training facility). So we will see how it goes. A colleague of mine told me that this development might conclude with me ending up on the national team or something meaning Qatari citizenship (but I supposedly would still be able to live elsewhere in the world) and lots of gifts from the Emir. But I am not crossing my fingers. I just look forward to playing again.