I’ve never been a sports person. My dad likes hockey, and I’ve attempted to watch games with him to try to understand what he sees in it. I didn’t get it; the rules, the motivations. When I was eight, my uncle took my dad, sister, and I to a Canucks game. To his dismay, I read Judy Blume’s Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself throughout more than half of the game. It was the third time I’d read it. Later, I learned that my mom had done something similar when she first met my dad’s family. They all sat down in the living room to watch a Canucks game and she pulled out a book to read instead, not knowing the level of offense she was committing. Even though I became embarrassed by my reading antics at Rogers Arena, I think my mom secretly felt proud.

I’m going to confess something here. I was enrolled in soccer at one point in my life. However, I was four or five years old so I wouldn’t consider myself to be sentient yet. I have two memories from then. 

The first is my grandmother attending a practice with me. She was supposed to gently toss the ball in an arc towards me, and I was supposed to bounce the ball back with my head. She must have misunderstood or misread the situation though, because she just threw it at my head and I fell over.

The second is actually my mother’s memory, and it truly speaks to my killer instincts when I’m forced to play a sport. My mom was supposed to play parents versus kids with me at soccer practice. Apparently I wasn’t too keen on this idea, and I insisted on holding her hand the entire game. I didn’t understand that we weren’t on the same team, no matter how much she tried to tell me, and she says that this complication made that game very hard to play.

Whenever she tells this story, I get the sense that she feels I wrecked her one chance to succeed in sports by playing on an adult team against a bunch of confused five-year-olds, who didn’t understand why their parents were being so mean to them.

On the morning of the VIU versus Capilano women’s soccer game, my parents both leave the house to go have brunch with my sister saying, “Have fun at the soccer game, Beatrix.”

I arrive at the game half an hour late. Children are running wild in brightly-coloured jerseys as I walk to the field. I decided I would go to a game to step outside of my comfort zone. Maybe I’d finally understand what all the fuss is about. 

As I watch the children rampage around on the field, I feel like something is off. I wonder if I’ve missed some kind of memo.

Do they let kids play? Do kids play first as an opening act?

I take a good look at Google Maps. I’m watching the wrong game. Oops.

I get back in my civic, plugging my phone back into the weird tape deck auxiliary cord and blasting the volume so I won’t miss the directions this time. 

I arrive at the real game thirty-five minutes late. The forecast had predicted rain but the dark clouds just sit ominously over the turf. I brought an umbrella, a raincoat, tea, a scone, a towel, and a copy of Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane. I’m ready for anything.

The first thing I notice is that I’ve seen bigger turnouts at competitive improv shows. The second thing I notice is, every time a player kicks the ball or it lands on the ground, a spray of dark-something rises from the turf.

Is turf… dirt? 

When the players finish the first game, I introduce myself to two women that are standing next to me. They’re both blonde and dressed for the weather, better than I am in my low-rise jeans. In other words, they look like they’re supposed to be here, that they not only know the rules of the game but know people who are playing it.

“Do you know any of the players?” I ask them.

“We’re friends with VIU’s coach,” says one.

“We played in 1993, back when it was Malaspina,” the other says. According to these women, back then, no one came to watch their team play, and they played on real grass.

“What is that stuff that gets kicked up when the ball lands?” I ask.

“Rubber?” one of the women answers, seemingly confused as to why I would ask a question with an answer so obvious.

Note to self: turf is rubber.

They also inform me that the turf behind us is brand new, and that the goalie in purple is VIU’s and the one with the yellow jersey is Capilano’s. The rest of the players either wear white and blue uniforms or blue and white uniforms. Which shade of blue am I supposed to be cheering for? Still feeling the sting of embarrassment from the turf question, I decide not to ask.

Instead, I ask the two women how they thought the sports world has changed for women, since they played. 

“The team has a lot more players now than they did,” one says. “There’s also more opportunities for the players now.”

I decide to wander farther along the fence. I find a gap in the spectators and claim a section of metal to lean against. I note the sound of SOS by Rihanna playing over a speaker somewhere, which feels fitting for me in this moment. 

Some guy from the VIU men’s team is playing with a ball on the turf, wearing socks but no shoes. He seems really busy though, so I don’t ask him if the loose rubber was getting stuck to the bottoms of his feet.

Suddenly, he leaves the field, the music cuts, and the players are back at it. Sometimes people on the sidelines shout hints and directions at the players, “Incoming!” and “Watch out!” and I wonder if that is allowed. Personally, it seems like backseat soccer-ing, and I may have been tempted to shout back, “I know!” if I were playing the game.

“Do you want to see a dog bow?” an older man, standing with his dog to my right, asks me.

“Yeah, absolutely,” I say.

I watch as the man tries to get his dog to stand on his hind legs and lean forward, imitating a bow. In my opinion, the dog doesn’t really seem to understand the trick, but the man gives him a treat for his effort.

“Do you know someone who’s playing?” I ask.

“My daughter,” he says, looking out to the field.

“This is the first soccer game I’ve ever attended,” I admit. He seems to find this amusing, and he’s happy to explain certain things that happen during the match. He is also quick to point out that the turf behind us is brand new and springy.

Man, people really love that new turf.

“See that girl with the orange armband?” he says, pointing to a young woman on the field. “She’s that team’s captain. And the girl with the green band is VIU’s captain. She’s my daughter.”

I sense that his motive here is less to explain an element of the game to me, and more to tell someone that his daughter is team captain. I appreciate the fatherly pride.

I feel myself getting caught up in the game by this point. I haven’t even looked at the book I had tucked in my purse. The sport seemed impossible to play. How can the players just repeatedly ram their heads into a ball flying through the air? How can they keep track of everything that was happening? How can they run so fast? How can they get knocked down and instantly get back up to keep playing?

I try to put myself in that place and I decide that if I got knocked down, I’d probably get up and say, “I don’t actually want to play anymore, this game is stupid anyways.” (I always got picked last in gym class and at recess.)

Anyways, I’m focused on the game until I glance down the fence and see one of the guy soccer players spit an immense amount of saliva onto the turf.

Yuck. If that was grass, it would just seep into the dirt. But he and I both know it’ll just sit on top of loose rubber chunks until it dries. What if one of the players kicks the ball through that? They’ll be playing with a spitty ball. I’ve seen with my own eyes that they use their foreheads regularly in this game. Yuck. Random boy spit.

This spitting display, and my train of thought, makes me feel less enthusiastic about the men’s game that will follow. Quickly after, Spit-Boy and his team disappear into the locker room to prepare to take over the turf for their game, and they pretty much fall off the radar (except for the rap music that would spill out of the doorway every time someone entered or exited the bathroom).

The man with the dog turns to me as the players pause their play and line up in a new formation. He explains that Capilano gets to take a penalty shot because something illegal happened near the net.

“Capilano is pretty much guaranteed a goal,” he says, “and they’re already winning.” I watch as the player taking the shot trots up to the ball (very casually, in my opinion) and kicks it into the top right corner of the net.

“That was impossible to stop,” I say, feeling suddenly annoyed at the unfairness of it.

I feel the need to have a snack to avoid getting angry over a soccer game, and pull my scone out of my purse. When I look up from my treat, I see the ball sailing through the sky towards my head. Years of panicked gym classes kick in and I act instinctively. With my eyes on the ball, I quickly stand and move as far from it as I possibly can, managing to run into the other spectator who is trying to catch the ball.

For the rest of the game, I feel a twinge of fear whenever the ball comes towards my area of the fence, and I jump back just in case. The man with the dog finds this hilarious. He probably thinks I’m a poor little creative writing student whose parents should have made them play soccer. He’d be (kind of) correct.

By the end, Capilano wins. I wish I could say that I’m deeply invested by this point and take the loss hard, but I’m mainly just cold, and I have to pee. I debate whether or not I should stay for the men’s game, and make up my mind when the guys come flooding out in their uniforms in shorts that are much longer than the women’s, even though the two teams are doing the exact same thing.

I know now that if I stayed, I’d only be able to focus on the shorts, wondering about sexism in sports. This is unfortunately the way my mind works; I jump from one thing to the other based on which seems more interesting in that moment. And in this case, gender equality will always be more intriguing to me than watching a game (apologies, not, to the sports fans reading this). 

I won’t speak on behalf of  how the athletes feel about their uniforms, as I don’t know that information. Maybe they chose their own shorts. However, in general, female athletes not only have to deal with lower pay, but they also have to deal with the fact that their bodies will be sexualized.

Noticing the shorts leads me to read up on sexism and sexualization in sports. There is an argument that less clothing allows more movement and speed. If that’s the deciding factor in women’s uniforms, then why don’t men wear bikini bottoms and cropped tank tops while playing handball like their female counterparts?

As I walk back to my car, I feel a bit odd about leaving the field. It seems like I was quitting something halfway through, even though I’d only gone to see the women’s teams play. I think about the players, wearing their hair in ponytails, faces determined. How they dove fearlessly to reach the ball before their opponents, yelling to their teammates to do the same. How even when faced with obstacles of sexism and objectification, they play their hardest, refusing to be cornered into the specifications the industry tries to fit them into. I think about Spit-boy disrespecting (probably unconsciously) the women playing by spitting on the ground they occupied. I’d like to see men play sports wearing the uniforms female athletes are given. Maybe then, I’d stay to watch.