Girls Can’t Play Soccer

For most people, moving in the middle of the school year isn’t easy. Jess, though… she took it all completely in stride. She has always been one to “just keep swimming.”

As soon as we knew we were moving, we did our best to make sure the girls understood why we were leaving. It wasn’t just something that we wanted; they needed to know that God was sending us. There was a real purpose to it… not just for Ben and I, but for the girls, too. They just had to find out what it was. For Jess, that was enough.

The day I dropped her off at her new school, I tried to look and feel as brave as she was. She had complete confidence that God had sent us here and had something important for her to do. She was ready to go do it!

There were lots of challenges she faced, right from the start. For one thing, Jess sticks out in a pretty major way. As one of the older students, and with height in her DNA, she is about a head taller than most of her classmates. And she is the only light-skinned kid that I’ve seen in her whole school.

For another thing, we put her in a dual-immersion Spanish class. We thought it would be great for her, for a number of reasons… Ben and I both speak Spanish, my mom and grandma are native Spanish speakers, and it’s just a really useful language in life. But learning a new language is hard, especially in an immersion environment. It’s the best way to learn a new language, but it’s not easy. It didn’t help that most of her class are native Spanish speakers. Every day she would go to class and not know what anyone was saying.

That didn’t bother her as much as the bullying she received from her table mate. He would try to intimidate her, call her names, and push or hit her. Thankfully we were able to get the teacher to give her someone new to sit with.

What do you mean girls can’t play soccer?!

Then there was the issue of making new friends. Recess was tough because she didn’t know anyone yet, and there were a lot of her classmates that couldn’t understand her, or she them. It took a couple weeks for her to remember her classmates names. But she remembered why she was there, and kept trying to do her best to figure out what God wanted from her.

One recess, Jess saw a girl from her class sitting on the side, crying. Jess went over and asked what was wrong. This little girl- we’ll call her Mena- told Jess that she was crying because the boys wouldn’t let her play soccer. “Girls,” they said, “…can’t play soccer.”

Oh boy… You don’t tell my baby that she can’t do something, especially not when it’s because she’s a girl. Her daddy taught her how tackle when she was just big enough to walk; she’d grown up watching football and playing soccer and doing karate.

She drew in a deep breath and said, “What do you mean girls can’t play soccer?! I played soccer in Utah and I was the best player on my team!” Pounding her fist in her other hand, she added, “You go over there and give them a taste of their own medicine!”

Jess’s fiery speech apparently had the desired impact, because when she was done, Mena marched over to stand up to the boys, and said, “Girls can play soccer too!” Surprised at her confidence, the boys muttered, “Fine. You can play.” Relishing the moment, Mena responded, “I don’t really want to play soccer right now. But I could if I wanted to! I’d rather play with my new friend.” And she skipped off to play with Jess.

“I’ll always remember you. You changed my life.”

Mena later told Jess, “I’ll always remember you. You changed my life.” And to be honest… I think she really did. She taught her friend to not allow people to put limitations on her. She taught her to stand up for herself. She taught her that girls can play soccer, too.

After that, Jess and Mena began to play soccer with the boys at recess. And I’d like to tell you that that was the end of the issues… but unfortunately, it didn’t stop there. They were playing… but the boys never passed them the ball. I guess they hoped they’d stop playing if they never got a chance to kick it. That didn’t stop Jess. She was as fast or faster than they were, and with her size, she was just as strong; she found opportunities to get the ball, and she made sure to kick it to her friend.

After a couple days, apparently the boys had had enough. After recess was over, they surrounded the two. And while the recess monitors were busy herding the other children into their lines, the boys would try to push or hit them, and tell them that girls didn’t belong on the soccer field.

Even then, Jess wasn’t intimidated. She did her best “karate moves” to keep the boys from hurting her and Mena; she was convinced that she could do flips over them while simultaneously blocking six punches (we had to convince her later that this was not the best move in that particular situation). Apparently they thought her attempts at karate were funny, so they tried to hit her more just to see her funny moves. And when they were done, they told the girls, “If you keep playing with us, we will keep doing this, every single time.”

One day, there were too many boys for her to deal with on her own; she felt like she needed to get the grownups involved, so she told the recess monitors what was going on. To her dismay, they didn’t do anything about it! They said something like, “Don’t do that, boys, get in line please,” and then turned and ignored them. She tried again the next day, and got the same response.

It was at this point that she finally told Ben and I what was happening. Papa and mama bear were furious, I can tell you. Various solutions were discussed… everything from marching into the principal’s office first thing in the morning, to having Ben become a volunteer recess monitor. We joked about having Ben wear his Superman shirt and have some stern conversations with the boys.

We wanted to help Jess to take care of this problem, but we decided that, since she wasn’t getting help from the appropriate channels at school, the best thing was to teach her how to deal with it herself.

Commence Operation Bullyproof.