I have bruises, little ones from the impact of a soccer ball, an elbow, a toe. Playing indoor soccer is dangerous, especially when it's with a bunch of hyper-competitive middle-aged men, several of whom are twice my size and have forgotten that shoving other players into the bleachers to get the ball would get them a red card if we had a ref. It just gets me going. It reminds me of playing with the boys as a little girl when we had a bitter German former pro player as a coach. Before games he'd gather us in and mutter through tobacco-stained teeth, "If you can't win, at least you can hurt them."
There were only a few girls in the league and they tended to drop out as years passed and the boys got bigger and started to run over us. But our coach taught us well. I learned how to get the team bully between me and the ref, sucker punch him where the welt wouldn't show and steal the ball. The girls on my team were the only ones who kept playing until we aged out of the league at 12, because our sociopath coach taught us to fight. He thought we had a right to be on the field.
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