A touch gone awry...

Not all criticism is bad. When someone makes fun of your touch on the ball it could be a good thing, at least for girls in Morocco.

This past Saturday, I was again in Sidi Moumen watching a girls league team (Nassim) practice at the local district field usually dominated by men. As they played, groups of older boys who just finished practice leaned against the gate, faces pressed through the bars staring. They started making comments such as "what kind of touch on the ball is that" and "hey, did you see her control, she has no idea how to control the ball, even on flat land." My first reaction was annoyance. Let the girls be, I thought. Arrogant punks. But then I realized that perhaps these comments they were making was progress. They reflected a new level of respect. No longer were the boys commenting on the girls themselves as they had in the past (calling them dirty, saying they look like boys, or they are prostitutes or that girls shouldn't play football). Now, the comments reflected criticism of their game, something all players do to other players, be it male or female. The key to this was that they saw these girls as players. Don't get me wrong, they were probably still arrogant punks but at least, from my point of view, they respected the girls enough to comment on their game and not on them.

Rainy days are good days in Sidi Moumen

Why? Well, the boys stay away and the girls come to play. Like I mentioned before, every Sunday I go to the Sidi Moumen Youth Culture Center where I run their sports program. The center is located in one of Morocco's biggest sprawling slums/low income neighborhood, infamous for being the home to many of Morocco's suicide bombers. We offer kids Lacrosse, field hockey, basketball and football. Today, the normal 150 kids did now show up because of heavy rains in the morning. On my way in bus number 17 (as Lisa and I read aloud to each other an old Harper's magazine article on the state of education in America and old men kept saying hello to Lisa because she has become something of a regular on this particular bus) I wondered if we would find any kids at the center today. They tend to stay away when the weather gets bad.

We arrive today and surprisingly I find all the girls who come to play football inside, waiting and about a handful of boys who probably just followed their sisters. It made me realize how far they have come from when we first started, half interested in football, not taking anything seriously, sometimes coming and other times not. The attendance has been pretty steady now for three months and playing with them today, I could also see an improvement in their game. Not that this is my main goal but it is nice to see they are learning more about the game. What makes me the proudest is that they are dedicated and are starting to respect each other more and their coaches more, especially when Amal (my go to women's football coach who comes to help Sunday mornings) is there. She is this great athlete who grew up playing football and now coaches a local Sidi Moumen team and has been a part of many camps and trainings that either I held or the US embassy or the British Council. The girls really like her and she does a great job with them. They have learned to respect her as well as me. Last week, Amal couldn't come so it was just me and the girls were pretty out of control, not listening, fighting among themselves, refusing to play if another girl was on their team. Nothing I could say was doing anything and so I finally told them to go home, that football was done for the day and they could tell me why next Sunday. Today, one of the girls came up to me and apologized, recognizing that they were out of control. I can't describe how great it was to feel that. Most of the time you think they have no idea how they are acting.

Regardless, we did some great warm up drills, boys weren't in our way trying to take our balls and kick them as far away as possible into the empty lots full of used hypodermic needles and it didn't rain again until we finished and were inside.

Oujda part jouj

The trip, like I said, was very informative and revealing of what football still means and is in small border towns across from Algeria. Oujda, before Morocco closed the border with Algeria in 1994, was a bustling and important gate to the desert but now, it is the end of the line. It is where the train stops, where the bus route ends, where things begin to stand still. Appropriately, women's football is no different. I met with a team, the team, over the weekend. They are mostly friends from their local high school and have been gathered and organized by an enthusiastic PE coach (male). Several of the girls attended the camp in Bouznika as well as my camp this past summer. Several of the girls, great players, travel to Casablanca on weekends, making that 10 hour trip, just to play with a team here. There is nothing for them in Oujda. They want to joint the national league but to do that they need to play at least three other teams in the region, in order to officially be able to play in the national championship. Three other teams no problem right? They are the only team in the region, that is where the problem lies. So they are stuck, with no money to travel and improve their game against teams in other cities and no ability to play within the national Moroccan framework because of bureaucratic obstacles.

They recently approached the local men's team, an actually very good and historical club in Morocco called Mouloudiya. The team's manager said they will take the team, incorporate them into the club and that is where the conversation ended. I met with the club's managing team and was basically asked by them for a new field for the girls because there is not enough field space for everyone. Everyone, they mean the two other boys teams that play. Fortunately I don't have the ability to build fields for cities so hopefully this team will figure out how to "squeeze" the girls in.

The ideas toward women's football in Oujda is still a bit conservative. It is true too that they are just far from the metropoles of Morocco, such as Casablanca and Rabat, where many more advances in the game and many more opportunities exist. However, I think the discussion is too focused on what is lacking and not focused enough on what can be done with what there is because of the hesitation in ceding that space and attention to the women from the men. The dialogue is still dominated by men, who know best. It was extremely refreshing to speak with the manager of Mouloudiya, who was a woman, because she was literally in a man's world. She was this really dynamic woman, master's in Sports Management and there on her merit rather than because she was a big former footballer with the club. That in and of itself gives me some hope that the club's perspective is headed in the right direction because they would hire someone like that in the first place.

I realized in the end that my contribution or help is very limited. My capabilities allow me to bring some attention to Oujda, create some buzz through camps and US women's teams touring through the area but that is it. Perhaps that is enough. Part of the problem I find sometimes is people making the first step. However, if you make it, then there is no shortage of people to help or no shortage of those who think it is a great idea.

First step in Oujda is to create a camp in March. Then, bring the girls' football team in the summer. Then, we will see who jumps on board.

Oujda, peanuts and go carts at the border crossing

Twenty hours on night trains and one Algerian border go cart amusement park later I am back in Casablanca, completing a successful but short trip to Oujda, part of my follow up evaluation of the camp I ran last summer. I felt like a small celebrity thanks to the director of the American Corner (an American cultural center) Mohammed Bendaha who set up interviews with local sports journalists and gathered quite a crowd for my talk on women's sports development in Morocco. I gave the talk on Saturday morning, all in arabic, with a nice little picture power point. Besides the complete butchering of Moroccan Arabic, the talk went well with representatives from the Ministry of Youth and Sports, the Football federation, and coaches/directors of the Oujda professional men's team Mouloudiya. Of course, the girls football team that I work with was there, all 35 of them (girls from the team, their friends, other girls from the school) and random local students and curious passerbys. After my talk, there was a great question and answer session and discussion involving everyone. The girls were shy at first but really made some great points as everyone got more comfortable.

After the talk I sat down with two journalists from a multilanguage online journal as well as RTM (local radio) and Radio Plus (a southern radio station with an Oujda correspondent or some reason). After the journalists I sat down with the girls team and their coach for a discussion on what we can do in Oujda for women's football. After that, I sat down with the Football federation rep and the director of the men's team Mouloudiya (a really impressive woman with a master's in sports management who did her thesis on professional jet skiing in Morocco and is essentially one of the only women in a man's world, tabarkal3liha!). Lots of sitting down with people but there were some very important points brought up and I realized some important things about my role in Morocco, my purpose etc. It might have taken three years, sleeping in numerous night train compartments, cheap hotels and hundreds of omlette sandwiches later but Oujda, next to Algeria, victors over Egypt in the World Cup qualifying underdog match of the year, was a small little victory for me at least. Below are highlights of the discussions I had and some of my ideas. Bare with me...

Structured play

Don't get me wrong with this post. I am an advocate of unstructured play time for kids as much as the other. Growing up, my small little life was full of unstructured play. Whether I was stranded on a deserted island or kicking around a football in the front yard or racing straws in the gutter after it rained, I was often left to my own devices, along with friends, to create games and rules etc. However, I also had a lot of structured play time in the form of organized sports and I think that structure and organization allowed my unstructured play be, well, more structured and I guess fair to all parties involved. I learned how to play on a team, make decisions with respect to those playing with me etc. That is the importance of structured and organized sports. I was working at the Sidi Moumen Cultural Center this morning. I work there every Sunday morning, running the local sports program for the center. We work with about 100 kids, splitting them up into football, lacrosse, field hockey and basketball. We were a bit short on volunteers today so we had to make due, meaning we had to let some groups play among themselves without a supervisor, an older member of the association or a coach watching them. This group was the boys football. First the older boys played and were for the most part fine. They could referee among themselves and decide who made the foul etc. Then the younger boys took the field. By younger boys, I mean between 7-14 years old. I was trying to get an organized game going so I could leave them to play while I went back to the girls when I realized that this would be impossible. They not only would not listen but started fighting among eachother, lying about who had already played, forming clicks and picking on others, crying, hitting, punching and throwing rocks. I just stood there imagining that this is how they play with eachother in the street and probably at school to. This is how they had learned how to play. That is when it dawned on me the importance of a coach, a mentor, a structure to play. The lessons that sports teach are for the most part apparent but I have also realized that they are not embedded or found naturally in the act of playing. They must be taught, shown. Playing a game or a sport can just as well teach the stronger to pick on the weaker or the more skilled to ignore the less skilled as it can teach collaboration, respect and fair play. Another testament to the importance of organized sports for young children growing up in environments where everything else around them is a little less structured. I am mostly speaking about lower income neighborhoods where the sports field might be the only place that these lessons are taught or the only place where there is a definite structure to their lives.

Needless to say, I put the boys onto teams, 4v4, let them play 10 minute games and then told them to stop acting like little children and go home to eat lunch. I am also not saying this behavior is specific to boys. Girls are just as guilty. Perhaps in slightly other ways. There is less physical violence and more just not listening and talking and giving up or throwing of tantrums but the general idea is the same.

Tetouan Follow up trip

Last weekend, on Sunday, I stuffed my sleepy sick self next to Lisa in a grand taxi to Tetouan from Tangier and went to visit the girls who participated in my camp in July. I met with Doha, Houda and Hajar (as well as some young girls who went to the states on a US Embassy football program) at the local football stadium. We had a good discussion about their thoughts on the camp (well, as good as any discussion can be when there are dominating male coaches in the room with them cutting off their responses and answering questions for them). Although I would have liked a slightly more open and honest discussion concerning the camp (which I can do later on alone with them I imagine), we did make some headway on ways they can use their skills in Tetouan to help the community. The idea I found most interesting was working at the girls orphanage, I think called Angel Association. This association is where the other three girls who were at this meeting came from. The place is basically a dormitory for young women and girls with no parents and the director was there accompanying the girls this day. She was talking about the ages of the girls (starting very young to late teens) and how they would love a sports program and are very much in need of sports and health education. Doha, Houda and Hajar as well as the other three girls from this orphanage seemed to like the idea so now they will come up with a proposal among themselves and then reconvene with me to decide the next step forward.

The meeting was interesting because like I mentioned, there were about four men with us (one was the President of a local association, the vice president, a local football coach etc). They all had their opinions on what the girls should do and what type of project we should implement and what players I should bring from the states. They also were great at answering questions for the girls. This has been the case every time I do interviews with women, especially with younger women. I think it does have to do with the gender roles and relationships here regarding whose opinion gets voiced but I also think a lot of it is the barriers and obstacles you face as a young person speaking in front of elders. The lack of honesty or frankness youth exhibit here in front of those older than them is sometimes disturbing. I know that you find a little of this in many other cultures obviously, a respect for your elders and a shyness in being truthful and candid. It was magnified for me in Tetouan and I think it is even more so when you are dealing with younger women and older men. Unfortunately, that seems to be the case here often, groups of young girls formed into teams by older male figures who then play up on the power trip/authority of their position and never allow any true leadership to emerge among the young women (or young men in many cases). Alas, I have learned that next time I go on a follow up interview I will make sure to interview the girls alone.

Red card or 15 minutes of fame?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/sports/soccer/11iht-SOCCER.html?_r=1&hpw

Not sure if many people read the New York Times piece on a young women named Elizabeth Lambert who's ridiculous fouls committed in one recent game have caused somewhat of a national buzz. Not sure why really. Apparently Good Morning America commented on it as well as Julie Foudy. Firstly, it is sad to see yet again women's football in the US receive media attention in this way. Secondly, not sure why this even received attention. At first I thought the article would perhaps detail a long season full of "deadly" fouls and irrational behavior by this one player, perhaps meriting an article or a discussion. However, this was ONE game. Growing up playing football, I've seen girls do things just as bad or even worse in one game and they were 16. I'm not by any means condoning what she did. The fouls are pretty bad and there is nothing worse than those types of players but again, I don't understand the media attention. She should have been given a red card, sent off the field and no one should know who she is. Rather than articles on the newly created professional women's football league or interesting players, team achievements and defeats (always like a good defeat story), we are seeing the women's game either ignored and brought to light by one game in which one player lost her temper. I also dislike the way the article, again, uses the same stereotypical approach to this top comparing the "rough" men game to what they imply should be a calmer women's game. Again, if anyone has ever played women's football, they know very well that is not true and the New York Times should know well to avoid these stereotypes and cliches.

Green March to Tangier

Today is a holiday in Morocco, the day that celebrates the green march when Morocco took back the Western Sahara and a large contingent of Moroccans holding Qurans literally walked down to Layounne. I will be making the opposite journey to Tangier and Tetouan for Latin music and follow up with some of the girls who came to the camp in July.

Amzmiz camp a success!

I would like to use my first post to celebrate the young girls and boys in Amzmiz for a camp well done. Amzmiz is a small town, a village, one hour outside of Marrakesh. The camp was two days with over 70 young girls participating, all from the local schools. They organized leadership activities with the help of Ami, a peace corps volunteer in town as well as pretty amazing zumba style aerobics and a soccer tournament in the end. What I liked the most, besides the clean air in Amzmiz, was that each following Sunday the organizers of the camp will hold a tournament for the girls at the school. They essentially have started a girls soccer league in Amzmiz. There are some pictures below but you can check out more on my Smug Mug page. Check out more information about the camp and the girls who organized it on my website as well. Three of the young women participated in the Women's Leadership through Football Camp in July and two of those three also participated in the British Council Premier League Camp this past year as well.

Next goal, get the league uniforms!