Rantzweiler!
Well ok, so Rantzweiler is just a last name. But it’s the onyl thing I could think of to use as an odd post name that sounded like: rant!
So what shall I rant about today? How about Las Vegas’ Corporate Challenge? Specifically, their co-ed soccer rules.
I’ve been waiting a long time to be able to participate in Corporate Challenge here in Las Vegas. My two previous jobs that I worked at totalling over 5 years didn’t participate, and my first two summers here at my current job they didn’t either. But they are this year, so I got totally psyched.
In case you’re not familiar with Corporate Challenge, I’ll give you a short recap of what it is. Companies across Las Vegas decide they want to compete against others in friendly athletic competition over a summer. There are many different sports and events to participate in, some individual and most team. There.
I plan on participating in Soccer, Flag Football and Bowling. Soccer and Football are mostly back-to-back from early- to mid-April and Bowling takes place sometime early May.
As many of you know, I play Indoor Soccer each week, so I’m already acclimated to soccer. They started team captain signups this week and I knew that nobody would head up the soccer team, so guess what — it’s me. I read the rules before signing up and got pretty pissed off.
See, usually any co-ed soccer setup will have rules designed to level the playing field between men and women. Some of them are pretty harmless, but others are blatant and even others are just outright bad for the game. I mean, it’s understandable that women can get injured more playing soccer than men, men are usually more aggressive than women and men, as a whole, are “athletically superior” to women. That is, if you believe that. So thus, balancing rules are in place.
My Indoor Soccer team is co-ed and there is basically one rule in place to level the playing field — a goal scored by a woman is worth two, a man gets one. That’s it, and when I first heard the rule, I was upset about it. That’s a drastic rule, but I eventually got used to it, and sometimes even like it because it creates unique tactical situations on the field that aren’t there in single-gender games. Like who to send up on offense and who to defend with.
So that rule isn’t that bad once you start playing with it in effect. But the rules that Corporate Challenge are using just absolutely suck. Really, it’s only one balancing rule that I think is really awful.
When a woman has the ball on the field, unless she is in the opposing team’s penalty box, a man may not challenge her for the ball. If he shadows her as she runs across the field or tries to intimidate her, he’ll get yellow carded. If he actually does take the ball away, he gets yellow carded. Now, I’m sure you all know what a yellow card is — it’s a serious warning. If you get two in one match, they turn into a red card. A red card ejects you from the game and you have to sit out the next competitive game.
How awful of a rule is that? Really, really bad. It basically means a woman has free reign on the field as far as opposing men go. It is really bad. At first, I was truly pissed off and was considering whether or not I wanted to participate because this rule is so putrid. After some thought, though, I realized I still wanted to play.
This rule makes it so only women can defend women. This way, men can’t just overtake a woman. Let me tell you from experience, women can be way better than men on the soccer field. I play co-ed each and every week and I’ve got to defend the women just as hard as the men because they’re really damn good too. If I couldn’t challenge the woman except for within the penalty box, I’d be screwed. Just think, if there’s a really good woman shooter from outside the box, men can never defend her shots!
I understand the rule is to make it so women actually get to play, but this is pretty bad. There should be some other mechanism in place. This kind of thing promotes the tactic of “get it to the woman!” at almost all times, which may counterbalance in favor of women and start shutting men out of the game.
In any case, the way around this rule to stay competitive and keep men involved is to deploy some good women on your team. The rules are 6-on-6, so ideally you’d field three men and three women, each gender having at least one player that can play keeper relatively well. From there, you’ve got to have good plans on offense and defense:
- Defense: Stay disciplined and communicate well in order to keep matching up women on women. In the event of a mismatch where there are more women you have to defend than you can match up with, well… you’ll have to practice that scenario.
- Offense: Try to create mismatches as much as possible to keep the defense running and confused, but don’t rely only on women. Creating mismatches may open up someone of either gender. Again, communication is key, but on offense, gender tactics aren’t as prevalent as on defense.
So yeah, I’m the team captain and will be responsible for practices, tactics and the like. Should be interesting, I’ve just got to get a team together, along with alternates.
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