I grew up in the middle of nowhere, and the only school in town was a K-12 school with only about thirty kids in each class. That meant that even while co-oping with the next town over for sports, we hardly had enough people to form teams. We didn’t have football, making soccer our town’s football. It was The Thing in our town. Or at least it was if you were a boy.

Back in the pee-wee leagues of soccer it was really just a bunch of kids - boys and girls - running around and having fun; I absolutely loved the sport. So when I got to junior high and had to choose between quitting or joining the boy’s team, I’d thought it was an easy choice. It wouldn’t be that big of a deal, right?

And for a while, it wasn’t. During my three years on the junior high soccer team, I got my fair share of playing time. That was when all the boys were still short, scrawny, and awkward. I competed just fine. It wasn’t until I joined the high school team that I started to realize all the adversities that a girl faces on a boy’s team, or in the sports world in general.

I’m not entirely sure where to start with everything I dealt with during my single year on the team before transferring to a different school. Boys thinking it was okay to pinch my butt in the aisle on the bus? Them changing my name from Ashley to ‘Assley’ because, really, they’re just creative geniuses. Or maybe all the snickering that came along with me trying to wear a sports bra to a 100 degree August practice while the rest of the team is standing there shirtless.

Believe it or not, one of the things that annoyed me the most while on the team may seem to pale in comparison. All the freshmen on the team were responsible for shagging balls during practices and warm-ups, but the senior boys informed me I didn’t have to do that because ‘girls are excluded.’ Seems like a good thing, right? But to me, it just seemed like another way that I was The Girl. A way that I was separate, apart, and different.

No matter how hard I practiced, how fast I ran, or how well I played, I was always The Girl. I wasn’t taken seriously, and suddenly my playing time dropped to hardly anything. One of my all-time favorite moments was during homecoming week.

As per tradition, the day of homecoming all the players wore their home jerseys, and their girlfriends wore their away jerseys. And so that morning when I sat in geography wearing my white home jersey, my teacher asked me if I was wearing it to support my boyfriend. When I looked him in the eye and told him I was on the team, he promptly burst out laughing. So, yeah. What was that about being taken seriously?

So now’s the point where I’m supposed to explain my She’s the Man moment where I stood up to the sexist jerks and showed them that I could play just as well as they could. Only real life doesn’t play out like the movies, and people don’t always get that moment. More often than not we end up biting our tongues and letting things slide. As I look back now, I can think of a thousand things that I wish I would’ve said to the guys on my team, but that doesn’t do me a whole lot of good now. Maybe if I’d continued on the team I would’ve gotten the courage to say those things, but I ended up transferring to another school. Now, I still play sports, just for an all-girls team.