This article is about the all-girl lasertag team I've been trying to field for the last three seasons. It's my perspective on what happened and some of the why behind it all. There's some stuff that might be useful, that maybe people in the sport might want to know.
Let me tell you how it happened.
First, I'd better give you some context. I'm 28, female, relatively confident, working as a freelance science communicator. Something important about me is that I don't really like girls. I studied physics and computer science, which are male dominated, and have continued to work in male-dominated if not completely male environments. The great majority of my friends are male. I like it that way. Despite all the physical evidence (which I'm told is sufficiently compelling), I think of myself as a guy. Girls are basically untrustworthy, bitchy, and all-round confusing. I just don't understand them. I certainly wouldn't normally choose to associate with them much.
A second bit of context you should know is about me and laser tag, or me and sports generally. I'm not very sporty - like many geeky kids, I was always picked last for teams if I got picked at all. I too have suffered the humiliation of being picked for a team out of pity and immediately having the rest of the team shout the leader down in front of the whole class. I don't like team sports much more than I like girls. Laser tag though is fun. It depends a lot on individual performance, but there's enough team work involved to make it interesting. I'm not a great shot, nor am I particularly skilled, but I can sit behind a barricade and annoy people while my team mates do great and wonderful things. In the time I was at uni, I met a lot of very nice, intelligent, good-looking guys who liked to play laser tag and who were reasonably willing to have girls play with them. You can see why I enjoyed it. I didn't play for a few years after uni, but then one of my friends posted a request on a mailing list for volunteers for a social league team. So I spent four seasons playing in the Southlands league with a team of guys I really like, trust and (I'll admit it) lust after. It was fantastic. We even started winning.
So, if you've been paying attention, you should now have one really big question. Why would I leave a team of people I really like and play successfully with to try and captain a team of people I wouldn't normally associate with in a sport I'm not very good at? There must have been a really compelling reason.
It started because my old team had got successful. There are two leagues running in Perth: Southlands and Northbridge. Southlands, where we play, has a reputation as much more social, not so aggressive or high-end. Northbridge's reputation is much more competitive, and it attracts more of the really good and elite players. We were winning too easily and often at Southlands, and so started talking about the possibility of moving our team to Northbridge to give us more of a challenge. The details got a bit mucked up, and I ended up being the only member of the team who showed up on the first night of the new Northbridge season. So I observed it - and it was a real eye-opener.
It was very much dominated by young, aggressive, and air-headed boys. I had never been to the site before, and I knew only a couple of people there who happened to play in both leagues. I wasn't made to feel welcome in any way. Quite the opposite, actually - I was specifically ignored by some of the players who knew me. I have to admit that didn't surprise me - they were the sort of players who after playing against me for four seasons still never speak to me directly if they can possibly avoid it, or use my name when speaking about me to others (after all I'm both a girl and a weak player). I just hadn't expected the whole site to be full of people like that. The conversations I overheard were boorish, self-serving, about how this boy had proved to some pig of a girl that she was a tiny piece of fly shit, or that boy had threatened some other poofy guy physically and the wimp hadn't threatened back. I've met plenty of boys like that before. On their own, they're just idiots. But it became fairly clear that they were using the site as a breeding ground to get younger boys and turn them into more of the same. I felt really uncomfortable, unwelcome, excluded and just a little repulsed. I couldn't help but wonder how a stranger to the sport would feel.
I went home, and did some hard thinking that night and identified what it was I liked about my league. It came down to four things. Firstly, you could be a new player there. There was room for people who didn't really know what to do, or who were still getting the hang of it. Secondly, you could be a weak player. I'd been playing for a year, and I still scored pretty poorly. My rate of improvement had long since plateaued. I didn't really care, and I still had a team who wanted me anyway. The third thing was that most people couldn't care less whether or not I was a girl. The ones who were idiots about it were very much a minority. The fourth was that you didn't have to be totally competitive to be valued. There was a really strong emphasis on the social nature of the games, despite us all trying to play well.
I also thought about why this was the case in my league, and identified a few contributing factors. The biggest of these was the manager, Renae. She valued all of those things, and worked hard to maintain them. She was young, pretty, feminine, and not terribly aggressive in her style of dealing with people. In fact, I think she avoided conflict a number of times when staring a problem straight in the face would have made it go away quicker. The result of this was that the league rules continued to support the weaker players and curtail the best ones, and that everyone knew that the emphasis would always be social rather than allowing the elite players to shine. We also all knew that management would be non-threatening and non-didactic rather than authoritarian. Big issues were solved in a sensitive, quiet way.
Another contributing factor was her staff. There were two other main people behind the counter. One, Jo, was another young woman, sometimes shy but technically reasonably competent. She was good at getting along with people, particularly in the age bracket the site drew most of its market from. The other was Marcel. He had a bit of a personality - but he was pretty funny a lot of the time, thoughtful about how new people would feel and very charming with girls.
None of these people were by any means perfect. The overall effect, however, was to create a site where the less clubby or elite still felt they belonged.
Then I started thinking about what I could do. If I liked this so much, and thought it was so important, I should be actively supporting it in some way. The question was, how?
An obvious answer was the support of numbers. The Southlands league was losing the better players, and not getting enough new ones in to replace them. So I should get a bunch of people in to play too. The next obvious point was that I should select the sort of people I thought should be encouraged in, to maintain the balance of "nice people" and ensure that the airhead-boys remained a minority. This really came down to selecting girls.
The attention span of teenage boys seems to be decreasing over the last few decades. If I brought them in, even nice ones, they'd be out again when they found a better craze. The only thing that I know of that will make them stick around is girls. The other thing about increasing the girl balance is that boys don't tend to act up in quite the same way when there are girls around. I'm a firm believer in rewarding good behaviour before it happens in order to ensure it happens. If increased attention from or presence of pretty girls will cause young boys to be nice, I see no problem with bringing in the pretty girls and letting the boys work out the potential rewards for good behaviour. The concept also had the advantage of increasing the numbers beyond my own scope. A sport where girls turn up regularly is likely to attract more boys completely of their own volition :-) Also, given that girls are an underutilised market for the sport, exposing more girls to successful play would increase the perception amongst girls that laser tag was an acceptable possibility, and increase penetration of that market.
So there I was, pretty much decided to start a new team. It was scary. It got worse.
I realised, on further thinking, that if I wanted to bring in a good number of girls, the best thing to do was to try for an all-girl team. There are two reasons. The obvious one is that an all-girl team means more girls. The less obvious one is to do with girls and sport. A very large number of girls and women select themselves out of sport. Some, like me, were never good at it and couldn't cope with the social alienation involved. Others were interested in other things, like boys. Essentially though, whatever the reasons, the details behind the stats show many women are scared off by highly competitive sport. They're not interested in being bossed around, or being yelled at to play harder and win sooner. Often, they simply just don't like the way boys play, or what they perceive as the "required" way to be successful. I reasoned that if I wanted to attract less-competitive people (remember the original aim here!), I needed to make a situation that would be less threatening and forceful or otherwise "repellent", and that had some inherent "attractiveness" or reason for joining (else why would you make the effort?). I figured that some of the nice girls I was going to try and target would be attracted by the fact that it was an all-girl team, because of the implied safety and nice-ness. Other girls, with more self-confidence, would be attracted by the chance to see if they could beat the boys at their own game. I was right on both counts.
I further decided that despite the advantages, I wasn't going to try too hard to load the team with women of a certain age bracket or appearance. After all, this was about sport, not sex. I'd just see what I got. As it turns out, that was just as well. I found lots of girls who were really keen and interested. Only a few of them however were really willing to commit. I'd sort of expected this, because if you're working with a non-traditional market there's a certain amount of innate resistance - they don't see themselves in that picture. It was still a little more of a hard sell than I expected, and there were time constraints - I only had about a week and a half to pull it together. It was hard work getting four other players.
I tried to hold a no-pressure come-along-and-try-it afternoon the Sunday before season was due to start, thinking that starting in comp is pretty scary when you've barely if ever played before. It was both my own idea, and a valued piece of advice from one of my now ex-teammates, Doug. I was also thinking that while some women who were interested wouldn't commit right away, groundwork now might mean players later.
In principle, it sort of worked. I had a few people, we played a couple of games. I had to work hard to get past the idea that this was some sort of "audition" to see who was good enough for the team - there were a couple of women who were convinced that this was some sort of test they were going to fail. I thought I'd been quite specific about the rationale that this was a chance for them to see the game while not in a competitive situation and see what they thought of it. It turns out that if you don't specifically say "this is not a test", some will expect it anyway. You have to confront them head on about it before they stop thinking that. It can backfire though - if you put too much emphasis on saying "this is not a test", some will assume that the only reason you are being so emphatic is to hide the fact that it's really a test. Australian culture has some great features that way. As far as setting up for the season went, the session wasn't so good - I didn't have many of the women who'd made a definite commitment, and I did have women who had been clear that they couldn't play this season because of other commitments. It did give us a chance to start meeting each other though, and to set it up as a real, tangible idea in their minds rather than just something talked about and not done. It was worth doing.
So, we started our first season with five players - me, Helen, Megan, Lisa and Gemma - all young and attractive as it happened, or at least I'd like to think so. Well, four. Gemma had put a lot of effort into chasing me to get a place on the team. She got a job that meant working Wednesday nights, and so never turned up - but didn't actually bother to tell me she wouldn't be coming. When we found this out, we started hunting for another player - I didn't really have anyone in reserve willing to be a regular player, though I had a few who'd offered to be reserves. Helen found a random cool girl named Lexi at her TAFE who was interested in coming along. I was pleased - it was the sort of girl-networking I'd hoped to see come into action. Remember, I don't get along with many girls, so don't have a wide number of female friends I can call on. I was having to rely on the friendship networks of my acquaintances.
Things started out OK. We had a mix of experience and skill within the team, and while we didn't know each other very well, we were working on it. Then I went away for a week. When I came back, I'd lost half my team.
It took a bit of wiggling to get the story, but basically there'd been some big decisions made by the new site owner, Renae was no longer manager, Marcel was no longer staff, there were people behind the counter I didn't know, and my team mates Helen and Lexi had taken the changes and the way they were handled very personally (as young women may) and left in protest. I wasn't too happy either, but I had a more important problem - not seeing my aims go up in smoke immediately. I tried to get reserve players in from my little list, but found that they universally weren't free any night I could possibly want them for. This was made harder by the length of time it took to get a clear statement from Helen and Lexi that they definitely weren't coming back - they kept saying their absence was "just this week" for one reason or another, so I didn't try to permanently replace them as early as I could have. In the meantime, I also tried to focus on making sure that Lisa and Megan made friends with other people in the league besides just me, so that they felt a more solid social involvement with the place and I didn't have to worry about them domino-ing out too.
End of season came, and unsurprisingly we did quite poorly. I was ready to try again. I started the hard word on people a little earlier, and had Lisa and Megan looking for more players as well. Lisa came up with two friends who were interested, Jo-2 and Wuffie. There was another girl as a possibility - Christine had come over from Northbridge along with a bunch of other players when the site changed ownership at the beginning of the last season. She'd had a bad injury that was going to keep her out of the first few weeks of the season, which meant she wasn't sure about joining a team as a regular player. I was really happy to welcome her to our team. It meant we had six players, but I suspected that wouldn't matter. Megan and I were both away often enough during the season that we were going to need a permanent reserve player anyway, and after the previous season I was a little pessimistic about being able to keep my team members for the few weeks until Christine came on board, let alone the whole twelve weeks.
We had another pre-season introduction of some sort, led and masterminded by Doug - the details escape me now. I remember being impressed that both Jo-2 and Wuffie came and were keen. They picked up immediately how playing competition would give them the chance to explore the facets of the game they were interested in, such as strategy and teamwork rather than just running around blankly, or the achieving of goals together rather than being beaten down on your own. It was looking good.
The first week of season came, and Lisa, Megan and I came - and Jo-2. Or was it Wuffie - I'm not sure now. At any rate, one of them made one game. Jo-2 got a new job that meant working on Wednesday nights. Wuffie's work increased her hours so that she couldn't get to the site by 7. I was sad to lose them both, as they were genuinely interested and keen, but money won. Christine ended up playing with us the whole season. We also eventually lost the all-girl thing. A few weeks into the season, Wombat's team fell apart, and we absorbed him into our team. I asked the other girls how they felt about not being all-girl, and they weren't too fussed at this point. We'd all been playing long enough to care more about having a full team than sticking with any particular image, or at least that's what they said. So I made Wombat a skirt, which he wore for us on more than one occasion to the shock and delight of many players.
We didn't do very well that season. I'd somehow remained team captain, but I had no idea how to use or direct good players like Christine and Wombat. We ended up not ever achieving very much. I figured Christine was getting bored with it. She never really complained much, but she didn't rejoin us after the season ended.
I was a little despondent at this point. None of my original aims were really working out. To really do it, I needed to get some girls in who would achieve some measure of success, have fun, and consistently turn up. It was a real battle to keep people coming, because there was always the feeling that "I'm not very good, and we're not doing well, so no-one will care if I don't come this week". This is especially an issue when you have less-competitive people - the challenge of trying to win isn't enough to keep them involved. Megan had been reasonably stalwart, but she was moving back to Melbourne and wouldn't play with us this season. That left Lisa and me, both of whom felt we'd called in most of our friends already.
I went for one more round, working specifically on people I knew might be attracted by the fact that most of the season happened within uni summer break. Four days before season start, I was just beginning to give up and talk to some of my ex-teammates who were also now looking for teams. I'd scheduled a pre-season Sunday afternoon session for anyone who might be going to play with us. Doug volunteered to come along and help. I had three women besides me turn up - Chris, Leanda and Sarah. Doug gave us an introduction, then we played two games. At the end of it, they all said they were in. I was chuffed.
It was always going to be an interesting team from the start. There's a thirty year variation in ages - Chris is a very funky 46 (she's the mother of Helen, one of my first players), and Sarah, Leanda's daughter, was sixteen at season start. Leanda's a few years older than me, and Lisa's a few years younger. We're all reasonably social and chatty, and willing to work together to try and improve our game as a team. This was a really good thing! Having a mother-daughter pair on the team was interesting. I asked Leanda and Sarah at one point if they'd be able to cope playing together. They both immediately replied that they'd be fine, if anyone else menaced them they'd quit their own arguments and gang up on the interloper. It was an accurate call.
It also turned out that each of the new three was both willing and able to improve their performance as individuals, and work on skills. I received several comments from other players on the noticeable improvements they made - and I saw it too. A lot of this was due to an innovation Doug suggested. He suggested we turn up half-an-hour early for a training game (that he ran) - and persuaded Wombat to make the game free to any new or weak player as well as any more experienced player who was willing to help. We'd tried that the previous season, for the first week, and it was really valuable - the best thing I could have done for my new players. The second week however no-one had turned up, and Doug had basically said "if you want the game enough to turn up, tell me and I'll be there". No-one had. This time the training games were attended well, if erratically by some players - but they meant we could address problems any player was having or feeling directly instead of leaving it until later. Doug was quite conscientious about checking with me to see if there was anything I thought my team needed to try. We all benefited - even I managed to improve in a few ways, much to my own surprise.
Part way through the season Doug came down with a mysterious illness that turned out to be glandular fever, so we stopped playing games for training - but we still continued to turn up early and train in other ways and talk about what we were doing. Through the course of the season, I continued to listen to the good advice I got from other experienced players and tried to develop my team further. This was particularly important for me, because I needed to learn how to be a good captain. The training sessions were a good chance to introduce some new ideas, and it turned out to also be a time when my teammates could suggest ideas they'd come up with and we could walk through them and "pre-implement" them.
Which brings me up to the present, today, the day before finals.
We haven't been training so hard. There's not a lot of point in some ways - we were really caned for most of the season. We've managed a few second places, but it's hard work - it took several weeks to build each player's confidence and skill up to the point where they could function well under pressure from another team, and then when we got to that point we were caned so badly by some of the teams of elite players that it all fell over, and I spent a lot of time building it up again. The high-level players do tend to pick on us. It's good points for them, because we can't defend ourselves as well. This means that even with handicapping we lose by a large margin, because the handicapping is based on how well you'd do against an average player and doesn't really take into account the advantage a good player gets from following a bad one around the whole game. As a team of gumbies, this works against us.
Because of this, I spent a lot of time during the season looking for ways to make sure my teammates didn't get discouraged. Chris got negative scores a few times, and felt the evidence was that if she didn't turn up we would definitely benefit. It took a lot of sweet talking to keep her coming. And, yes, it was worth having her keep coming - five players let us do things that four just couldn't. Another form of harassment we got was that the more aggressive players would often crowd us at speed, knowing that the instinct of most well-mannered girls and inconfident players is to give ground - which meant we were being forced out of advantageous places easily. We had to work on this and other polite habits.
I think the end result has been that we've been a fairly successful team this season. We've kept coming, and we've continued to enjoy ourselves. That to me is how I define success in a social league.
My team disintegrated after the finals night. Chris gave it in - she really didn't feel it was worth continuing. Sarah had uni exams and showcase performances, and Lisa was really needing to concentrate on her study too. Leanda was moving to England to begin the first stages of a new life with her fiance. None of them made it to the end-of-season awards night the next week - and after seeing it, I know they didn't miss anything. There was nothing that would have made it worth their while to come.
In explanation of that statement, let me tell you something I noticed about women's sport when I worked in radio. Women talk about their sport differently. If you've read this, and you're a guy from the sort of mindset I described at the beginning of this story, you might have got impatient as you read. You might have wondered why I bothered to name everybody, or mention their relationships to each other, or say something about who they were.
The reason's simple. In general, men want to know who won. Women want to know who played.
So women's sport reports talk about this consistently, because for the most part that's what the women playing want to hear. Names, who was there, who wasn't there. Special or funny things that happened, the moments that build a community out of strangers and friendships out of competitors. Such reports include who won, but that's not the most important information in the bulletin by a wide margin. I've seen male broadcasters privately make rude comments about women who've phoned up with their sport bulletins, because they can't believe this woman is waffling on so much - why doesn't she just say who won and get on with it? Why does she have to name everyone who came?
So, back to the league end-of-season. I'd enjoyed previous end-of-season nights in this league. There'd be some brief speech about the season, which included some comment on the teams. We'd hear about the finals games, which team won and who the players on that team were. There'd be a few extra awards, for funny things or great moments that had happened. Someone would be congratulated for winning fairest and best player. We'd celebrate.
I didn't enjoy this night. We filed in, found somewhere to sit. The winning team was announced. I'm not good with names and faces, so I wasn't sure exactly which players were on the team - and I didn't find out. That was it. No extras, no sharing, no comment about the successes or great moments of the season. They didn't even mention what I thought was prime detail: that the team who won had started at the bottom of the ladder on finals night, and played seven games straight in order to win. To me, that's really impressive. It's a huge effort, and it takes a good amount of skill to come out on top of two other teams who are naturally quite good plus still fresh and rested. It should be celebrated. But it didn't seem like the site cared.
In the face of what this said about the league, I chose not to run another all-girl team. I'd already called in all my favours with the women I knew, and didn't have the energy left to try and pull a new one together. It'd been a lot of hard work, for everyone involved, and it was hard to maintain the feeling of reward.
As it happens, the next league season was cancelled anyway. I guess I wasn't the only one feeling tired.