In case you hadn’t noticed, there is a lot that I am willing to do for you. I will attend every one of your home games and as many away games as I can. I will fly halfway across the country to watch you play. I will cheer for you and advocate for you and publicize the team as much as humanly possible.
I am telling you this to make sure you understand the difference between your Militia Cheerleader and the Sacramento Sirens Cheer Elite. Despite my name and my perpetual fascination with cheerleading competitions on ESPN2[sws_css_tooltip position=”center” colorscheme=”rosewood” width=”254″ makeOverflowVisible=”1″ url=”javascript:void(0);” trigger=”*” fontSize=”12″]which you’d think Backseat Coach would be more excited about, but I think he just finds it slightly disturbing [/sws_css_tooltip], there’s not much similarity between me and other cheerleader-types. Remember the DC Divas rap? In response, I wrote one for us. Here it is, in its entirety:
Bos-ton [clap]
Mil-i-tia [clap]
fuck you.
I have not been able to tell if Sacramento Sirens Cheer Elite will be attending the game this weekend – it’s hard for me to imagine that they wouldn’t be, but I don’t know what their travel budget is like and their events page doesn’t mention it although that could absolutely be a website-updating lapse and not a we’re-not-going-to-Texas lapse.
I guess I just want you to know that even if the Sirens show up with a whole squadron of matching-uniformed highly-enthusiastic extremely loud synchronized tumblers or whatever, there’s still no way those guys love their team more than we love you. And come on, who would you rather have on your side: a bunch of people wearing matching spandex or this guy?
Defensive back Penta (#36) holds a number of distinctions, but I wish to highlight two of them here: one, she was unanimously voted MVP of the Eastern Conference Championship game by me and Barker’s stepmom[ref]the Backseat Coach got upset that he was not included in this statement but I explained that he waited until the end of the game to award her this designation while we declared it official several minutes before halftime.[/ref] and two, she has the coolest grandmother around. (Nanny, if you read this, I’m ready to storm the Boston Globe building with you, and I’m sorry I swear so much.)
1. Of the games you’ve played for this team, is there one that you consider your favorite? Which one and why?
Of all the games I’ve played, my favorite would have to be the one we just played against the Divas, for so many reasons: it advanced us to the Championship; they’re our arch-nemesis (the equivalent of Superman and Lex Luther, where the Militia = Superman); we shut them out; and IT JUST FELT SO GOOD!
Although we had beaten them twice during the regular season, we still had to put the work in during our many bye weeks to prepare, because once you make the playoffs it’s anyone’s game. There’s so much history between the Militia and the Divas (most, if not all of our supporters are well aware of this) and we made a promise to ourselves and our supporters that we were on a mission not to let history repeat itself. Check! On to the next one…
2. How did you first find out about the Boston Militia? What experience did you have with football before then?
I first found out about the IWFL in January of 2007, when my mom saw an ad in my local newspaper for tryouts for the Bay State Warriors and jokingly suggested I try out. I went online and did some research, and it looked pretty awesome. I recruited two of my friends to try out with me and it was amazing! I’ve been addicted ever since. I had played Pop Warner football when I was in 6th & 7th grade, and I also played on my high school powderpuff team in my senior year.
3. During one scary, rainy game in 2008, you were injured and got taken off the field on a stretcher into an ambulance. (Thankfully, you either had no lasting damage or have been doing a kick-ass job of hiding it for two years.) What were your thoughts after that happened? Did it make you nervous at all to return to playing?
When it was happening, it was terrifying and painful – it was more of a reality check than anything. It’s one of those things that you know can happen, but you don’t think it will ever happen to you. Overall, it was a very scary experience, one I never want to go through again. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous about returning to play, but if you play with hesitation, that’s when most injuries occur.
After that, I put a lot more effort into working on my technique and tackling properly to avoid injury as much as possible. Plus, the way I see it, you can get hurt doing anything – clearly, launching your body around increases your chances, but at least it’s fun!
Nanny with her crew4. What is something that’s made you feel supported as a Militia player?
My family and friends go above and beyond to support me every week. They tailgate before every home game (even in the rain), they made an awesome sign and if they can’t make the game, they listen to it on the radio. I even have five family members traveling to Texas to support us in the championship game. One of them is my grandmother, who is by far my biggest fan – she has put off vacations this summer to come to our games, she even weathered our playoff game vs. the Sharks in the rain (I spotted her in the stands wearing a sombrero to protect her hair). There are a few things my grandmother can’t stand, including heat and humidity, rain, flying and the D.C. Divas – and she is going to fly to Texas in the middle of July! Seriously, if that doesn’t make a person feel supported I don’t know what will. And she doesn’t just love the Militia because of me, she supports the entire team. She carries our program around to show it off to random people[ref]Ooh! I do that too! Right on![/ref] and every time I talk to her she says “I believe in all of you; if anyone can do it, it’s the Militia. You girls are wonderful.” Oh Nanny, we love you too!
5. What is something you’d like see happen that would make you feel more supported?
It would definitely be cool to see our scores in the paper. Here’s another Nanny reference: every week she checks the Sunday paper sports section to see if they did a small write-up or even just put the results in the score column…needless to say, she is not very happy with the Globe or the Herald.
I also think that given all the sports networks that are out there today, we should get a little coverage. If they have room to cover bowling and billiards, I’m sure there is a time slot out there for women’s football. I’m just saying.
6. Assuming you have an iPod or mp3 player of some sort, please put it on “shuffle” and list the very first three songs that come up. (No skipping the embarrassing ones.)
OK, here they are: “Last Night” by Az Yet, “Time After Time” by Cyndi Lauper, “A Decade Under the Influence” by Taking Back Sunday.
Fun fact: I kind of love Football Gameplan. I mean, yeah, it would be nice if this page had content and working links (or was at all remotely accurate) but to be fair, most of the other pages on that site have similar issues so at least it’s somewhat uniformly underdeveloped. But that’s not really the point; the point is their youtube videos, which combine low-budget graphics and a cheesy sports-drama soundtrack with actual intelligent football analysis for a whole lot of leagues, including the IWFL. Like it was a real game and everything! I know! Wacky, right??
Now, this part is totally not the fault of Football Gameplan[ref]who I actually am trying to write a positive post about, I swear[/ref] but it makes me sad that the bar is set so low in this arena that any interview or article that doesn’t preface “football” with “women’s” in every single instance of the word feels like a friggin’ gift from God. (This is why the Militia Cheerleader cannot ever allow herself to be interviewed. It would just end up like this: “So how did you get interested women’s football?” “Dunno. How did you get interested in men’s sportscasting?”)
But beyond the fact that its mere existence is enough to make me happy, that Emory Hunt guy cracks me up. Dude, who proclaims themselves to be “the Czar of the Playbook”? THAT guy! Which is awesome. As is this, for the most part:
So yeah, he’s clearly not Czar of the Roster: I’m not sure why he talks about Cahill (#7/QB) while showing a photo of someone who – to my knowledge – hasn’t played on the team since 2008, and I’m quite sure that he effed up the consonant at the end of #28’s name, but you know what? I’ll totally take that over a 100% technically accurate piece that lacks any amount of actual respect for the game and the players. Seriously.
Plus, he picked Boston. What can I say? The man knows his women’s football.
Ok, so: back to that Twitter thing I mentioned in the last post. For most of the first half of the game, IWFL just straight-up reposted Backseat Coach’s updates (he was posting to the @BostonMilitia account as he is in fact the Designated Militia Twitterer). But let’s take a look at the last few postings in the second quarter:
BSC: 11:06 2ndQ Boston rush TD! Snyder kick good. Boston 14 DC 0. IWFL: 11:06 2ndQ Boston rush TD! Snyder kick good. Boston 14 DC 0.
BSC: Kickoff. Hemlock returns, stopped at own 25. 1st and 10 DC. IWFL: Kickoff. Hemlock returns, stopped at own 25. 1st and 10 DC.
BSC: DC advances the ball 40 yards, as the ref did not see the pass skip off the carpet. IWFL: DC advances the ball 40 yards.
From here on out, it’s not like they stopped reposting his updates entirely but he was definitely on seven-second delay…and of the two Twitter feeds coming in, one started to get reposted juuuuuust a bit more than the other, even though that one too occasionally lacked complete objectivity:
BSC: Snyder 40 yd FG try no good. End of 2ndQ. Boston 14 DC 0. DC: Militia FG attempt fails! Divas have 1/2 min and the ball b/4 first half’s close. IWFL: Militia FG attempt fails! Divas have 1/2 min and the ball b/4 first half’s close.
…and would have lacked even more objectivity if Twitter didn’t have a 140 character limit:
DC: IWFL Eastern Conf championship in the books. Divas trail the Militia 14-0. DC will need to mount a comeback in the 2nd stanza. IWFL: IWFL Eastern Conf championship in the books. Divas trail the Militia 14-0. DC will need to mount a comeback in the 2nd …
DC: Divas’ Hemlock picks off Boston QB in the endzone to prevent another score. DC takes over on their own 20. Time to mount the comeback.. IWFL: Divas’ Hemlock picks off Boston QB in the endzone to prevent another score. DC takes over on their own 20. Time to moun …
And look! Even our superstar QB gets snubbed:
BSC: Cahill amazing rush for a TD! Snyder kick good. 5:43 4th Boston 28 DC 0. DC: Militia adds another TD. PAT good. Divas trail Boston now 28-0. IWFL: Militia adds another TD. PAT good. Divas trail Boston now 28-0.
IWFL: Gatorade! Boston Militia shutout the DC Divas to earn the title of Eastern Conference Champion! Final score: Boston 28 DC 0.
…which is mostly funny because when BSC and I were talking about the Twitter feed later we discussed that his post there wasn’t entirely accurate since, in fact, no beverage other than water is allowed on the field at Dilboy Stadium[ref]Incidentally, that bothers the living hell out of me. Militia players who may be reading, does it bother you too? Or do you not even care so I should just get over it?[/ref], but we both agreed that it just wouldn’t have the same ring to it if he had posted “Water! Boston Militia shutout the DC Divas.”
So the reason I haven’t posted anything post-ECC is because I have this giant list of things to say and I was making the mistake of trying to finish writing each one before putting the post up on the site, which is difficult as I remain pressed for both time and functional brain cells. So I’m just going to start posting unrelated things in a disorganized fashion, because that is just how your Militia Cheerleader rolls.
Item: Backseat Coach and I want to go to Austin for the Superbowl so badly I cannot even tell you. Whether we can or not depends on a situation completely out of our control, but I will keep you posted since I know you’re all on the edge of your seats wondering who the hell else but BSC would be able to send out Twitter play-by-play messages so snarky that the IWFL had to edit his Twitter posts [ref]Yeah, I know they’re called “tweets”. I’m sorry, I just cannot deal with that.[/ref] before adding them to their own feed. (Oh I am SO not making that up. Details forthcoming.)
Item: Oh my God, Toin Coss Announcer Guy[ref]See end of second full paragraph here for reference.[/ref] You know those scenes in movies or TV where someone’s talking but they’re so tired that they keep falling asleep and then someone nudges them and they wake up and say a few more words before falling asleep again? My new theory is that that’s what’s going on with the announcer for the Militia games. I’m serious. There was a whole lot of this:
Announcer: And here are your Boston Milisher[ref][Seriously, he says “Milisher”. Don’t get me wrong – I was born and raised in Boston and am certainly known to leave my R’s off the end of some words, but I don’t think I do the thing where I then add them to the ends of words that didn’t have them in the first place. Incidentally, he also says “the D.C. Deevers”, but I’m leaving that one alone.[/ref] captains: Kelly Barker, Mia Brickhouse, Allison Cahill, and…. [pause] Me and Barker’s parents: MOLLY GOODWIN. Announcer: …and Molly Goodwin.
Item: Also someone should probably tell them they might want to switch to the radio edits of a few songs. Just sayin’.
And on that note, Item: Overheard at the ECC:
[M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” plays over the loudspeaker.] Backseat Coach: Why are they playing this song? Me: What? I like this song. BSC: It’s all…gunshots. Me: It’s not all gunshots. It’s gunshots and a cash register and a Clash riff. BSC: OK, I guess that is a cash register. Me: Of course it is. She needs it for after she takes your mon-ay.[ref]That line is a lot better if you imagine she’s saying “Monet,” by the way. Makes me think of Pierce Brosnan in Thomas Crown Affair. Yay![/ref]
BSC: Well, I still disapprove.
Item: I can’t understand why I didn’t notice this as a problem before, but I became quite concerned early in the game that yelling “Defense!” in an encouraging fashion sounds a lot like yelling “Divas!” in an encouraging fashion. Or maybe just to me because I can’t hear worth a damn, which is why I had to ask whether we were “going to the ‘ship” or “going to the show” since in fact, what it sounded like to me was that we were “going to the shit” which, I suppose, could be considered accurate also.
So! Part 2 of this post will hopefully follow in a few hours, with extra bonus photos of Backseat Coach’s Crocodile Dundee hat if you’re lucky. And I think you are, my friends, I think you are.
Seeing as how I am crazy excited for tomorrow’s game but am still trying to pull myself together from the past few sucky weeks and thus have exactly no actually helpful things of my own to say about it, I’ve decided to continue my tradition of posting completely ridiculous versions of other people’s legitimate pep talks.
Brief background of this one: I discovered a number of things while exploring the different websites of all the teams involved in the IFAF Women’s World Championship: one is that there are a lot more teams than I would have thought there were (with some seriously kick-ass names), and another is that Germans take this shit really effing seriously.
I’m not kidding, man. This site kinda gives the IWFL site a run for its money (well, from what I can tell, what with not speaking German and all), and here’s a blog that I think is mostly about the recent world championship. There’s a post from that blog that I’d like to share with you all now, because the fact of the matter is this: no matter what language you speak, no matter what team you play for, no matter what particular connection you have to the game of women’s football, at the end of the day there’s still nothing funnier than pain medication combined with online translation engines.
I’m pretty sure this post is about the German players’ observations of the motivational posters put up by the Canadians in their shared lodging, most of which seem to involve metaphors about geese. As with the earlier post, I highly recommend that you read it out loud (or get someone else to):
Although on the plant four teams live here, one gets oneself only rarely to face. Either one is on the way or the others. With all one can converse, at most contact has one however to Canada, because they divide with us most houses. So we must come from the Staff each time by a Canadian corridor around to our rooms.
The Canadians we hung many Motivationsspüche up. So for example the picture from Friday Night Lights with the saying “CAN you fuel element perfect?” or Al Pacino with “inches”.
In addition also hand written articles for motivation over two Canadian game geese, which that saw to coach here. Geese ensure for each other, work in the team. Who cannot do no more, can be dropped back and the Führungsarbeit** takes over the next whole. If it needs a break, a goose remains with it. When eating one watches out, while the other one eats. The usual motivation saying. The geese do not make however, because they are geese, but Canadians!!!
But we found most beautiful still: My more better is more better than your more better. Good, more better, stock it is not sufficient to want to be only better. We will give today our BEST in order to win.
Fuck yeah, we will.
** As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I know absolutely nothing about the German language so I have no idea what “Führungsarbeit” means, but is that not, like, the scariest thing you’ve ever heard? A bunch of geese are flying together and one drops back and gets TAKEN WHOLE BY THE FüHRUNGSARBEIT? Holy shit! Attention, all Militia running backs: tomorrow, run as if the Führungsarbeit were on your heels. You have the admiration and support of the Backseat Coach, me, and possibly Al Pacino.
From my Boston Militia Google alert this morning, posted here as an image because I don’t need that kind of search engine traffic, thankyouverymuch:
Oh, spambots. Can’t you stick to trying to sell me performance-enhancing herbal remedies to enhance a performer I don’t have in the first place? Why you gotta drag the Militia into it? Shoot.
NB: I would just like it to be known that in the first version of this post, I misspelled the word “gigolo” in the post title and was informed of this via email about forty-five seconds later by the Backseat Coach. Always diligent, that one!
So I had a whole post all ready to go about the IFAF Women’s World Championship but I realized that if anyone actually followed the links I put in there, it might ruin the game that’s been amusing me to no end over the past two weeks or so. So let’s get to that now and I’ll post the other stuff later. Deal? Deal.
OK, so: what follows is a list of absolutely real women’s football team names from different parts of Europe, plus a few that the Backseat Coach and I completely made up. Guess which ones are which! (NB: Team USA members who may actually know this would normally be disqualified, but if they’re all still jetlagged and spacey I’m willing to let it ride.)
Antwerp Harpies
Berlin Kobras
Budapest Wolves Ladies
Cologne Crocodiles
Duesseldorf Blades
Helsinki Gargoyles Ladies
Krakow Mean Cats
Lower Austria Titans Ladies
Minsk Express
Mülheim Shamrocks
Neuss Frogs
Nuremberg Hurricanes
Stockholm Mean Machines
Stuttgart Scorpions Sisters
I’ll post the correct answers tomorrow; in the meantime, feel free to debate in the comments section…extra points for actually posting your guesses. Answers below!
Please note: the last link in this post goes to a site that might not be great to look at in a conservative work environment or around kids or your grandma (unless your grandma is a fan of MAXIM magazine-style imagery, in which case: rock on, grandma.)
Hey, all…seriously long time, no post and for that I apologize. Life pulled a Vicky Eddy and your Militia Cheerleader has had a crappy past few weeks, including the discovery that “drowsiness may occur” can also mean “this shit will mess with your brain so badly that you’ll literally be unable to write and will spend large portions of the day staring at things and vaguely remembering what it felt like to be coherent but too bad, you have to stay on it anyway.” I am seriously pissed that this had to occur during this particular time in the IWFL season, since now I have to try to catch up on everything I wanted to post about the Women’s World Championship (ok, not that I didn’t expect us to dominate, but an aggregate score of 201 to 0? Holy crap, USA) and the upcoming epic game against DC this Saturday. (Wait, can you call something epic before it happens? I mean, like, other than another Lord of the Rings movie or something? I totally can’t remember. Goddammit.)
So I am going to try to get to all that over the next few days – as well as sneak in another Meet Your Militia or two if possible – but first, I have to talk about some way less-fun stuff.
I wish I didn’t have to. I wish I could skip right over every hateful bullshit comment made by every asshole that I come across when reading about women playing football – ’cause damn, man, there’s a lot. I save links to almost all the articles I find, positive or negative, and I organize them into categories in the hopes that someday I will have both the time and the ability to actually post and discuss them; there’s a whole horrific section comprised exclusively of articles and comments (lots and lots of comments) so nauseatingly hate-filled and degrading that I remain torn about whether or not to even post links to them.
It sucks either way, you know? I mean, who wants to say to their friend, “Oh, hey – did you see over here where some guy saw a video clip of one of your games and then wrote some shit about you that was so violent and graphic that it literally triggered a PTSD episode for me? Oh, and over here, too. And here. Oh, and here…”
On the other hand, if I don’t link to those…if I decide to ignore them, and write them off as just some jackasses who don’t know enough about football to understand that a 45-yard field goal is friggin’ badass regardless of the kicker’s chromosomes, and I don’t talk about what it means that these things are being written and posted and shared and promoted…what then? Well, for one thing, the Backseat Coach checks to make sure no one performed a surreptitious lobotomy on me while we were sleeping since he is aware that I am apparently physically incapable of NOT starting shit when there’s shit to be started, but more importantly, I lose the potential opportunity to explain all of this to people other than a) those who already agree with me and b) fucked-up jerkoffs who will never agree with me. By this “other” group, of course, I mean the vast majority of America’s sports-watching population.
Here’s where I start pulling generalizations out of my ass, so feel free to tell me if you think I’m off-base on any of this. But I believe that the aforementioned vast majority of America’s sports-watching population would agree with the following statements: one, that women should be allowed to play whatever sports they want but two, no one has any interest in watching them when they do so it doesn’t really matter. And then there’s a third statement, sometimes unspoken and sometimes put right out there, that since women nowadays CAN play sports if they want to, they no longer have any business complaining about gender inequality in the arena of athletics.
The WNBA is the obvious hallmark example of this. I came across an interesting exchange between a guy who’s a vocal supporter of the WNBA and a guy who staunchly believes that the only reason the WNBA has vocal supporters of any gender is because women really dig playing the victim card. Link to full text is here; the basic gist is that Ben the WNBA Supporter Guy says supportive stuff about the WNBA and then Chris the Not-So-Supporter Guy complains that it’s all much ado about whining, and Ben the Supporter Guy says that WNBA fans – and I would extend this to include fans of any women’s professional or semi-professional sports – are in a lose-lose situtation: “If we defend it, we come off as ‘juvenile’ (as you put it). If we ignore it and don’t address the issues, they keep occurring. So…I choose to at least talk about the issues rather than sit idle.”
Chris the Other Guy then responds with this: “I really don’t understand why you think there are ‘issues’ to address. If you ignore ‘what’, then ‘what’ keeps occurring?”
What keeps occurring?
This, motherfucker. People write shit like that and fuckin’ Sam Adams and Jerry Remy’s sports bar fall all over themselves to advertise right next to it. Perhaps it’s my victim card talking, but I’d say that qualifies as “an issue.” And that is why I write.
