So on the night of the Boston/Chicago semifinal, I went with Backseat Coach back to our hotel room after the game and proceeded to stay up until 3 am writing a long, cathartic, six-page single-spaced essay about everything that had happened in the Militia’s world in the last few weeks. And then the next morning I checked Facebook and saw this status update from one of the players:

Boston Militia all day – this L is based on politics. Charge it to the game.

And I thought, who the hell needs my 5,000-word Unabomber diatribe when she just summed it all up in two sentences? So I sat on this for a while. Then the WFA final got closer, and I wanted to post something about why Backseat Coach and I were not there (we had planned from the beginning of the season to go, regardless of who was playing). Part of it is that I’m utterly exhausted and have been really sick over the past two weeks (Dear whoever said the nausea ends after the first trimester: Excuse me, but your pants are on fire). But part of it absolutely is that I’m so angry and frustrated by the string of bizarre events that capped off the Militia’s 2012 season that I can’t bring myself to celebrate this league right now. I do not, at the moment, have any pride in the WFA. And I can’t bring myself to spend a thousand-plus dollars and get sick on an airplane while trying to hold a 15-month-old on my lap to get to something produced by an organization for whom I have nothing but contempt right now, for multiple reasons. I just can’t do it.

So I wanted to try to explain more about that, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to edit down the huge thing I wrote after the Chicago game. So here’s the majority of it (minus a few bits that really were superfluous). It’s long and it’s loud and it’s from my heart, because that’s really the only way I know how to write.

(more…)

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Hey! If you’re looking for the links to coverage of tonight’s games, they’re right here.

It’s a bird. It’s a bug. I hope it’s not a bug.

Dear Chicago: What the hell is in the tree outside our hotel room that sounds like a discordant fire alarm? Is it a bird? A bug? A lot of bugs? We have no idea. But it’s really weird. Giant locusts? Are we too far north for cicadas? Man, it’s creepy.

You know you’ve been to a lot of away games when you have conversations like this.

– Do you want to go to breakfast or do you want to go to the hotel first?
– Let’s go to the hotel; there’s breakfast right across from there.
– There is?
– Yeah, don’t you remember? Right across there street there’s a Denny’s.
– Oh yeah, there is. IN AUSTIN.
– Oh. Right.

In case you were wondering…

…who drives a neon blue Ford Mustang rental car: why yes, yes, that would be us. I actually think it’s the car they give you when they think you may have come to Chicago specifically to commit a crime of some sort. Ain’t too many of these babies out on the road. Also, oddly enough, Ford Mustangs were apparently not designed with short pregnant women in mind. That shit is low to the ground, is all I’m saying. It would have to be a pretty decent crime to make it worthwhile for me to get in and out of that car just for that.

Yay, this article. Boo, my standards.

This is a pretty good article, for a mainstream media article. Or, as I put it to Backseat Coach: “Hey, you should read this. There’s no part of it that made me want to bang my head against a wall.” I said that, and then I thought about how wicked sad it was that THAT’S where I’ve set the bar for mainstream media these days. But honestly, can you blame me?

P11 what-what!!

Gathering troops to hit Party City for any last-minute ridiculous gameday needs. Jen of the Force, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry in advance for the cowbells, friend. But a cheerleader’s gotta do what a cheerleader’s gotta do. Militia, go do what you do. I’ll be cheering.

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National Conference Championship: Boston Militia @ Chicago Force
Saturday, July 21st
7 pm local • 8 pm EST
Video: Live stream on the Chicago Force website. It will be available as free video-on-demand from their site after the game as well.
Audio: WJOB 1230 (online, and there’s even a mobile app! Awesome.)
Twitter: Play-by-play from @backseatcoach and the regular Force twitter feed. If the play-by-play is too much for you, quarterly/scoring updates will be available via the Boston Militia Twitter feed and the Force gameday Twitter feed.

American Conference Championship: Dallas Diamonds @ San Diego Surge
Saturday, July 21st
5:30 pm local • 8:30 pm EST • 7:30 pm if for some reason you’re in Chicago
Audio broadcast here and apparently a second one here; the Diamonds will be updating their Facebook page and probably also Twitter. The Surge usually post scoring updates on their Facebook page as well.

Backseat Coach and I intend to be at the Chicago game. Tiny Coach decided to make things interesting by getting incredibly sick over the weekend (if I had less of a thing about privacy I’d post videos of what a 14-month-old playing peekaboo looks like before and after he’s given codeine) but he’s doing a lot better now and we expect to be able to travel as planned on Saturday. (We are assuming that one can carry a cowbell, a giant bling skull & crossbones necklace and about half a dozen pomegranates in one’s carry-on; we’ll keep you posted on the accuracy of this assumption.)

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Since Sunday, I have been working on a whole marathon post about the media coverage of last Saturday’s events and every time I thought I was almost done, something worse would come out. At some point I decided that that wasn’t the post I wanted to make; that’s not what I want to say. Anyone with any sense already knows how much it sucks that THIS is what finally catapulted women’s football onto the national scene (albeit briefly), and anyone with the most basic ability to read knows that the comments on those articles are nothing less than an embarrassment to humanity.

So here is what I do want to say. I hope that you can hear it.

I don’t believe that violence defines you, and I believe that you can prove that it doesn’t.

I believe that the men who leave degrading, angry, repulsive comments on stories about you do so because they are fundamentally afraid of what it would mean if you really are as strong and powerful as you look.

I also believe that they are pathetic, cowardly assholes.

I don’t want any of you to get hurt, for any reason, ever. On the field or off.

I want to reclaim this sport from this low point. I have so much passion for it and the amazing women involved – in teams all across the country – and this isn’t what I want to have to focus on.

I need this sport to grow in strength and numbers, because I recently found out that I’ll be having another little boy later this year and since I don’t want either of my sons to ever actually play football, I want them to believe that it’s just a sport for women. So if you all could get on that, that would be awesome.

With true admiration and respect from the top row of the stands,

xo
militia cheerleader

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You can check out the fully updated bracket here, but here’s the punchline:

Once I have game time & broadcast details I’ll post those too, of course. Off to check out flights to Chi-town (which I still don’t know how to pronounce).

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Overheard in the stands

Person 1: MORE cops? What’s happening now?

Person 2: I dunno, but I hope it ends up involving handcuffs. [Pause] Huh. This isn’t usually the setting where I say that kind of thing.

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OK, so the WFA Round 3 playoff game schedule is below along with all I know about where to find streams & updates. If you’ve got any more info, lemme know and I’ll add it ASAP. The coverage of American Division (west coast) games is surprisingly sparse!

[table id=2 /]

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