The Female Perspective

Boy am I sunburned. First thing, always, ALWAYS, have sunscreen on hand. My son and I were in a tournament this past weekend and while it was cold and the days started windy, that Saturday I practically burned my face off (and my hands, and the back side of my knees, everything else was covered).

But the takeaway for me this weekend was the fact that for the first time in forever, I worked with two women and one of them was the center. Both were grade 7, so they knew what they were doing and they shed some light on the female side of the game that I really hadn't seen before.

First of all, I know how I like to call a game. And I know I call the game different if it guys out there playing or women. I know I do, there is no denying it, at least for me, that gender does influence, at least a little bit, my calls. I don't particularly want to call games differently, but I know I do. For one, the hip check is different. Guys don't do that, so when girls do it, it is taken into consideration because it is not shoulder to shoulder. The other aspect that is totally different is the handling calls. Truth be told, we men muck it up, it seems to me. Some of us call it like we call men's games, if it touches the hand, it is handling, period.

What I took away from seeing a woman doing a woman's game was that she was calling it like I would call a man's game if I were in the center. She was treating them like players and not thinking of gender. At least that is what my realization was. At one point, the orange coach got flustered because there was a play where a girl fell and could have been a foul. He said something (I didn't hear specifics) but the center said, "These are women, coach. They are not made of crystal. They can fall and get up again."

I correlate this to a game I did a couple of weeks ago where I called some fouls and the girls were complaining about the same thing, that I was calling things that shouldn't be called (one team was much more aggressive). Perhaps they were right. I know that if I had been the center of that match that this center did, I would have called more fouls. I just wonder if I can adjust my game to accommodate that different view, that the players are players first and they need to be treated as such instead of looking at them as men or women and adjusting my bar that significantly.