Indoor soccer: a few thoughts the morning after.

In my last post, I mentioned that I was about to start a soccer class. It turns out "class" might not be quite the right designation for it, as there wasn't any formal instruction, discussion of techniques, etc. (Not that I didn't get schooled at various points in the evening.) Instead, we pretty much just played.

It's worth noting that this was not soccer on a big, grassy field. It was indoor soccer -- in a gymnasium with a smaller "field" surface, with sneakers squeaking against the floor and the ball slamming against walls. In lots of ways, this is a completely different game from the other kind of soccer.

Though I make no promise that they're connected by any deeply significant common thread, here are my thoughts after the first night of indoor soccer:

• If you don't have super-precise aim or lots of power behind your shots, you can still be useful to your team by challenging everything the other team might try to do with the ball. (See, training in analytic philosophy can be useful for other things!) Someone has the ball and is taking some time to find an open teammate and line up a shot? I charge him. He gets rid of the ball more quickly (and less carefully) than he would have liked. Repeat every time someone else on that team gets the ball. Once I get better at actually stealing the ball, this could work out pretty well.
• Frequently, defense is a matter of happy accidents. Having a good prediction of the precise trajectory the ball is taking and intervening with a foot is nice, but just being in the way can work, too -- even if the part of you that's in the way is your face.
• For some reason, men seem to think its a really big deal when a ball they kicked hits a woman in the face -- even when she says she's fine and insists that play continue. Are there lots of extremely fragile women who sign up for indoor soccer? (Maybe most of them shattered already, which is why they weren't there last night.)
• Gymnasium floors are not as "cushiony" as grass fields, and this makes them more efficient bruisers of people who fall on them.
• With a smaller field, being in the other team's collective face requires less running. However, one has to make more of a conscious effort to do anything resembling "playing a position".
• There are actually some rules, but no one who knows them sees any need to explain them up front. You just start playing, and the players in the know inform you of salient rules as needed (i.e., as you violated them) while play is underway. Feels a little like joining a lab.
• Sometimes the foot with which you're better at kicking is not the foot that's available. You do what you can with the foot that's close at hand.
• I'm guessing that there are noticably fewer women in my area playing over-30 soccer, since the only other woman who was there last night out of 11 of us (and who, by the way, was awesome in play) invited me to Wednesday night practices and a weekend club league.

Current state: A couple bruises, but nothing to make me think I'm going to fall apart or lose mobility (as, say, day 2 after lifting after a long break from weight-training can make you feel).