We Can Play Soccer Too: Fiquh Ben Salah Girls Soccer and Leadership Camp

by Emma Goldbas

As a new volunteer in Morocco, I was surprised when I arrived in my community to see so many young girls playing sports among other girls and boys. In my small mountain town, I was unsure whether or not girls would have the same mobility to play competitive sports. To my pleasant surprise, I was connected with the local, all-girls soccer team in Azilal. The team was comprised of nearly twenty girls from Azilal’s center and the surrounding duwars. I began to play with the girl’s on a weekly basis, joining their practices and traveling to their games to show my support. As the summer came closer, the girls began to play less even though we managed to enjoy several midnight matches during the month of Ramadan. When the holy month was over, the girl’s soccer season had come to an unwelcomed end, and the girls seemed disappointed that there would no longer be any matches or weekly practices until the new school year began.

            During the summer I received a call from another volunteer, Kelsey Goodman in Elqsiba, inviting me to bring my team to a camp she, Alex Matthews, Cole Ulbrict, Treva Vollmer, and Mickey Gamonal were organizing in Fqih Ben Salah. Ecstatic about the prospect, I began to tell my girls about the opportunity. After many phone calls to and from the girls, I was able to take eight players to the soccer camp to train and play with other local teams and participate in a leadership program that would supplement the soccer training.

            We arrived at the Dar Taliba in Fqih Ben Salah and met several girls from nearby towns in my region like Elqsiba, Bouujad, Beni Mellal and the Atlas 05 team from Fqih Ben Salah. Five other Peace Corps volunteers had brought their teams, and several semi-professional players were there to help coach and facilitate the daily activities at the camp.

On the first day of camp, the volunteers facilitated a series of icebreaker activities for the girls to become acquainted with one another and to set boundaries, goals, rules, and a schedule for the camp. Parts of the first icebreaker was arranging the girls into new teams so they would have the opportunity to meet other girls from Morocco and learn to play as a new team with a new name. Each day the coaches and counselors organized soccer drills for the girls on their new respective teams. We ran several drills and had the newly formed teams scrimmage in a tournament that would culminate with a championship game between the two teams with the highest number of points on the last day of camp. It was amazing to see the relationships that formed among the players on their new teams. The girls formed new identities together and learned to play with girls from all over Morocco, girls of all ages and level of soccer skills.

            In the afternoons, these relationships grew even more when a local association called Nun w Finuun Fqih Ben Salah came in to do a series of gender-based trainings that focused on leadership and self-confidence. One training was a confidence builder: it began with a brainstorming activity that encouraged everyone to write both a series of adjectives that described them and a series of adjectives that did not describe them. Then, girls taped a blank piece of paper on their backs. Each girl would walk around in the room until the leader said to stop. The girls that were closest together would write a word or a small phrase that they thought embodied that person. After several minutes, the girls were allowed to take off their piece of paper and look at the words and phrases their peers had written about them. The activity ended with a dialogue about how our self-image sometimes differs from what others see.

Additionally, Nun w Finuun led theater and dance workshops that taught expressive arts and built teamwork skills through creative collaboration. These workshops built up towards the final day when all participants performed their collaborations for the whole camp.

One evening we watched the movie You Can Dream. The movie highlights the stories of six successful Moroccan women who come from a variety of backgrounds and education levels. After the movie, our counterpart Mohamed from Nun w Finnun facilitated a discussion with the girls about gender norms and their goals for the future. The girls talked about expectations of marriage versus education and power dynamics in relationships.

Aside from any activity or movie we watched, the camp empowered the girls by giving them a space to be taken seriously as athletes. The girls came from all different backgrounds. For example one girl plays on the Moroccan U-17 team and other girls have never played a game of organized soccer in their lives. At camp, girls of all skill levels were coached by top-level players and respected as athletes and leaders.

            The Fqih Ben Salah camp was modeled after the girls’ soccer camps that volunteers in the Souss region have hosted with the womens’ professional team AMJAD. We hope that more volunteers across Morocco organize these types of camps to encourage the confidence-building and leadership skills that organized sports inspires within girls.

            Moreover, in a week’s time a group of forty girls from Midwest region of Morocco joined together to play soccer, build leadership and confidence, practice dance and theater, and get to know like-minded girls from their country. Breaking down the set teams and allowing the girls to play on new teams that combined players from all four cities, forged a new kind of camaraderie that was supported by the work of Nun w Finuun Fqih Ben Salah and Peace Corps volunteers. We hope that this camp empowered young girls to continue to play soccer and to be leaders on and off the field.