More women should play fantasy football

If you’re anything like me, you might’ve grown up with a father or another male figure in your life talking about how “Brady got me so many points this week” or “I won my fantasy league, so I’m taking the family out to dinner tonight.”

Until very recently, most of that seemed like a gatekept, hypermasculine mystery. Despite that, I had always been interested in it. Like a lot of the sports world, it’s seen as a male-only activity. I was shocked to find out that 29% of all fantasy football players were female–I thought it would be significantly lower. Although I wouldn’t call myself a massive football fan, I tend to actually want to watch some of each Johnnie football game and procrastinate homework on a Sunday if the Vikings are winning.

When I got invited to join my boyfriend’s fantasy football league with a bunch of our mutual friends, I was hesitant. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to; it was my internalized misogyny telling me I couldn’t. I didn’t know how the app worked, I didn’t know a good draft strategy, I didn’t know enough about football, I didn’t have enough time to keep up with it and the list goes on and on.

None of these excuses were real–the app is self-explanatory, drafting isn’t that hard if you put in minimal research and rely on computerized algorithms for help, you don’t need to know very much about football to participate (not to mention there are others in the league that know less than I do) and it’s not very time consuming if you don’t want it to be. Other than my aunt– also the only female in her league and who regularly beats my dad– I didn’t know of any other women who participated.

But she’s a self-confident 60-something woman from rural Minnesota who has been doing it for ages. As much as I love all the guys in the league, I didn’t know if I would be the laughingstock of the friend group if I came in last at the end of the season or made a mindless draft decision. Against all those excuses I could’ve made, I decided to do it. Like I said, I don’t have the highest football IQ in the world, but I quickly discovered you don’t need to know very much at all. Although it sometimes might help, you don’t need to know much about statistics either, although the two guys beating me in the league were economics majors…

Here’s where my case for women to join fantasy football leagues comes in. Simply put, you get to beat men at their own game. Everything about fantasy football screams hypermasculine and unnecessarily competitive. But I’m a competitive person and a washed-up high school athlete with a point to prove. There is no pleasure in life simpler for me than beating a man at something he is overconfident in. The first time I ran the mile in fifth grade gym class, I came in third in my class to two boys (one of whom now runs DI cross country, so I don’t think I had a chance). The reason I remember that is not because I probably haven’t run a faster mile since; it was because I remember running into the car after school to tell my parents about how I had beaten a bunch of boys in a race. Maybe it was fate that I’m ranked third in my league now.

Every week I get to try and rekindle that sense of fifth grade pride. Deep down I know it doesn’t matter and that it’s meant to be a fun, light-hearted competition to engage in socially, but I can’t help but know that the best way to fight against stigma of women in sports and other unrepresented fields is to overcome, prove yourself and persevere against the barriers to entry.

Despite the low-level of anxiety I feel every Sunday, the reward of pride, fun and chipping away at my internalized misogyny far outweighs the fear I felt at the start of the season.