Worldfocus.org report by Gizem:

The Turkish national football team recently beat Estonia 4-2 in the World Cup 2010 qualifiers. When I mention the World Cup, many of you probably understand that I’m not talking about “football” the American way. The sport is called “soccer” in the U.S., but “football” in the rest of the world. I watched the game in a popular vacation spot in the south of Turkey with a small group of Turks. As we went crazy watching the game, showing the most extreme of emotions after each exciting moment, bewildered tourists looked our way with curious eyes. They might know the beaches of Turkey well but what they probably didn’t know was how fanatical Turkish people can become while watching football — especially if the national team is at stake.

It’s true: Turks are mad about football. But most of them are unaware of a new development in the field: A new professional women’s football league. For many Turks, football is simply a men’s sport, one not meant to be played by women. That’s why, for so many years, little girls playing soccer on the streets in their neighborhoods have been ignored by their families and sports professionals. Women’s soccer existed on an amateur level, but never really developed because of lack of attention and understanding.

Now, a group of brave girls are trying to change the status quo in Turkey, but they are not aware of how brave they actually are.

For the signature story we produced for Worldfocus from Turkey about a women’s football team, I had to embark on a 12-hour bus ride with the players on their way to a very crucial game away from home. Most of them asked me why we chose to make a story about them. They didn’t understand why some stranger was filming them for a story to be aired on American television.

As most of them are very young, maybe they don’t understand how important they are to the future generations of women football players in Turkey. And what their courage and persistence to do what their passionate about in the face of opposition meana to the women’s movement not only in Turkey but anywhere in the world.

And many of them are probably unaware of how difficult it has been for their managers to form this team and take it to where it is right now. The team we followed is from a conservative city called Sakarya. The manager of the team, Sinan Panta, told us that it hasn’t been easy for him to start a women’s team there. “They even had newspaper headlines asking ‘Are you a pervert?’” said Panta. For many in Turkey, there are still some boundaries that women should respect, and the football field is one step too far.

For many of these girls, football is a passion. They grew up playing football on the streets, with the older guys in the neighborhood. Many of them had parents who opposed to them playing football, thinking it’s not meant for girls, it’s not too lady-like and too physical. Some of the parents didn’t want their kids to get too interactive with guys on the streets and some parents simply wanted their daughters home no matter what. But these girls did not give up and kept on playing. Now they are the pioneer players of a new league that is struggling to prove to the whole of Turkey that football is not only a men’s sport.

Our story about women’s football in Turkey is about women being capable of anything. We still have a long way to go in Turkey to comprehend and implement this fact. I recently read a newspaper article about a Turkish woman weightlifter who won an international competition. She talked in the article about how hard it’s been to get accepted by the weightlifting community. Weightlifting is one of the most important national sports for Turks and it’s also  placed in the nation’s collective conscious as men’s turf. The woman weightlifter explained how professional coaches in the field did not believe in her because she was a woman and how they thought it would be a waste of time to train her. But she proved all of them wrong.

The women football players are also encountering abuse when they play. I read in a New York Times story about how some women players complained about men coming to their games and yelling out at them from the stands. Or simply people, mostly men, making fun of them as soon as the girls mention they belong to a professional football team. “We should play you” some of them say sarcastically, implying they’d beat them right away. “To them, we’re just women,” says the team captain Esra Erol.

I think it’s a huge step forward to have a professional women’s football league in Turkey; after all, it has been established in so many European countries for many years. Girls playing football or lifting heavy weights for competition are at the beginning of a long road to establish total equality for women and men in Turkey. It’s not going to be easy but as girls, like the ones in Sakarya women’s football team, insist on and act upon proving they can do anything they want, people will have to accept that basic truth.

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