A level playing field: a rant.

I've never really got the hang of football. I mean, I know it's vitally important, but I've never quite managed to work out exactly why.

Still, I've just discovered something that's piqued my interest.

There's a wonderful not-for-profit organisation called The Ant which helps communities in Assam in India. It provides work for impoverished women, and it tries to combat prejudice and violence between the many different groups of people living there.

A new project has been the formation of mixed junior frisbee teams. Each team has to have representatives of each sex, various religions, and several ethnic or tribal groups.


photo by  Raimond Spekking

It's working well in reducing prejudice (well, you can't be prejudiced once you've had an opportunity to judge for yourself, can you) and something that The Ant's co-founder Jennifer Liang said has given me a new insight, not only into frisbee, but into football, too.

"As the sessions progressed, they [the boys] quickly realised that the girls were valuable for the team. Frisbee was the perfect vehicle to impart lessons to the children as the sport was new to both genders. Unlike football, it offered a level playing field."

Football without a level playing field?

Now that's something I'd really be interested to see.

Word To Use Today: frisbee. Frisbees were first sold by Walter Frederick Morrison. He called them the Flyin-Saucer at first, and later an improved version was called the Pluto Platter. After he sold the company to Wham-O in the late 1950s the disc became known as a frisbee because of Bridgeport Connecticut college students' craze for skimming Frisbie bakery pie tins at each other.