“Knowing how to play the game”: futsal in the Feminist Futsal Project

Abstract

This study seeks to understand how the coach and the researcher, the first author of the study, perceives herself as a leader in the process to develop a pedagogical environment for engaging women in futsal. It is an autoethnographic research, employing participant observation and entries in the coach’s field diary. Analyses and discussions of this study enables comprehension of the teaching-learning processes regarding “knowing how to play the game” of futsal and, in the context of the Feminist Futsal Project, resulted in at least four types: (1) “the game of life”; (2) “the obvious game”; (3) “the game of time” and; (4) “the dispute game”. All of them, in a sense, crossed by gender and power relations in dispute; making “knowing how to play the game” exceed the constitution of the rules of the sport.