when sport changes your life

Physical education teacher, Carolina Dunn went to watch a soccer game. The Spartansthe foundation that seeks to reintegrate prisoners into society through rugby.

Dunn played with them and He left prison wanting to do the same but with women. It was 2016 and he organized things to overcome the bureaucracy and get them to play rugby too.

On precarious terrain, without grass and with uneven and pitted ground, shortly after that men’s game He summoned detainees to assemble the women’s team in Unit 47 of San Martínnorth of the Buenos Aires suburbs.

The first step was taken. Without adequate physical condition, more than one thought about giving up when she was out of breath and had to run, but she yelled at them no, that it was not worth giving up and that we had to continue. And they took a breath and continued. And they continue.

This is when the writer Agustina Caride appears on the scene. That does not come from the sport, but in the end it became the third eye of The Spartans. What she saw and heard she wrote for a book whose title is Let’s go girls! – The Spartans, the first women’s rugby team in prison (Editorial Marea).

Caride knew about The Spartans in a barbecue He thought he could help by giving a writing or reading workshop. But in 2021, when the pandemic had eased, “with a mask and alcohol gel,” she entered the female pavilion 2 of Unit 47 ready to tell the story of Las Espartanas. And she wrote almost 200 pages that are more than sports.

“They as protagonists and I as a simple compiler of their stories. They, the ones who leave everything on the court”, she presented her book already in 2024.

In addition to Dunn and Caride, The story is completed with more women. Some live in cells. Others are known as caretakers and they are the ones who should take care of them. It is impossible not to generate a certain brotherhood. Also, certain fights. In the cell, Caride will write, the girls seem to become a mere surname. Catalina, whose real name no one knows, will be called Caty but she will be called “Álvarez.” “The way those in charge call the inmates,” Caride will describe. Through rugby, they are more than just a surname.

“I started believing that I was going to construct the stories and in the end I ended up deconstructing myself. I was simplifying. From something as banal as the outfit I planned to wear every Monday ‘so as not to show off’. I entered with the anxiety of meeting them and ended up reviewing my own history. I have brought them paintings, plants to decorate. And I left with something inside me, from the smell of cigarettes, the cold in winter, the music that kept playing because of the volume with which they listened to cumbia,” he reminds Viva.

From “what did they do to be there?” From the first day, Caride began to feel like a guest at those birthday parties where she doesn’t know anyone. Each meeting lasted two hours between mates and biscuits and patience: she knew that at some point someone would break the ice. And so it was.

The greetings became more effusive, the mates were no longer bitter but sweet as she liked them and the tea was very hot in the winter. “That gesture of mine on the first day, as if I needed to hang my wallet across the strip, ended in the gesture of leaving it forgotten on top of a bench, of telling someone to give me my cell phone or to look for a pen. Where? There, in the wallet.”

According to the Espartanos Foundation from its website, the percentage of recidivism with this program has reached 5 percent, while among those who do not participate in the proposal, a recidivism rate of 65 percent was recorded.

As for the girls, some got formal jobs after regaining their freedom. There are those who even work in hostels where they help homeless people. According to the same source, The Los Espartanos program expanded to reach 60 prisons in 16 provinces. Almost a thousand prisoners were trained for different professions and 100 of them have jobs. In prisons, the detainees banished a belief: that rugby is only a man’s sport.

One of the best days they lived The Spartans It was when they came out of prison to play a friendly at the San Fernando Rugby Club against the girls from Banco Hipotecario. The most important victory was not on the scoreboard (they won the first 10 to 2 and the second 20 to 11) but in the famous third period. On another occasion, they were visited and interviewed by a television channel dedicated to sports. His fifteen minutes of fame were a way to achieve unexpected happiness.

Caride accompanied them to another game, in Tigre. He reminds Viva: “The day they played a game outside the prison, there were three who wanted to go to the bathroom, and a guard had to accompany them. I was walking behind them, and it was like four friends, only one had a gun hanging from her belt. But they laughed, they chatted as if they were at halftime, or third period. That shocked me. I think that type of relationship grew thanks to being Spartans, to the sport that somehow makes everyone equal.”.

That time, upon hearing the previous harangue, he knew that they left him the title for his book: “There were his family, friends, children. It was very emotional to see them run, hug their loved ones.. They wore the shirt with the pride of knowing that they were going to show themselves, to put on a show. They had made a circle, the coach was in the middle giving the last instructions. And then, one of them applauded and shouted what ended in the title: ‘Let’s go girls.’ And she added ‘fuck’.”

“I learned not to prejudge. I understood the benefits of a team sport, the values ​​that can be transmitted and learned from a game when it is played fairly. I learned, too, that I am not special. In there they brought out that ‘writer’s ego’ in me. I was one more. And without a doubt I valued life, freedom, the privileged place in which I was born and raised. I left home at the age of 25, almost thrown out by my old man and that, which in my life became a tragedy, next to his stories was a world of scented cotton. I was even ashamed to share ‘my problems,’” says Caride.

And he adds: “Something I didn’t know about rugby is that anyone can play it. That is to say, there is a position for different types of people. You can be short or tall, fat or skinny, clumsy or skillful, fast or slow.. On the other hand, it was a sport about which they knew nothing, not even a rule. Starting was starting not only from scratch, but all at the same level. That is already a great metaphor for many things in their lives. There, where you have to make sure your shirts or sneakers aren’t stolen, where the leader is, the stupid one, the piola, suddenly they were equal with equal opportunities. Each one was finding where to stand out, what to offer.

Being part of a team also says a lot: It is learning to live together, to understand that every movement you make benefits or harms the rest, let’s read ‘rest’ as a society.”. Now that her story is in bookstores, Caride remembers how it all started for her. The physical barriers of the Penitentiary Service, the chicken wire type door, a wall, another door but made of iron, the hallways and the padlocks.

“Behind all that, they,” he says. “Barriers that we put between human beings. I don’t forget that they are imprisoned for a reason, but the question is how to get out of there knowing that there are so many obstacles? That is, they go out, the problem is what awaits them outside? A second chance? Are those of us who live on this side willing to give second chances? Or are we going to continue putting up barriers?”