As spring soccer season begins, a local group of female soccer players insists they're being shut out from the best public soccer fields at prime times. And while it may seem like a minor tussle, it's emblematic of the kinds of bureaucratic disputes that affect quality of life—taxpayers fighting to use resources they pay for, women fighting for equitable access to sports fields, city policies that look okay on paper but don't work so well in real life.

And in the middle of it all is Carrie Lewis.

A longtime soccer player, Lewis started her own soccer league last spring, after quitting the city's biggest soccer league because she felt that their women's division was treated poorly. She named her league Recreational Adult Team Soccer, or RATS. "We're celebrating our first year at RATS, but this first week [of the season] has hardly been a celebration," she tells me glumly. Instead of fighting a large league for better access to fields, she's now fighting the city, whose arcane assignment policy gives established sports leagues first pick of ball fields and leaves her scrappy start-up trying to get by with less desirable fields at inconvenient hours.

"On some days, it's no fields," she says of the spring game schedule she got from the parks department. On other days, she got less than 10 percent of what she requested.

Understanding the forces at play requires understanding the influence of the city's largest soccer league, called Co-Rec Soccer.

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