The Combatant Side

Editorial by Courtny Cotten | Field Owner

I have watched the same arrival enough times that I can tell you how it goes. Someone pulls onto the gravel alone. They stand by the truck a minute longer than the walk requires. Then somebody already in the chrono line waves them over. It is not a welcome speech. It is an assumption. You are here. Get in it. By the end of the morning they have a lane and a name people are using. They have a reason to come back.

Sometimes that someone is a man who has not had a crew in years. Sometimes it is a woman who has spent years in rooms where wanting a fight was treated as a costume. The line does not sort them. I want the rest of the day to live up to the line.

That is the club. People reach for the word brotherhood. It fits a lot of the men here. It is too small for the parking lot. Coyote Force is a club for men and for women. I have come to think it matters especially for women.

The field still holds the other days. Birthday parties. Gellyball for kids. Private groups who come once and go home glad. I am glad of those days too. This is about the people who stay. The men and women who keep coming back after the masks come off.

The thing men are hungry for is real. I will not thin it out to make a point. They want a repeating Saturday with the same people. The stakes are fake. The loyalty is not. A lot of men do not have that anywhere. This field can be where they find it.

What I under-said is that women come looking for a scarcer room. They are not looking for a softer game. They are looking for the combatant side of life. You take ground. You make the plan. You get hit and you call it. You push again. Ordinary life will hand a woman every role except that one. Then it acts surprised if she wants it. Out here she can spend the whole day inside it.

The respect that makes the day possible is not a speech. It is what a teammate does when the person beside them is a woman and the lane still has to be held. The squad needs her to be good. It needs that from anyone with a lane. She needs the same from them. Real appreciation is for the play. People remember who called the hit and who gave an order worth following. A compliment for having shown up is not respect. Moving when she says move is respect.

I am a man. I do not get to narrate the inside of that for her. I can tell you the standard I want kept. It is the one the people who stay already practice. You will be shot by women here. An hour later you will be glad they were on your side. You will take a plan from a woman here. The plan will stand because it was the plan. Some people would rather talk about her being here than play next to her. The club is not for them. The club is the people who want her on the line.

I did not invent the hunger. My dad put a marker in my hands in 1998 in the woods around Sugar Creek. What stayed was the way a morning rearranged who you were to each other by lunch. He was a teacher and a coach. He believed you developed people by playing with them. Coyote Force is that belief with a county road attached. The women who drive out to find out what kind of combatant they are are part of that work now. So are the men who get better because those women are beside them.

Here is the part that has nothing to do with courage. It has to do with Tuesday.

Life is hard in the ordinary ways. Work runs long. Money is never finished. A partner is worried. Family needs more than you have left. Surviving takes the hours that playing would have used. I watch people who love this place go quiet. They still care. The week used them up. Saturday starts to look like one more thing they owe.

A club that ignores this becomes a hobby for people with spare money and spare time. We are trying not to let that happen. We keep the day as cheap as the field can honestly stand. Rentals mean you do not have to buy a marker to belong. The price is meant to survive a normal paycheck. When one of ours is having a rough go we help. There is no form for it. I am not going to publish a coupon. A member is someone whose absence we feel. That is the only sense in which I use the word. Their energy is part of why everyone else comes back. If a hard month is what stands between them and the line we would rather solve the month than lose the person.

That help only matters if the Saturday pays them back.

On the field the camaraderie is mechanical. That is why it holds. You take a hit and you call it. The person beside you does the same. If they do not you have a short adult conversation. It is finished before the next push. Somebody you met an hour ago holds a lane so you can move. Somebody you have known for a year makes a bad call. You give them grief in the staging area. Then you run the next game on their plan anyway. That is what a crew is. For a few hours the job cannot reach you. Neither can the bill. You are a combatant among people who need you to be one. That is the relief. It is also the point.

In February 2025, streetcleaner wrote what the crew actually is. "so refreshing to have team mates that had my back and to fight along side with. The team support system is something special."

The factions give the day a spine that lasts past the afternoon. An armband becomes a name. A name becomes a reputation that survives the winter. Some of the people writing that history are women. The game does not keep a separate scoreboard for them. It does not keep one for who is broke this month.

coal1483 wrote the Saturday down in March. "Great job today everyone! Great games, great people, great atmosphere. All at Coyote."

Off the field is where you can tell it is a club.

The Discord has been running since 2021. This field opened in 2024. Thursday belongs to the club as much as Saturday does. Someone in Lafayette offers a seat. Someone else asks whether a build will clear chrono and gets a straight answer. A new player wonders if rentals will make them look foolish. They ask it more quietly than they mean to. The reply is instructions. Men ask. Women ask. The right answer does not change. Between games people arrange rides and argue about kit. They text the person who shot them because they want that person beside them next time. This is also where we notice who has gone quiet. Then we say so.

I have watched people grow inside it. That is the part I care about most. It is also the part I have the least right to claim. A player who arrived alone becomes the one who waves the next truck into the line. A renter buys a first marker because somebody said what not to waste money on. A woman who spent her first Saturday learning the rules spends a later Saturday writing a plan other people follow. A man who came for a hobby stays because the club knows his name. Someone in a bad stretch comes anyway because we made it possible. The staging area is better for it. The club gets larger without getting thinner.

The standard is short. Show up. Call your hits. Respect the combatant beside you. Look after the person on your left. Come back. That includes the months when coming back is the hard part.

You can grow with it for a summer or for years. There is no rank you age out of. There is no kit you must already own. Women are not guests. The club does not only work when life is easy. The people who have been here longest are the first to make room. I say that from experience. The room they make is a fighting position. That is the culture worth protecting. Toughness means you stay. Respect means you treat the person next to you as a combatant. A man or a woman. Care means you do not let a rough month erase someone this place runs on.

If you have been looking for a club this is one. If you want a Saturday on the combatant side with teammates who will appreciate you there the chrono line is where it starts. If money or the weight of the week is what keeps you home then tell us. We want you here. Men and women. Same brief. Same field.

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