The Girlz Compete

GirlzClan had become a place where women could find one another.

Now we wanted to see what we could do together.

Over the years, the Girlz played Half-Life Deathmatch, Counter-Strike, Quake III, and Unreal Tournament 2003.

I played all of them, but Half-Life Deathmatch would always be special to me.

It was where StarLight began.

It was where I found my first friends, discovered how much I loved competing, and eventually found the women who would become the Girlz.

But as Counter-Strike grew, the Half-Life Deathmatch servers slowly became quieter. Players moved on, communities changed, and eventually the Girlz followed them into a game that felt nothing like the fast, chaotic world I loved.

I hated Counter-Strike the first time I played it.

The guys who brought me into my first match led me into the bathroom on cs_militia and gave me one simple instruction:

“Stay in here and shoot anyone who comes through the door.”

After constantly running, jumping, and fighting in Half-Life Deathmatch, standing in a bathroom waiting for someone to appear was painfully boring.

My immature self was at least entertained by the turd in the toilet.

I was even more entertained when I discovered it exploded if you shot it.

That was the highlight of the match.

I left and uninstalled the game.

Thankfully, that wasn’t the end of my Counter-Strike story.

Eventually, I reinstalled it and decided to give it one more chance.

My first match back was on de_aztec.

I still hadn’t figured out some of the game’s most basic mechanics. I didn’t know about the buy period, and I didn’t realize I could pick up weapons dropped by other players.

During one round, everyone else on my team was eliminated until I was the last one standing.

Then I ran out of bullets.

All I had left was my knife—and my will to live.

So I did what any perfectly sane person would do. I pulled out my knife, looked toward the last player on the other team, and thought:

Welp… here goes nothing—and everything—all at once.

Then I charged.

It wasn’t a strategy.

It was desperation.

Somehow, it worked.

I got the knife kill and won the round.

For someone who barely understood how the game worked, it felt like an enormous victory. I imagine the other player was considerably less excited about being taken out by a confused beginner with no ammunition.

That ridiculous little victory, during my first match back, was enough to convince me that maybe Counter-Strike deserved another chance.

Before long, it became GirlzClan’s main game.

As the clan grew, other Girlz stepped into leadership roles. BaDGiRL* and SweetiePie* initially led the Counter-Strike team. Sassy*Chica coordinated matches, while SeXyHiTGirl and Mandy helped organize tactics.

We weren’t simply entering public servers beneath the same tag anymore.

We had team leaders.

Match coordinators.

Practices.

Strategies.

Women willing to study maps, organize schedules, and put in hours of work before an official match ever began.

I practiced with the teams, competed when my schedule allowed, helped promote GirlzClan, and stepped in wherever I was needed.

We competed in CAL—the Cyberathlete Amateur League—and through Team Warfare. At one point, our team reached third place in the Team Warfare 3v3 pistols division.

For CAL Season 18, our roster included eleven women:

StarLight, HeavenScent, Tinkerbell, Trinity, MustangChick, KillerChick, Cloworm, KittyKat, Raccoon, Girls suck at CS, and GlockGoddess (who became the clan coleader after LDG stopped playing).

Seeing those names together still makes me proud.

Behind every gamer tag was a woman making room for something she loved.

Some of us were working.

Some were going to school.

Some were raising children or building relationships.

We didn’t have endless free time.

We made time.

We practiced after long days. We rearranged plans for matches. We showed up tired, frustrated, excited, nervous, and sometimes completely unprepared for whatever technical problem the internet decided to throw at us that night.

Servers lagged.

Connections dropped.

Updates broke things.

Someone’s ping could suddenly become impossible five minutes before a match.

The technology rarely cared how hard we’d practiced.

But when everything worked, there was nothing quite like it.

The team joined the server.

The familiar names appeared.

The match went live.

For those rounds, everything outside the computer seemed to disappear.

We were the Girlz.

And we were there to compete.

Of course, not every match ended the way we hoped.

Our first CAL match of Season 18 was against HitList on de_concrete.

We’d prepared well for the Terrorist side.

The Counter-Terrorist side was another story.

We lost.

It was disappointing. We’d practiced, prepared, and expected more from ourselves.

But we didn’t hide the loss or pretend it had gone better than it did. We admitted where we’d struggled, recognized the teamwork the Girlz had shown, and started preparing for the next match on de_train.

Several of the Girlz loved that map.

The old match post ended with the kind of confidence that seemed to follow us everywhere:

“Thanks for your support, and you will see us kick some serious ass in the near future!”

We didn’t let one loss decide who we were.

We loaded the next map.

Eventually, competition carried us beyond our own homes.

In April 2003, we attended the LanTactics event in Chicago.

The Girlz I remember attending were me, Kamikazie, Sunshine, and Lady_Sapphire.

Our fifth player couldn’t make it, so we borrowed another female gamer at the event so we could compete.

It wasn’t the roster we’d planned.

But that was LAN life.

You practiced, packed your computer and equipment, traveled to the event—and then adapted when real life changed everything at the last minute.

So we adapted.

We played.

And we had fun.

Finding the old photographs brought the entire weekend back.

Rows of bulky CRT monitors.

Headsets and tangled cords.

Name tags stuck to shirts.

People leaning over tables, talking strategy, laughing between matches, and surviving on far too little sleep.

The pictures aren’t polished.

That’s what makes them special.

They captured us exactly as we were—young women in the middle of something we loved, without any idea how much those ordinary moments would mean more than twenty years later.

View all 40 LAN photos

There was something surreal about meeting women I’d known only through gamer tags and voices.

For months, or sometimes years, they’d existed inside my computer.

Then suddenly, they were standing beside me.

They had faces and expressions I’d never seen through a headset.

They laughed in ways text could never capture.

The online world we’d built had stepped into a real room filled with glowing monitors, folding tables, tangled cords, and the women behind the names.

Not every match became a victory.

Not every roster stayed together.

Not every plan survived real life.

But we kept showing up.

We learned how to win without becoming arrogant.

We learned how to lose without disappearing.

We learned how to trust the person watching our back—even when she lived hundreds of miles away.

GirlzClan had begun as a way for women to find people to play with.

Competition showed us what could happen once we stood together.

We entered leagues.

We traveled to events.

We turned voices into faces and teammates into real-life friends.

Long before anyone outside our servers knew our names, we’d already proven something to ourselves.

We weren’t women trying to find a place in gaming.

We were gamers.

We were teammates.

We were competitors.

And soon, the rest of the gaming world would begin to notice.